I’d heard good things about The Paper Menagerie, so I decided to try The Hidden Girl as an intro to Ken Liu. This is a collection of speculative and scifi short stories, most of which were extremely disappointing. When these stories were best (ex. the trilogy of stories about Maddie), they painted clear pictures of different worlds and followed the arc of active protagonists facing wild challenges. At their worst (The Message, Thoughts and Prayers), the stories were hard to visualize, relied too heavily on clichés, and ended before the real excitement began. It was also often difficult for me to reconcile whether the stories were all supposed to be connected; some of the threads were obvious, but others left me scratching my head. I’ve already forgotten most of the stories here, but may eventually return to the few I connected with. Overall, I don’t recommend this title.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is my first time reading anything by Ken Liu, and it wasn’t anything like what I was expecting. This story collection is much more high-concept sci-fi than what I’m used to from short stories, but it’s pulled off in such a succinct way that it (mostly) worked very well for me. The majority of the stories use themes like technology and AI and climate change to examine human nature, which isn’t something I’m always a fan of, but Ken Liu does an excellent job of centering the humanity in these stories rather than technology. These are still really bleak stories, to be sure, but they focus on examining the people using the technology and their failures and shortcomings rather than falling into tropes of “robots evil, science bad”.

The titular story was one of my favorites to read, but it differed so much from the other stories in the collection that I spent a lot of time while reading it trying to figure out why it had been chosen as the title and not really coming to any conclusions. Other standouts for me were The Message, Maxwell’s Demons, The Gods Will Not Be Chained and Thoughts and Prayers.

Also, full disclosure, I did not read A Chase Beyond the Storms because it’s an excerpt from the third book of a series I’ve never read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Saga Press for an ARC!

This totally should have been my jam - socially-conscious sci-fi, playing around in the near future, often set in Boston - and yet here we are. Maybe I shouldn't have read the intro note from the author, which set me off on a bad foot, or maybe this is just the nature of sci-fi short story anthologies, be they from one author or many authors - there are likely to be stories you're going to like, stories you're going to hate, and stories that slot somewhere in between. The Hidden Girl is no exception.

There's some interesting choices in the book - for instance, a lot of stories take place in a shared universe where The Singularity has happened, and features different sets of characters dealing with this in different ways. And then that choice is hampered by putting those stories out of order - on one hand, these aren't heavily linked, but on the other, I think they could have been more powerful by building on one another chronologically. A lot of the other stories hang on an idea or concept that feels straight out of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, but it's one of the episodes where the writer is a little too eager for you to *get* the *metaphor* they're using for ~society today~, or to see the scientific/philosophical concept they read the Wikipedia page for to the point where you feel like you're reading that Wikipedia page. This kind of wrecked a few stories that I thought had good general concepts.

This said, Ken Liu's descriptions and settings are fantastic, particularly when describing Boston - he does a great job of painting the Seaport, Harvard Yard, and other areas in vivid detail, and the stories that aren't heavy-handed are fantastic. I love the general idea of what Liu does with these tales, even if the execution sometimes left me wanting.

I was unfamiliar with Ken Liu's work before this collection. This is a great introduction to his work. There are 19 stories here, of which I really enjoyed 15 and thought the other 4 were just ok. But overall, I thought it was a solid collection and I am looking forward to checking out more of this author's work.

Ahoy there me mateys!  I received this short story  collection eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  So here be me honest musings . . .

Title: the hidden girl and other stories

Author: Ken Liu

Publisher: Saga Press

Publication Date: TODAY! (hardcover / e-book)

ISBN: 978-1982134037

Source: NetGalley

One of the best short stories I have ever read was Ken Liu's the paper menagerie which in 2012 was the first work to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award.  Ye can read it for free by clicking here.  This lovely cover for his second short story collection caught me eye and I was excited to read more of his work.  This book has 16 stories from the past five years and a brand new novelette.  There were 19 all together.

All short story collections are kinda hard to review.  I usually try to give thoughts about each story individually but I am not able to do that for this book.  This stems from the fact that the stories, as the author's preface states, have been arranged by the editor into a "meta-narrative."  The stories at the beginning seem to standalone but later stories have many characters and plots reappear.  I think the beginning of the collection was the strongest but much of the middle blurred together and felt very slow for reasons I will get to.  Here are the stories that I loved:

"Ghost Days" - The first story was cool and the historical fiction aspects excellent.  I didn't particularly love the ending but I did learn about bubi which are awesome Chinese coins.  After the story I went looking to find out more about them and found this cool page.

"Maxwell's Demon"- This was the second story and the best for me.  It deals with the Japanese internment in 1943 and ghosts.  Poignant and beautiful.

"Thoughts and Prayers" - A thought-provoking tale about the consequences of a mass shooting on one family and how the digital world impacts how each member deals with grief.

"Real Artists" - A weird but fascinating look at how films could be made.

"Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard" - Cool magic.  Super fun characters.  I wouldn't mind this one being expanded into a longer form.

"The Hidden Girl"- Assassins and magic.  Arrrr!

"The Message"- Lovely story about familial bonds, alien archaeology, and tough choices.  Bittersweet.

About 30% of the way through is where the tone switched.  Much of the middle of this book deals with the unforeseen impact of technology advancing.  One story dealt with what happens when ye crowdfund charity and the non-profits have to compete.  Multiple stories dealt with uploading the human consciousness to computers.

Two repeating ones were 1) a girl, Maddie, who talks to her dead AI father and 2) the Singularity which is where people gave up their physical bodies.  Many of the stories with Maddie used emoji which I couldn't see very well on me Kindle and couldn't enlarge.  It irked me and I missed a lot of the meaning.  I enjoyed the Singularity ones better.  But the switching back and forth did lead to some whiplash.  And some of the tech made no sense to me so I was just confused about what was going on.

At 65% it switched to fantasy second with the "Grey Rabbit" story.  I loved that one.  Next from 76 - 81% there was an excerpt from the third Dandelion Dynasty book.  Horrible, horrible choice.  It didn't fit and should have been put at the end of the book if they wanted to promote it.  Blech.  "The Hidden Girl" was next.  Fantastic story whose theme and tone matched the "Grey Rabbit" story.  The remainder of the stories were good.

Out of the 19 stories, I loved 7, enjoyed 7, and didn't like 5.  That is pretty darn good for me and a collection.  So while there were quibbles, I am very glad to have read this collection.

So lastly . . .

Thank you Saga Press!

I always found it hard to rate anthologies but here we go! I loved his writing, it was my first time with him (not like that lol) but I would definitely read more of his work in the future. However, I felt like a few were disconnected but nothing too serious, overall a worth read.

I got an ARC of this book.

I had never heard of Ken Liu before I saw that cover. I checked him out on Goodreads and saw some people I really admire loved his work, so I thought "why not?". I know ringing endorsement and super excitement on my part. I promise my excitement level rose. 

From the first time I opened the book and started reading, I was hooked. The stories are so in depth and feel so full. One of my biggest complaints with short stories is I generally feel like I am not getting a full story or I am left wanting more in a bad way. Liu seems to know exactly when to stop. Each of the stories ended at just the right spot. I got enough information to have a full world. I got enough to feel satisfied by each story.

Well, sort of satisfied. A few of the stories had another chunk later in the collection. Those chunks were also magnificent, but they opened me up even more to the world making me wish for a longer book. Liu still managed to end in just the right spot to make me satisfied, but I am mad about it. How dare he play my emotions so perfectly!

Some of the stories felt interwoven. They were clearly in a similar world or even the same world as other stories. The ideas Liu came up with are just incredible. There were very few stories were I wasn't riveted. The few that I was a bit eh on, managed to hook me by the end. There were little twists and turns. There were aliens. There were cyber people (sorta?). There was a lot of sci in the sci-fi. It focused around computers a lot, but in a way that was far above my head. The descriptions were often above my head, but they sounded like something that would work. If you know computers, please read this and let me know!

I only skipped one story. It was an except from book three in a series. I have not read the first two books. I just didn't want to spoil how much I was loving the book by being dropped into a world I was not ready for. This is not a judgement on the author or the story. This was all on me. 

I have every intention of checking out more by Liu. I want to see if his other short stories are as incredible as this collection or if this collection was just perfectly curated for me. Wish me luck. Read this book.

A gorgeous collection from one of the genre's finest writers, THE HIDDEN GIRL AND OTHER STORIES by Ken Liu is a must-read for short story fans and any speculative fiction readers looking to absorb new work from a unique and vital voice in the field.

