An anthology from Ken Liu, a Hugo award winner as both a writer and a translator. His first anthology, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has some interesting stories, and for some reason the library in my University has the English version of this book, plus short stories are pretty easy to read even for non-native speakers. so I just picked it up.
Really? 3 Harvard degrees + MSFT SWE + Lawyer
wtf
Overall
The Reborn & Staying Behind are pretty good and insightful, the others however, are either mediocre or just bad.
6.5/10
Now the review for each story.
Ghost Days (2013)
“See how the universe is straight forward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve. When you look at these characters, you’re convening with the history of these artifacts, with the minds of our ancestors from thousands of years ago. That is the deep wisdom of our people, and no Latin letters will ever get at our truth as deeply as our characters.”
based
His father’s heavily accented English made William cringe.
Really? First time I see “cringe” used in the modern way in a literature.
So, a story about the Chinese immigrants, but he also inserted an alien story inside.
So some humans are somehow stranded on an extranjero planet, and they breed a new generation who can live on the planet normally without some equipment, by putting some alien genes inside or something (the natives of the planet became extinct a thousand years ago).
The stranded humans resemble the Chinese immigrants, who are obsessed with their own past, while the new hybrid alien-human resembles the 2nd generation of the Chinese immigrants, who are kind of annoyed but also understand their previous generation’s obsession with their hometown.
I would say the metaphor works quite well, you really feel something toward the end of the story.
He also used 布幣 (spade) as a symbol that connects the whole story. Didn’t understand what he was referring to at first.
7/10
Maxwell’s Demon (2012)
A WW2 story interleaved with some Okinawan tale and the Maxwell’s Demon thought experiment.
So the protagonist is a 2nd generation Okiwanan raised in America, who’s also a yuta, meaning she can talk to the dead. She was sent to Okiwana as a spy. She was then ordered by her Japanese boss to use her yuta ability to make the dead Maxwell’s demon and achieve the theoretical power generator s.t. Japanese can have an infinite power source.
She trained the deads and made it happen, but then sent the deads to Murica to help them complete the atomic bomb before the Germans & Japanese did because the main challenge at that time is to have Uranium 235 separated from 238, which is kind of the same as Maxwell’s demon’s job.
Toward the end of the war, the island is bombed and attacked and conquered. When she ran to the US soldiers to try to tell them hey I’m also a Murican , she’s shot.
The end.
From the plot design’s perspective, it’s kind of impressive that he can connect WW2, Japan & atomic bomb with the Okinawan tale. Kind of genius honestly. But as a reader, they just don’t feel very related. Not mindblowing or memorable, but I have a pretty good time reading it. Sad and depressed war stories always make you feel. Dundrik for example, doesn’t really have an overarching plot, but the whole epically depressing vibe is just so good.
7/10
The Reborn (2014)
“The unified individual is a fallacy of traditional human philosophy. It is, in fact, the foundation of many unenlightened, old customs. A criminal, for example, is but one person inhabiting a shared body with many others. A man who murders may still be a good father, husband, brother, son, and he is a different man when he plots death than when he bathes his daughter, kisses his wife, comforts his sister, and cares for his mother. Yet the old human criminal justice system would punish all of these men together indiscriminately, would judge them together, imprison them together, even kill them together. Collective punishment. How barbaric! How cruel!”
We are a different people now, Kai thought. This is also our home. And yet some of you insist on tasking us with the sins of our dead past selves. It is like holding the son responsible for the sins of the father.
What if war should occur again? I thought. What if the Xenophobes convince the rest of us to rise up against you?
Then we might change yet again, become ruthless and cruel as before. Such changes in us are physiological reactions against threat, beyond our control. But then those future selves would have nothing to do with us. The father cannot be responsible for the acts of the son.
So the alien is basically an anthropomorphism of a nation or a dynasty, and the process of cutting off the bad personalities & memories and becoming a reborn is basically transitional justice.
You humans think you are what you’ve done, Kai once thought. I remember us lying together in a park somewhere, the grass under us, and I loved feeling the warmth of the sun through thir skin, so much more sensitive than mine. But you’re really what you remember.
