Reviews with content warning for Suicide - The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Some really conceptually interesting and thought provoking stuff. A collection of very emotional (and sometimes heartrending) stories. Primarily sci fi and magical realism with a heavy historical influence.

As a warning, there is a ton of *extremely* graphic content in here. In fact, I think this may be the most explicitly graphic book I have ever read.

Content Warnings

compassrosa's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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danielles_reads's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

I’m honestly in awe of Ken Liu’s mind! This collection is full of stories bursting with imagination, discussing everything from language, culture, our responsibility to history, racism, imperialism and colonialism, personal trauma, and family relationships.

I’ve only read a handful of SFF short story collections because I really disliked the first one I read, and I wasn’t sure if it was the author or the format. Turns out it is possible to write short, engaging speculative stories that make sense with minimal world building and make you attached to the characters! A lot of these stories were absolute tear jerkers—I cried my eyes out at the titular story, which was only 28 minutes long but so emotional. Liu discussed a lot of trauma, both personal and collective, which made this a really heavy but worthwhile read.

I loved so many of the stories and only found two of them to be meh. My favorites were: The Man Who Ended History, Mono no Aware, The Paper Menagerie, The Regular, and Good Hunting. My least favorites were The Perfect Match and Simulacrum (though the latter inspired a good book club discussion). I do kind of wish that Liu had spaced out the longer stories more evenly throughout the collection—the stories in the first half were all fairly short, but the longest stories were all in the second half. It made the pacing feel a bit uneven.

I definitely need to read more of Liu’s work! I highly recommend this collection to anyone looking to read more short speculative fiction.

Spoiler thoughts on each story:

Preface: made me tear up a lil bit tbh. I like how he talked about how different human consciousnesses are but how we can connect through books. “Communication is a miracle of translation.”

The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species: wow, these species are all so different! I love the metal species with stone brains carving out a little for their descendants. And the species that has to physically touch the books to read and so they lock them away and only share interpretations. So creative, loving this already.

State Change: Gave Ling Ma vibes. A seemingly mundane story with slightly absurd speculative elements that has a greater meaning. But with actual closure lol. This one was fascinating and had me all in. I liked the excerpts with historical figures’ souls too. I’m already so impressed with Liu’s mind!

The Perfect Match: Disappointing. An obvious manifesto against tech companies that was super predictable. Hopefully this is a one-time issue.

Good Hunting: This one made me tear up 🥲 I loved the theming, characters, ending. Beautiful

The Literomancer: Ken Liu is really just gonna rip my heart out of my throat like that huh?? jesus. This one was too real. The ending did feel rushed and kind of forced with the dad explaining literally every detail about the torture to his wife, but ultimately I think it succeeded in delivering the message he wanted about imperialism, anti-communism, etc. I also loved the discussion around Chinese characters and language—you can really see Liu’s translation skills at work.

Simulacrum: Was that ending implying that Anna started the simulacrum of her mom? Interesting. I’ll always be team family members don’t deserve reconciliation just because they’re family, so it would make sense she’d rather bond with a fake version of her mom than have that message be her last memory of her. And her dad was creeping me out.

The Regular: omg this was so scary and intense. How does Liu always get me to connect with these characters so quickly?? Ruth hanging from the windowsill waiting for the Watcher had me STRESSED. And then her getting the chance to make up for her daughter’s death by saving Carrie in the way she couldn’t for her daughter… 😭 the feels
The Watcher was creepy af and his POV heightened the tension even more. And Liu really seems to understand women’s experiences with sexism with the comments Ruth made about what she dealt with from men

The Paper Menagerie: freaking bawling at his mom’s story, she didn’t deserve that and neither did he 😭😭

An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition: Just the kind of philosophical sci-fi I like. Uranium-based life forms, who even comes up with that?!? Though I can’t deny that traveling 550 AU from the sun to listen to messages around the universe for the rest of your life sounds depressing as fuck. I like to think that the parts about different aliens were things she learned while listening.
I think the point was to show how insignificant our thoughts and legacy are to the universe and the different ways love can be expressed.

The Waves: This one was wild. I feel like Liu took the typical “what makes us human?” sci-fi theme to its absolute limit in a way I haven’t really seen before. I also felt the revulsion Maggie felt when Bobby turned into a machine 😅 but then when they essentially turned into light I started thinking, what’s the point of living like that forever? So strange. I like how he incorporated creation stories too. For a second I thought Maggie was going to create humans from mud at the end there lol

Mono no Aware: A beautiful story about community and sacrifice and the inherent transience of life. Loved it.

All the Flavors: this was… fine. It was pretty much just straight historical fiction and it felt meh compared to the other brilliant stories in this collection. And it was so long! I also kept getting the names in the legend confused so I probably didn’t fully understand it. And I know it’s historically accurate but hearing “Chinaman” constantly was grating.

A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel: interesting alternate history that had a real dark but realistic turn. Damn, the prisoner trying to escape was Hokkien like the narrator and not a communist terrorist like he was told :(

The Man Who Ended History: wowowow, this one was incredible. A perfect example of a sci-fi with meaningful social commentary. I loved the rumination on how we interact with history, and the discussion of the needs of the individuals affected by past atrocities vs the needs of society as a whole vs the need to save and document these atrocities. I had never heard of unit 731 before. Pure evil, but I’m glad that this story informed me.

Content Warnings

blenchbooks's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad

4.75

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ruthhelizabeth's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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