Thought-provoking, inventive storytelling. Sometimes amusing, sometimes challenging. Overall very solid, though some of the relationship to true socio-political spaces is a bit heavy handed. Would recommend for fans of scifi and short stories.

Thank you to NetGalley for granting me this arc that comes out on Feb 25th. I read up on it on Goodreads before requested and was very excited about reading sci-fi style short stories, id also heard great things about the authors first instalment of short stories but unfortunately this really wasnt for me i read the first 2 before DNFing, the first story read like a chapter from a second book in a trilogy and i struggled to keep up and couldnt really understand it, the second story was more interesting but it was still a bit of a struggle to keep up. The writing was really good but it just wasnt for me so i didnt think it was worth continuing.

This smart collection of speculative short stories by Ken Liu is mostly science fiction, but includes a few works of fantasy (including the titular story, which is what one might call “martial arts-fantasy” – i.e. imagine “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” with more magic.) Depending how one counts up the stories, one could call the collection nineteen stories or sixteen stories and a novella. The novella, broken into three parts, is “storified” enough that its sections are interspersed among the other stories.

Liu doesn’t neatly contain his stories within boundaries of genre. In some cases, he jumps through time -- including historical fiction, contemporary / near future, and distant future within a single story. He also takes on social issues like the Japanese internment during World War II in “Maxwell’s Demon” and the blight of technology on social interaction (best shown in “Thoughts and Prayers.”) There are hard sci-fi stories that show intergalactic travelers in a distant future, such as “The Message,” but there are even more that peer into the worries of the near future, such as artificial intelligence or the replicating of human consciousness in computers.

The novella imagines a world in which companies have captured the consciousnesses of great, but dying, minds for their own purposes. It then explores considerations such as: what happens when a great mind gets tired of being trapped as an acorporeal intelligence for the benefit of a company, and what does humanity mean in the context of fully replicated human minds?

I found these stories to be both intriguing and thought-provoking. I enjoy a good story, but stories that make one think deeply hold that much more allure. I’d highly recommend this collection for fiction readers. Whether or not you read genre fiction, you’ll find stories of great appeal.

I'm really not quite sure what I just read. Part of this was stunning but it didn't come together for me.

Sadly I had to dnf this book and it was my no means because the book was bad or badly written it was just not the book for me and I could not carry on and complete it.

I think for the right person this book would have been amazing but the topics for me were just too intense and much for me to take emotionally.

I have to say I only got 30% into and there are hell of a lot of trigger warnings. Alot! Of death, mass shooting, children and babies dying, war, gun violence, molestation, suicide, pornographic references and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.

I definitely know there are people out there that this book is for but it's just not for me. When talking to a friend about it I told her it reminded me of black mirror but possibly more intense.

Thanks to netgalley for sending me an arc is exchange for an honest review. Sorry I couldn't finish it

My only experience with Ken Liu thus far has been in his translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem and Death’s End.  But I know he has a few beloved books already published out there, so I jumped at the chance to read this.

I generally try to read the introduction whenever one is included, and I definitely recommend reading the intro to The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.  Liu talks a little about his writing process and how he went about selecting stories for this book.  He says that stories are co-told by an author’s words and a reader’s interpretation; that writing a story is like building a house in which the reader moves in, arranges the furniture and decor to suit their tastes, and settles down.

He also goes on to say that it would be impossible for him to construct a home in which everyone was comfortable, so he selected the stories that he himself felt most comfortable in, and asks that the reader “find a story..to make [their] home.”  I adored the metaphor and knew with that short but sweet introduction I was in for a treat.

That being said, I really am terrible at reviewing collections.  So terrible in fact, that I’ve put this off for two months because I read it in December.  It took me a week because these were stories that often required some processing afterward, so I know it’s worthy of a fantastic review and I’ve no idea how to convey that to you.

So bare with me friends, I’m doing my best.

The first two stories “Ghost Days” and “Maxwell’s Demon” absolutely blew me out of the water.  They were both eye opening, haunting.  They were stories I think it would benefit everyone to read at least once.  While “Ghost Days” is about the importance of history and immigrant experience in America, “Maxwell’s Demon” is about the experience of a woman of Japanese descent in America during WWII.

For me, the stories that follow didn’t quite live up to the enormous standard by those first two stories.  What they do instead, is follow, as Liu himself put it, a “meta-narrative”.  Trailing different and yet similar themes (AI, digital immortality, virtual reality, shared experiences, parent-child relationships, etc.) weaving together an inventive tapestry of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I will say this book ventures to some dark places.  Sometimes I’d read a story and have to put the book down for a bit because it was that dark.  Many stories don’t have a happy ending.

I do think the book finished strong, despite being a little bogged down in the middle.  Other highlights include the miniseries starting with “The Gods Will Not Be Chained” and “The Hidden Girl”.

In the end, I liked The Hidden Girl and Other Stories enough that I will certainly be checking out Liu’s other work.  This collection is well worth picking up for fans and newcomers alike.

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories releases on February 25, 2020.  Thank you to the publisher for sending an ARC for review.

Excellent collection of short stories by the masterful Ken Liu. Each story is fascinating, and sometimes strange, but always imbued with what really matters the most: of what it means to be a human.

I’d recommend this collection of stories to anyone that loves Black Mirror or the stories of Philip K. Dick. I don’t think you have to be a sci-fi fan to enjoy these stories because the writing is excellent! Look forward to checking out more of Ken Loy’s work.

All the stories in this collection are wonderfully written and equally good, even if my enjoyment of each one varied greatly. In the preface, the author explains how he didn’t write these tales to please the audience but himself, so it stands to reason that each reader connects with some stories and not others.
My favorites are the ones that deal with family and loyalty, like the titular Hidden Girl or The Message. Both these stories are also a good example of the themes, all are science fiction but the settings vary. Some take place in space, in the future or faraway places closer to the fantasy genre. One of the most poignant is set in WWII.
Three of the stories were too convoluted for me, mostly because two of them discuss a future political landscape in great detail.
A few stories deal with humans leaving behind our flesh to upload our consciousness into computers. Kudos for the use of emojis in the “Gods” tales. The world-building is fantastic and all the characters well-rounded. Every reader will find a favorite.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/Saga Press!

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is the second short fiction collection (The First was The Paper Menagerie) by SF/F author Ken Liu, one of my favorite writers in genre - and in my opinion one of the strongest at using the genre of SF/F - mainly through science fiction - to convey ideas about humanity and about humanity's future. Liu is one of the more versatile writers in the genre today really, as one might expect from a dude who also works as a translator (see The Three Body Problem), lawyer, and computer programmer.

This collection is, like pretty much all of Liu's work, really good, featuring a diverse range of stories, hitting on different scifi and fantasy concepts, although the concept of humanity uploading their minds into a virtual space is a common concept at the heart of a number of these stories. I would say however that nearly all of these stories are pretty serious explorations of ideas relevant to humanity today, and a number of them are pretty depressing, so if you're looking for a fun read, most of this collection will not provide for you. Be warned.

Reviewing a collection is always difficult, because the various stories hit on a number of different themes, and it's rather defeating the point to go in depth into each story specifically, in my opinion. This collection is no different - a number of stories within deal with concepts such as the uploading of the human mind into a virtual reality, of the importance of having a physical body, of the dangers of trying to control artificial intelligences, whereas other stories deal more directly with the ideas of memory and histories and families, among other things entirely. The collection only features one new story - in addition to an excerpt from Liu's upcoming novel The Veiled Throne* - but the collection features mainly stories afaict which were in published anthologies and not on the web, so I'd only read one of these stories prior to this volume.

*Book 3 of Liu's fantastic The Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, which still doesn't have a release date.

It's also hard when the collection doesn't have 1-2 standouts, because in this case, pretty much all of the stories are stand outs and are really damn strong. So you have a fantastical tale of an American woman sent back to Japan after being interned in WW2 to act as a spy (under threat to her family), who wants merely to go home (and the fantastical connection to said want). Unsurprisingly, it ends in bittersweet heartbreaking fashion. You have the tale of a family where one daughter dies in a mass shooting and the mother tries to use said daughter's memory to promote gun control, only to find the whole family devastated by the acts of trolls as a result.

Perhaps the strongest story of these more grounded in the modern or past US stories is "Byzantine Empathy", in which two women - former roommates - fight over the use of virtual reality to drive empathy - and thus charitable giving - toward people in need in areas that others around the world might otherwise overlook through ignorance or due to realpolitik, with one woman arguing that reason must overcome empathy for the good of all, whereas the other arguing those global concerns shouldn't matter over helping people (Liu clearly comes down on the former side, seeing the latter side as siding with hegemony and empire, but I don't want to ruin more of the story).