To retrieve a memory, you must reactivate a set of neural connections, and in the process change them. Your biology is such that with each act of recall, you also rewrite the memory. Haven’t you ever had the experience of discovering that a detail you remembered vividly was manufactured? A dream you became convinced was a real experience? Being told a fabricated story you believed to be the truth?
Exactly. Kind of cool to say it this way. It’s like a splay tree or something. When you read a node, the node is brought up and the entire structure is changed .
This is a story about Ship of Theseus. or deeper, temporal part, or more fundamentally, four-dimensionalism. Time is merely another dimension. For the alien, their violent past is probably just like some irrelevant part in the world.
A pretty interesting perspective. I genuinely believe that being able to wipe out old obsolete memories is better tho, even though it sounds very dystopian. I’m pretty sure the world will be better if people can forget old things and become basically a new person every few years. It might even be a pareto improvement. People can let go of hatreds, and people can have new affairs happily instead of being stuck in a box set death march (ref: Succession S1E10), people can experience things over and over again without the enjoyment ever decreasing.
8/10
Thoughts And Prayers (2019)
No you use the word troll wrong. Trolls are not haters or agenda posters or xxx shills, they troll because it’s fun.
The writing style is pretty interesting. I appreciate his efforts, but it didn’t make me feel. It just felt too direct and clumsy.
I just love the stories that make me unironically think the thing the author is against is actually based, like this story and Brave New World. The woman in the story is a true lolcow. Sure trolls are everywhere, and they troll when the ones they’re trolling against will crash and burn. No fuel no fire, and the woman just kept on giving them fuels by becoming a bigger lolcow.
The trolls smuggling deepfakes into ordinary videos to avoid being detected by the “armors” reminds me of rickrolls tho.
5/10
Byzantine Empathy (2020)
Traditional media, bound by old-fashioned ideas about decency and propriety, could not show images like these and refused to engage in what they viewed as pure emotional manipulation.
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. Emotional manipulation is their favorite tricks if anything.
So it’s actually an old topic with a fascade of new technologies. Emotion manipulation and clickbaits have always been a thing. It’s why people love to read the daily mail and similar outlets, while hating them at the same time. Same goes for those youtube videos with ridiculous thumbnails or titles. In this story, they’re just replaced with VR, which is obviously even more powerful.
As for the blockchain thing, tbh the smart contract really isn’t the most important thing. People on web2 also start some random gofundme for ridiculous purposes all the time. For example, there was a black girl pretending to be banished by her parents for being a MAGA fan and successfully got 150k (see this article), so it really is an old trick. The key about blockchain is that they can’t be monitored, controlled and blocked by central governments.
But the stupid crypo fights are really not the point. The gist of this story is emotion vs. rationality. One of the protagonists is for emotion. She thinks that emotion is what drives the world, and people should do whatever they want without the interference of the big brothers. NGOs shouldn’t decide how the donations should be used, and which groups of people should get the money. Another protagonist, however, always look at the big picture. She looks at what kind of resource allocations will lead to the best outcome and execute it, without being attached to the “noise” i.e. the people being bombed. In her own words:
“You managed to get money to the refugees on a tide of rage and pity,” she says. “But how does that really help them? Their fate will always ultimately be decided by the geopolitics between China and the US. Everything else is just noise. They can’t be helped. Arming the refugees will only give the government more of an excuse to resort to violence.”
The final sequence is the fight between the two with two opposite ideologies, so I’ll just chime in with my own views.
Emotion is what drives the world, that’s for sure. It decides our motives. As the great tech lead once said, we always make a decision first, and try to rationalize it later. But after we have a decision based on feelings, we are always looking for maximizing our own utility. Although our utility function is based on our feelings, we maximize it with our rationality, and one of the most effective means is through manipulating the emotions of others. So we obviously also have to look at the big picture when making decisions if we’re looking for long-term utility.
Jumping back to the story, so who’s in the right here? None. There’s really no right or wrong, and the so-called debate about emotion and the big picture is also a fake issue. Each of them is driven by emotion, and try to maximize their own gains through whatever means. They only care about the things they care about, just as everybody else.
6/10
The realism approach of Ken Liu always seems kind of clumsy.
The Gods Will Not Be Chained (2014)
The good old digitalizing human consciousness story. The premise doesn’t make a lot of sense tho. Human’s intuition is not special or precious at all, I think. I’m not sure actually, maybe the one-in-a-hundred-year type genius really is very special?
Tbh I really don’t think so. Thoughts and ideas are cheap, execution is what matters, which does not require some crazy once-in-a-lifetime epiphany. I’m not well-versed with the history of science, but I’m sure there are a lot of scientists at Einstein’s time trying to solve the same problems, and if Einstein didn’t exist, I’m sure relativity will still be discovered, just by another person.
3/10 for a boring and unoriginal story. Like c’mon just try more, at least add some new ideas to your copypasta.
Staying Behind (2011)
A pretty nice story. The possible future of San Junipero, but it’s written in 2011, before San Junipero is released.
In San Junipero, only those with some illnesses can be uploaded I think, but in this story, everyone can be uploaded, and so do the majority of humans. But of course there’s still a small group of people insisting not to, and they’re called the “left behind”.
Because most people are dead, the society has regressed into your stereotypical apocalypse world, scavenging-based society. Those in the simulation consistently try to persuade the left behind to join them, while the left behinds try to stop them, although from time to time people would still decide to suicide into the simulation, partly due to the ever-regressing quality of life.
That’s basically the whole story. Just a small piece to introduce us to the world, and the writing is pretty good.
I don’t buy this kind of viewpoint tho. I don’t think the uploaded you is the same consciousness, it probably thinks and acts the same and has access to the same memory, but no it’s not you. From your own point of view, you’re dead, the digital you is just another instance of you, while the physical address of the original version is zeroed out. Sure for others you’re the same, but for you, you’re as dead as a regular dead body.
To be fair, if you’re under the impression that you’ll not be dead but just continue your life in the digital world, it just doesn’t make a difference if that’s really the case or not. If it is the case, then great, but if this instance of you is actually destroyed i.e. you’re dead, then whatever. You’re dead, you don’t care.
8/10
Real Artists (2013)
What if ML models make all the films, through test-driven development?
Cool, was even adapted.
8/10
The Gods Will Not Be Slain (2014)
The sequel of The Gods Will Not Be Chained.
So basically the secretly digitalized consciousnesses in the prequel are living in the cloud and can hack into whatever system they want. One of them hated humans and wanted to wipe them out, so she started to launch random missiles, and then a world war broke out. A small group of them wanted to stop her, but was almost killed by some virus the evil guy planted. At the end the dad of the protagonist sent fork bombs everywhere to signal the SREs that something’s happening. The SREs investigated their machines, found out some parasites were living inside their systems, and wiped them out.
The end.
Honestly don’t quite understand what’s happening at the end. How was the dad still able to send out fork bombs while under serious attack from the villain? Why didn’t the villain stop such a simple attack? The villain was supposed to live inside every machine. She should be able to detect it and then kill the process.
So there’s even an anime series based on the story, called Pantheon.
5/10. Very mediocre.
The book is a bit repetitive honestly. Too many digitalizing human stories. I get it it’s a pretty probable future, but you don’t have to write like 10 or more stories about this topic. It’s not an anthology that you can keep on reading for hours.
Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer (2010)
When Sarah is gone, Mom comes over and I allow her to give me a hug. Our algorithms entwine together; we synchronize our clocks; and our threads ping onto the same semaphores.
..
Not the point of the story but if they’re all terminally online and create new borns digitally, why not just make everyone perfect?
The sequel of Staying Behind. The underclocking thing is kind of beautiful watching the world fading away.
Life doesn’t have any meaning, but when everything’s simulated, it makes you question the meaning of life even more. But of course you can just apply some automatic filters on those existencial crises when you’re merely a digital soul.
6/10
The Gods Have Not Died in Vain (2015)
What a surprise. The sequel of The Gods Will Not Be Slain .
Another entry in this short series, and they are actually the prequels of Staying Behind & Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer. I can see why they are adapted into a tv series. When I came into this book, I thought I was reading some disconnected short stories, but it’s actually more like The Three-Body Problem at this point. I mean ttbp is also just a bunch of short stories spanning across multiple eras, just that this book does not put them in chronological order.
