The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Ken Liu is on quite a spree this year: in October Tor will publish his translation of Cixin Liu's Death's End, the concluding volume to The Three-Body trilogy, in November Saga will publish The Wall Of Storms, the sequel to Liu's own The Grace Of Kings, and November will see the release of Invisible Planets, an anthology of Chinese SF stories & essays, all of which he translated.

March 2016 saw the publication of The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories. Yes, that's a great title, and an even better cover! The 450 page collection features 15 short stories and novellas, almost all of them from around 2012. They have all been published elsewhere before, except one. The stories are short indeed: most are about 20 pages. Only four are significantly longer: 38, 55, 61 and 95 pages.

Liu is quite explicit about his philosophical framework and goals in the preface. The universe is accidental and senseless, and the stories in The Paper Menagerie have a clear objective: they are tools in a search for meaning and truth.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors--which is the logic of narratives in general--over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves--they're the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency "the narrative fallacy" doesn't mean it doesn't also touch upon some aspect of truth.

A few of the stories are quite meta, almost all deal with aspects of cultural identity of some sort, and there's a clear presence of Asian themes and settings. Liu writes both fantasy and science fiction, and as such it is a varied collection. Stil, in all of these stories Liu manages to write with a fairly recognizable voice: most share a kind of magical realism feel. You won't find epic high fantasy, nor epic space opera, or chilling hard SF, but instead will find a subtle, sometimes even poetic collection--not without blood and suffering though. Taken as a whole, I loved it.

I will refrain from giving a summary for each story, but try to use each of them to highlight some features of Liu's writing.

Please read the rest of the review on Weighing A Pig...