The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

A revised and abbreviated version of Orwell’s 1984, and, unfortunately, significantly worse than the original.

Evil corporations and their little AI programs interfering with our lives to the point of managing us and creating our own needs and worldviews. A really sweet, light, yet thought-provoking story on how we create our own limits and then learn to transcend them.Įh meh. One of two best stories in the compilation, based on an outlandish and very compelling idea that every person is born with their soul manifested as a concrete, tangible item – and that the form of that item directly affects their personality. It’s a fun exercise, and an invitation to the readers to think about the idea of a book, but nothing more. Not a great start to the collection a showcase of interesting ideas, but nothing really stands out in this fanciful enumeration of how various species in the universe might create/perceive books. The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species 5,5/10 This review will vary slightly from my usual posts as each story or novelette forms a separate whole, I will review each in turn and give score to each separately in short paragraphs. His works won multiple awards, Nebula, Hugo, Locus and World Fantasy Award among them, and I must say that, at least with regards to the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, he deserves quite a lot of the praise 😉. But the readers of short stories know him predominantly as a talented SFF author with his own unique voice and unerring focus on humanity’s past and future, cultural diversity and a peculiar vision of transhumanism. He is also known as the author of a “silkpunk” epic fantasy book, The Grace of Kings. Ken Liu has been known as the translator to Cixin Liu’s critically acclaimed Hugo award winner, The Three-Body Problem. Title: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu