I read the first few stories in this collection sometime in 2020, and "The Reborn" knocked me back with the intensity of its metaphor, and I couldn't finish the book or revisit it until now.* I'm not sure I understood the story correctly in my 2020 fug and have certainly misremembered most of it since, but it haunted me. This second read corrected the details and reaffirmed my impression: that story is worth the cost of the entire book.

*I've also since that time read Octavia Butler's <i>Xenogenesis</i> series, and Liu's "The Reborn" is certainly a call and response to that older, similarly disturbing SF masterpiece..

This was a really strong collection of speculative fiction and fantasy stories! Themes ranged from global warming to family drama, to AI and consciousness, but all of them kept me engaged and entertained. None of the stories were too long that you couldn't finish them in one sitting and they weren't too large-scope as to be overly confusing or anything.

I tried really hard to like this book, but I just could not jump from story to story. Most of the stories felt unfinished, others I had no idea what was going on. Maybe there was a deep underlying meaning to all the stories, but to me, it just felt like a bunch of stories forced into a book with no flow or overall message.

I am such a huge fan of the short story genre, but this book just didn't work for me. It was a lot heavier on the science fiction aspect than I thought it would be. Normally, I can get on board with sciencey/tech stuff, but there were a lot of elements of these stories that just kind of went over my head. I felt myself skimming over a lot of the content because I had trouble connecting with the plots. I do like the way Liu writes in terms of moving the action along in each story, and his creativity has no bounds. But there just wasn't enough in this collection that allowed me to fully appreciate all of the stories. I can see this received good reviews on Goodreads, so I might be in the minority here, but I just didn't get most of this.

Ken Liu continues to lead the way in sci-fi short stories. While I didn't enjoy this as much as The Paper Menagerie, it's still worth your time.

I think this collection started off strong, but eventually, all the stories tended to blend together. I think because these have all been written throughout Ken Liu's career and weren't written with the intention of being in a collection altogether, they don't flow as well as other short story collections/anthologies. I think the entire middle section all seemed nearly identical and were almost all about digital immortality. I wish those were either divided up or the shorts for this collection were chosen more carefully, so as to not compete with each other. Overall, it was good and I enjoyed the messages throughout!

Average rating (not including the two I did not read): 3.3 stars

Individual ratings and thoughts:

Ghost Days - 4

Honestly stunning and a great introduction to the collection. This is all about appreciating and understanding our cultural history and its importance in memory and artifact. There are three total time periods that we get to see a POV from and they all add such depth to the story and really round out these important themes. Plus, I felt like since two of the POVs take place on historic Earth (1900s and 1980s) and the other takes place in the future, the two from Earth really helped me to feel connected to the futuristic plot even though it's 300 years advanced. Just such a fantastic use of language. Made me so excited to continue on in the collection and I can't believe I've waited this long to pick this up.

Maxwell's Demon - 4

Wow. Absolutely heartbreaking. Follows a Japanese-American woman living in an internment camp who is given a task to go back to Japan as a spy to help America win WWII. Folklore magic combined with science created an interesting and rich story of betrayal, wartime devastations, and pain. Was reading this in a Starbucks and had a hard time controlling my facial expressions. It's just heartbreaking and simultaneously made me so SO angry.

The Reborn - 1

I cannot for the life of me get into this one and it's making me not want to pick up the whole collection, which I don't want, so I'm just going to DNF it. All of them can't be winners so, on to the next!

Thoughts and Prayers - NOT RATING

I'm actually just going to skip this one because it's a very dark story about mass shootings and that isn't something I feel super comfortable reading about. But I've heard it's amazing, so if you're not sensitive to things like that I would highly recommend giving it a shot!

Byzantine Empathy - 1

A really confusing and boring story about cryptocurrency, VR, and social media. I wanted to get into this one so bad and the first scene really hooked me in, but it just went downhill from there in my opinion and wasn't for me overall.

The Gods Will Not Be Chained - 4

The first story in a mini-trilogy within this collection and WOW was it amazing. Discusses digital immortality in ways my mind has never thought up before and it's both terrifying and extremely intriguing. I can't wait to see where this story goes in the other installments.

Staying Behind - 4

This story had very similar themes to the previous one (digital immortality). I think it was beautiful and touching and, at the same time, was kind of a tough read because I could understand both sides of the argument. It really made me ponder what decision I would make if technology like this was available. And honestly... I have no idea. Really tough.