But as noted above, the book contains a number of stories grounded more specifically in future technology, particularly the idea that minds can be uploaded into virtual reality, with bodies abandoned either willingly or unwillingly, and what that would mean for humanity. These stories play with the ideas of what is real, what offspring, family connections, and futures (as well as the ability to be part of others' lives past their normal expiration point) mean in such worlds, and what histories actually matter when everything is such. They're all rather strong and form a central part of this collection, even when they don't all directly connect.

There are a few fun stories in the collection, most notably, the titular "The Hidden Girl" and "Gray Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard" (the only brand new story here), which are both excellent. But for the most part, even the less "high concept" of the stories tends to be serious in tone, and bittersweet in its conclusion ("The Message"). So yeah, this is not a collection anyone should be reading looking for brevity and fun. But it's a strong collection filled with powerful themes and ideas and futures, and you could do a hell of a lot worse looking for interesting science fiction than reading any of this collection of Liu's work.

Thanks to an e-book ARC from NetGalley, we’re reading The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu a little earlier than expected this year. In the preface to this latest collection of short stories, Liu frames short fiction as an entrance to a world where readers for just a little bit. Beautiful metaphor as that makes, Liu’s worlds often look frightening like the one we live in now, filled with rising global temperatures, emojis, and complicated relationships between science and people. Sometimes interconnected, sometimes not, each story builds a world where the imagination squirms, pinpointed by the omnipresent, what if, leading down enchanting new trails. 

Part of the beauty of science fiction is the extrapolation of, well, science, which includes social science as well the Hard Stuff – physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. In particular, politics and science fiction have mingled since the beginning of what we now recognize the genre, namely Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, from which the sub-genre, dystopian derives. The politics of technology come to the brutal forefront of “Byzantine Empathy” where a virtual reality website starts bidding war between philanthropic lobbyists and earnest activists over the plight of refugees from ethnic cleansing. That’s but one of the bleak futures of many of these stories. 

Frequently, religions and philosophies grapple with the concept of life as a computer program after the singularity. Many of these stories feature “the gods” of this cloud society, fighting petty duels that result in either command the entire world economy or security for the sanctity of human choice, whether to ascend to the aether or not. Once humans stop living in human bodies, they leave behind scavengers, bent on fighting the old battles between generations. Generational conflict echoes across migration patterns all over these worlds, from one family’s generational journey from China to the US in “Ghost Days” to a little girl’s birthday celebration as she ages into a mother and grandmother and enters the Singularity in “Seven Birthdays.” Liu time and time again proves to be a fan of the right word, rather a gang of flashy words. This bleak style just enough of an opening to grasp characters jaded from worlds that really really suck. Liu’s simple, elegant prose frames the entire collection, presenting a scientific conflict that amplifies the real emotional struggle behind the minds that create it.

However, to counter the science-heavy side of this collection, a few outright fantasy stories stand out, often as the brightest spots. “Maxwell’s Demon” about a Japanese-American spy in 1945, hated by both countries, and that can speak to ghosts, giving us the rare World War II story that examines American prejudice as well as Axis. Other fantasies collected here tend to take on mythic properties, while still employing downright rad character arcs. My favorite story of the collection, “The Hidden Girl,” stretches all the way back to Tang dynasty China where a young girl gets kidnapped, trained as an assassin, and finally rebels against her kidnappers. Finally, fans of Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty book series will be treated to look at the upcoming third novel, The Veiled Throne. “A Chase Beyond the Storms” presents not only the titular chase scene between otherworldly aircraft but insights into the dueling Dara and Agon empires as they attempt to forge onward in a world of gods and monsters. 

Certainly not the lightest upcoming book, Liu’s short stories continue instead to resonate like stones dropped into the well of thought. This latest collection presents a master perfecting his craft. Overall, an exciting rumination on what not only, but the past, might hold.

Ken Liu is a talented storyteller. Some of the stories in this book almost made me cry. I read them with tear-filled eyes. The Reborn, Thoughts and Prayers, The Gods Will Not Be Chained, The Message and Maxwell's Demon were my favourite stories.