This one is actually pretty good, pointed out plenty of the modern world problems. Too many dependencies, everything is depending on and coupling with each other.
“Remember how during the crisis, when we were coming to Bostin, I told you about layers of technology?”
Maddie nodded. Her mother, a historian, had older her the story behind the networks that connected people: the footpaths that grew into caravan routes that developed into roads that turned into railroad tracks that provide the right-of-way for the optical cables that carried the bits that made up the internet that routed the thoughts of the gods.
“The history of the world is a process of speeding up, of becoming more efficient as well as more fragile. If a footpath is blocked, you just have to walk around it. But if a highway is blocked, you have to wait until specialized machinery can be brought to clear it. Just about anyone can figure out to patch a cobblestone road, but only highly-trained technicians can fix a fiber-optic cable” her’s a lot more redundancy with the older, inefficient technologies.
“You point os that keeping it simple technologically is more resilient”, said Madie.
“But our history is also a history of growing needs, of more mouths to feed and more hands that need to be kept from idleness,” said Mom.
Just like how a small npm module can break the whole Internet, to operate at scale, you can’t do everything all alone, but depend on lots of ready-made things, things taken care of by other parties. But this also make you more vulnerable. It’s also the reason why you have those Too-Big-To-Fail schemes in finance.
7/10
I’ll add more complete thought after I finish the whole book. But I think either Ken Liu isn’t good at writing realistic yet beautiful stories, or the short story form just isn’t compatible with realistic stories. Short stories are made for metaphorical stories, not lifelike ones.
Memories of my Mother (2012)
Curious. Why is the protagonist always a girl?
A beautiful piece of writing tho. 8/10.
Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts (2016)
Pretty interesting. Who is to decide what culture is valid and what isn’t?
Remind me of the amnesia scenario. Your personality is largely determined by your memory. If a person suddenly lost all the memories, then they’re basically a new person, and will develop a different personality. But the people around the person will obviously think that the old personality is real while the new one is not, and will want the old memory to come back and overwrite the new person anyday. Isn’t that basically killing the new person, however? How can you invalidate the newly developed personality?
7/10
Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard (2020)
…. okay? What a stupid fairy tale
3/10
A Chase Beyond the Storms (2021)
An excerpt from Dandelion Dynasty, Ken Liu’s fantasy series.
Well now I have no interest in the series at all. The writing is really cringy. It has the vibe of those wholesome 100 shonen animes.
Not going to rate it since it’s not a standalone.
The Hidden Girl (2017)
Shadows are given life by light, and they also die by light.
Til the hidden girl is literally 隱娘, 聶隱娘.
I’ve actually never read the original story or watch any of its adaptations, despite its fame, but according to wikipedia, the general plot is the same, with the timeline being altered, and the fantasy part replaced with a bit of sci-fi (the girl hiding in higher dimensions), and the plot was also made to be much more wholesome.
Interesting
7/10
Seven Birthdays (2016)
“Why do you love the wilderness so much if you don’t even live in it?” I ask.
“It’s our ethical duty to be stewards for the Earth,” she says. “It’s barely starting to heal from all the horrors we’ve inflicted on it. We must preserve it exactly as it should be.”
I don’t point out that this smacks to me of a false dichotomy: Human vs. Nature. I don’t bring up the sunken continents, the erupting volcanoes, the peaks and valleys in the Earth’s climate over billions of years, the advancing and retreating icecaps, and the uncountable species that have come and gone. Why do we hold up this one moment as natural, to be prized above all others?
In the grand matrix of my matrioshka brain, versions of our history are replayed. There isn’t a single world in this grand computation, but billions, each of them populated by human consciousnesses, but nudged in small ways to be better.
Yep, we’re living inside this simulation.
This one is the entire history of the digitalizing human conscious series. Kind of neat, but nothing special.
7/10
Reading Ken Liu after a few pages of The Book of the New Sun, feels like a breeze
The Message (2012)
Wow. Incredibly cheap. Emotional manipulation with such a r-slurred story?? wtf
Imagine a spaceship unable to detect radiation. Imagine a civilization placing so many stones representing the atomic structure of uranium just to tell people hey there is nuclear waste here. Really??
3/10
Cutting (2012)
Ok, so … when r/othepelican users form a religion