Real Artists -2

A super short story about film production technology, and perception. I just didn't really click with it, but I can appreciate what it's saying about creativity in the time of mass production. I actually think about this topic often, but this particular story still just didn't do it for me.

The Gods Will Not Be Slain - 4.5

The second story in the mini-triology within this collection. I actually preferred this one over the original. It definitely brought more life to the story and I enjoyed what it had to say about AI, technology, and the way the world's going. So relatable, it's SCARY.

Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer - 3

This was a nice story, but it felt a little incomplete and there are SO many stories in here about digital immortality that this one really didn't stand out.

The Gods Have Not Died in Vain - 2.5

The third and final story in the mini-trilogy within this collection and definitely the weakest in my opinion. I think the trilogy overall is great, terrifying, and heartbreaking, but this one didn't give me the same excitement as the other two. I needed more from it and I felt like it got a little off track.

Memories of My Mother - 4

I actually really REALLY liked this one, but I wish it had been longer. I feel like right when I started getting into it, the story ended and I felt slighted.

Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit - Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts - 3

Very interesting concept and such a cool (but terrifying???) look into what the future may hold regarding climate change. I love dystopian stories like this, but my goddddd are they scary.

Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard - 1

This one was really confusing and all over the place. I just couldn't get into the magic system or anything.

A Chase Beyond the Storms - NOT RATING

This is an excerpt from the upcoming third book in Ken Liu's The Dandelion Dynasty series. Not reading the series so not reading this one.

The Hidden Girl - 1.5

This was a very strange story. Felt like it would have been better as a long-form novel, with more time to build up the world and systems. It just didn't work for me as a short, I needed more.

Seven Birthdays - 3

Obviously, like all of these, this was very well written, but it was another one I just didn't connect with or fully understand.

The Message - 5

Absolutely LOVED this story!!! It was stunning and heartbreaking and definitely my favorite in the entire collection.

Cutting - 2

Not the story I would have personally chosen to leave off with, but a nice message overall!

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reading thoughts

0%: finallyyyy getting around to this arc (yes, from 2020). going to try to get myself to read at least a story a day to be able to finish this up this month!!!! praying hoping pleading that i can because this seriously has been on my shelf for over two years now

1%: OKAY UHM THIS PROLOGUE IS EVERYTHING WOW

17%: was not expecting these to all be this sad. i was expecting sci-fi/space/magic, but not this feeling of absolute heartbreak from every story. powerful, but very unexpected. be warned!

76%: a lot of these are extremely similar and i am starting to get a litttttle bored, but let's see how the last four stories go.

A love collection of short stories across a range of themes. Some that make you think, and some that stay with you a long time afterward. I would definitely recommend the book.

Love Ken Liu's short stories and this collection was no exception, I have used several of these stories in class and have recommended the collection to other English faculty.

I really enjoyed reading this unusual and excellent collection of stories. Some carried on the theme or characters from previous stories, some stood alone, but all were thought provoking and interesting. It is a quite long book, so you get plenty of content, and I really thought it was a terrific read.

As with most short story collections, there were weak stories and strong ones, however the strong stories in this collection were VERY strong, staying with the reader long after the book is put down. Some of these short scifi tales would be great to read expanded into full novels.

Ken Liu is one of my favorite short story writers. A wonderful collection of stories—"Byzantine Empathy" is brilliant, alone worth the price of the book.

Ken Liu is a busy, busy man. He is practically the sole engine behind Chinese SF being translated into English, and that's a major feat right there, especially while he was also being a lawyer and a software engineer...and also writing his own fiction. Thankfully the fact that his story "Good Hunting" was made into an episode of the first season of Love, Death + Robots for Netflix, and two seasons of a series called Pantheon is being made for AMC from these post-Singularity interconnected stories means that he's now a full-time toiler in the vineyards of literature.

There is, I suppose inevitably, quite a lot of focus on names, naming, descritpive labeling, and other methods of identifying unique points in the information flow-chart of the Universe. There are entities with graphic and mathematical-symbol augmented (or even composed) names; there are subtle jokes scattered around having to do with the sounds and definitions of the component parts of the names; it all feels playful, and is in part that. But think...a Chinese-American man, by the fact that this label is applied to him, becomes supremely sensitive to the power of names and naming. The power to create, destroy, invent, reinvent, control and rebel is in the power of naming. What better way to use that power, inherent in storytelling, than to signpost one's purpose without having to bash the reader with Messages.

A hefty proportion (possibly even all?) of the stories in this collection are set in that Uploaded (as opposed to Artificial) Intelligence/post-Singularity world. Liu takes his time exploring the inevitable losses of the end of the Anthropocene, making the coming of UI (that is, formerly human personalities freed of our slow wetware by insertion into quantum computers) "gods" inevitable. Then, as only Author Liu can, parsing out the ways humanity, freed of bodies, might optimize Life, the Universe, and Everything. These have the overarching feel of a novel that just wouldn't *quite* take shape. The key scenes are here...but there simply wasn't enough *oomph* to launch the project with a reasonable chance of success. But they're absolutely perfect cloth to shape a sixteen-episode TV series into!

This collection proves (as though it was not already undeniably clear) that Ken Liu is one of the greatest short fiction authors working today! Every story shows his strength, creativity, and incredible thoughtfulness about weighty matters. A short story collection apart.

I wasn't able to read the book but it will be featured in a series called "I Wish I'd Read That." Text below:

Ken Liu is the kind of author you constantly hear about thanks to his huge talent for storytelling. I’ve always wanted to read his work and was thrilled to get The Hidden Girls and Other Stories, a short story collection from Saga. It sounds like a great mix of science fiction and fantasy, and I was compelled by the prospect of reading one of the best modern short story writers in the genre. I’m determined to get into his work in 2021. I’d love to hear what everyone thought of these stories! Read more about the author and book below, or purchase a copy for yourself. And of course, a big thank you to Saga Press for the free review copy!

"The Hidden Girl and Other Stories" was an interesting and thought provoking collection of short stories. Most of the stories in this collection involve artificial intelligence, virtual reality, or technological advances, such as colonization of other planets. Some of the stories imagine a world where everyone or nearly everyone has given up their corporeal form and "uploaded" themselves into a machine, existing only a digital form now, but freed of the physical constraints of the body, they can create worlds and lives that are far more expansive (but are these lives as meaningful and fulfilling??). The author imagines scenarios where manmade global warming and other destructive activities have destroyed civilization as we know it. He deals with issues of distribution of resources between the developed and developing world. He has characters debate the value of having a physical human body with its frailties, limitations, and finite lifespan versus the nearly infinite lifespan of a digital life. He discusses the value of history and memory.

My favorite stories in the collection were:

Maxwell's Demon -- This story is about a Japanese-American woman who is in an American internment camp during WWII and is allowed to leave on the condition that she goes to Japan, a country where she has never been, and act as a spy for the US. Adding to a classic tale of divided loyalties, discrimination, and war is the fact that the woman has the ability to communicate with spirits, which is central to the story of her activities in Japan.

Thoughts and Prayers -- This is actually a very sad and disturbing story, dealing with the death of a young lady in a mass shooting and the appropriation of her memory, image, etc. for propaganda purposes. The author images a world where our current technology is more advanced and people's lives are captured by drone footage, sound recordings, scans, and immersive videos. All of the digital data related to Hayley Fort has been transformed into an immersive video to be used to promote gun control efforts. However, it did not take long for the "trolls" to appear, attacking Hayley's family online in every manner possible, altering the video to promote conspiracy theories or hate or to produce inappropriate videos. The story imagines advanced defenses against digital trolls, but every defense has its weaknesses, and the trolls evolve their techniques as quickly as efforts to stop them are created. The most poignant part of the story is when a self-professed troll explains why the trolls do what they do and how everyone is a troll now.

Byzantine Empathy -- the story deals with using blockchain, cryptocurrency, and virtual reality to direct donations and various types of aid to individuals or groups that are overlooked or ignored by the major nonprofits and governments, by utilizing virtual reality to create video experiences that make viewers empathize with the individuals/groups and allowing donors to earn credits which they can use to vote for the aid projects they want to support, with rewards for backing projects that succeed in getting funding and penalties for failing to back those projects. Making empathy a commodity does not work out as well as the inventor had hoped.

No advance previews provided for the following stories -- I don't want to spoil the fun and mystery.

The trilogy of The Gods Will Not Be Chained; The Gods Will Not Be Slain; and The Gods Have Not Died in Vain

Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard

The Hidden Girl

I would definitely recommend this collection of short stories.

I received a copy of the e-book via NetGalley in exchange for a review.

