You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
speculativebecky 's review for:
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
by Ken Liu
Another nearly perfect short story collection by one of my favorite authors, Ken Liu. The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is an exciting compilation of Liu’s writing, leaning heavily into science fiction and exploring family, culture, and the Singularity in stories both interconnected and stand-alone.
Liu blends our history and his ideas of the future into stunning works of art. Some of my favorites: in the story Ghost Days he envisions humanity’s descendants, bred with an entirely different biology to allow them to survive on a new planet, grappling with maintaining memories of a human race they are nothing like, and the inheritance of a new planet and its deceased former inhabitants. Maxwell’s Demon is a chilling imagining of World War II, where a young Japanese American girl is plucked from internment and sent to Japan to become a spy, and ends up conscripted to leverage her connection with the spiritual realm for military tactics. Several interconnected stories explore the world on the brink of and following the Singularity, the vastly different world created as a result of technology able to upload human consciousness. Wildly creative and scientifically engaging, these stories are also tender and emotionally rich. I nearly cried reading Memories of My Mother, a wisp of a story about a girl whose mother, dying from an incurable illness, makes the decision to travel at high speeds to prolong her life through her daughter’s, seeing her for a few spread out days rather than just the two young years she’d be afforded otherwise. Liu did more to my heart in those few pages than some writers can do in an entire novel.
I had high expectations for this collection and it absolutely delivered. Fans of science fiction especially will love this book, but it may find a home for readers less inclined towards the genre too. However if you’re not a sci-fi fan, I would recommend Liu’s first short story collection, The Paper Menagerie as a better place to start with his work.
Liu blends our history and his ideas of the future into stunning works of art. Some of my favorites: in the story Ghost Days he envisions humanity’s descendants, bred with an entirely different biology to allow them to survive on a new planet, grappling with maintaining memories of a human race they are nothing like, and the inheritance of a new planet and its deceased former inhabitants. Maxwell’s Demon is a chilling imagining of World War II, where a young Japanese American girl is plucked from internment and sent to Japan to become a spy, and ends up conscripted to leverage her connection with the spiritual realm for military tactics. Several interconnected stories explore the world on the brink of and following the Singularity, the vastly different world created as a result of technology able to upload human consciousness. Wildly creative and scientifically engaging, these stories are also tender and emotionally rich. I nearly cried reading Memories of My Mother, a wisp of a story about a girl whose mother, dying from an incurable illness, makes the decision to travel at high speeds to prolong her life through her daughter’s, seeing her for a few spread out days rather than just the two young years she’d be afforded otherwise. Liu did more to my heart in those few pages than some writers can do in an entire novel.
I had high expectations for this collection and it absolutely delivered. Fans of science fiction especially will love this book, but it may find a home for readers less inclined towards the genre too. However if you’re not a sci-fi fan, I would recommend Liu’s first short story collection, The Paper Menagerie as a better place to start with his work.