I have heard of Ken Liu before but not read anything that he had written previously. Usually, I try to start with a novel instead of a collection of short stories but I saw this one available on NetGalley and decided to give it a try. Like most collections, there are some really good stories, some okay stories and some not so great stories.

I found the fantasy stories to be more interesting and better written (Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard and the Hidden Girl were two of my favorites). The collection starts very strong with Ghost Days (story about a girl on an alien planet) and Maxwell's Ghost (World War II internment camp story). The middle section was filled with connected science fiction stories focused on AI that I found very depressing. The subject matter was interesting and the author has some great ideas but the stories in the middle third were harder to get through.

Overall, I enjoyed enough of the stories to be interested to pick up some of his other work. If he writes a fantasy novel, I would be VERY interested.

Overall a good read. Opinions will vary with any collection, but this one is overall worth the read.

**I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I can’t say I’m a big SF/Fantasy reader. I do sometimes read SF/Fantasy but it’s the exception rather than the norm for me. I can’t really do spacecraft stuff, and I rarely manage to immerse myself in a fantasy world. I can’t deal with post-apocalyptic novels (even before Covid) for reasons that 2020 made me unnecessary to explain, and the future of humanity is something I don’t really enjoy pondering in my free time.

But I can do hard things and I can go into literary unfamiliar territory, especially when a- it’s in short format b- Ken Liu writes it. I had discovered Ken Liu with his award-winning, heart-wrenching Paper Menagerie story (I haven’t read the whole collection, but I probably should) and I recently read The Man who Ended History, an interesting time-travel slash reflection on war crimes and memory. Ken Liu writes beautifully, and he also has a wicked imagination for some far-fetched concepts he would like us to explore. I was game for both.

Still, of course, my favorite stories were the fantasy ones. “Hidden Girl” (the eponymous story) made me think of those old Taiwanese dagger and kungfu puppet shows from my youth (don’t even ask), and I wished there were many more like that. (is there?) I also enjoyed “Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard” set in a world where a disadvantage girl uncovers a hidden force under the unlikely form of a humble rabbit. For fans of Ken Liu’s Dandelion dynasty series there’s also a fantasy novelette included but I didn’t get it at all (I suppose you need to have read the series to understand).

How to keep memories alive is a big theme in the collection and it gave a melancholy tone to the book, in my opinion. Humans are doomed in most (all?) of those stories, what’s left to imagine is what will be remembered of them (us). Some humans try to emigrate to a distant planet, some others turn their back on technology and live ever smaller lives in American survivalist backwater (“Staying Behind”), others solve the finite resources of earth by uploading their minds on servers, thus saving the planet but renouncing anything physical reality. There are a lot of stories about inter-generational transmission, some successful and some not so much. There are several stories with parents and children and how they misunderstand each other. In a stunning image, Ken Liu presents us with a world mostly made of oceans, where tourists from the future plunge into a submerged Harvard library, taking selfies, imagining fall foliage and totally misunderstanding what used to be there.

There’s also a lot of current concepts and catchwords in those stories: AI, bitcoins, VR, social media, trolling, climate change, … I didn’t really enjoy when the author explored some far-fetched hypothesis by writing long explanations about how these worlds work in details. But again, I’m not a SF fan at all. Where he got me every time is feelings and emotions, although I felt kind of depressed at the end of many of those stories.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

As always, thought provoking and intriguing storyline. Great characters and varied yet cohesive. A good set of stories.

Ken Liu has a very accomplished writing style and I found myself enjoying stories about AI and computer code that I normally find quite boring.

The first few stories are for the most part barely fiction, set in the present time or the very near future illustrating the most appalling and repellant uses of what is now every-day technology. Stories designed to provoke discussion.

Then there is a group of stories concerned with uploading human consciousness and the consequences it will have on the human psyche and perception. Although I found these easier to read than most stories involving AI I did feel a certain distance from the characters.

In between these scifi stories were a couple of Chinese folktale-style fantasy stories which I enjoyed though I experienced a certain whiplash switching from far-future techo-scifi to historically based fantasy and back again.


This is a curious collection of fantasy and scifi, both near and far future and I enjoyed the stories individually. However I felt that the composition of this collection did not necessarily display Mr Liu’s skills to their best advantage. The underlying theme was of family relationships particularly between separated parents and their children – who curiously all seemed to be only children - but this wasn’t enough to meld the collection into a cohesive whole.

Despite these reservations Ken Liu’s story-telling talent was not obscured and deserves at least 4 stars.