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A review by xcinnamonsugar
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
4.0
A wonderful blend of historical fiction and science fiction about identity and memory. Thoughts on each story:
* The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species ♥️♥️ I loved this one so much!! This story was written in a similar style to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is one of my all-time favourite reads. I loved how it explored the myriad ways knowledge could be processed and communicated.
* State Change Interesting piece exploring what it means to change and adapt, by having the characters’ souls take the tangible form of everyday objects.
* Perfect Match A matchmaking algorithm on steroids. Could totally be a Black Mirror episode.
* Good Hunting One of the more forgettable stories for me, although I liked the reframing of the hulijing’s alleged seduction of men really being about men vilifying the subject of their infatuation.
* The Literomancer Lots of fun wordplay on Chinese characters.
* Simulacrum ♥️ This is one of those stories that I’d love to hear what people thought after reading it. It explores the human need to hold on to core memories—positive or negative—and immortalise an impermanent reality.
* The Regular ♥️ I would love to watch a movie adaptation of this sci-fi murder mystery story. The idea of an emotional regulator was also pretty interesting, and got me thinking about whether emotional regulation and hormonal regulation (effectively how the regulator works) is really the same thing.
* The Paper Menagerie I’d forgotten that I’d read this one before (years ago, likely to see what the hype was about). It’s probably not surprising that I didn’t find it especially memorable the second time around either.
* An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition ♥️♥️ It had some elements of The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species interspersed throughout a narrative about memory and love. This was the one story that hit me right in the feels from the entire collection.
* The Waves This read a little like a sequel to the previous story, describing some kind of evolution cycle(?).
* Mono no aware Compared to all the other stories in this book, this one felt kinda meh in terms of creativity.
* All the Flavors A heartwarming tale that points out the cognitive dissonance in the xenophobic rhetoric toward immigrants.
* A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel Told from the perspective of a migrant worker who spent most of his life on a multi-year subterranean construction project. He’s both the victim and perpetrator of a system that effectively sacrifices human lives in the name of technological advancement.
* The Litigation Master and the Monkey King This one reminded me of the Chinese fiction I came across during my schooling years, where court cases are argued through witty rhetoric.
* The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary ♥️ (Trigger warning, there’s a fair bit of gory detail on war crimes in this story.) Who owns the history of a land? Who gets to determine the narrative, which facts are documented and which are erased? If there were a way to obtain incontrovertible evidence of events in the past, would any political system actually greenlight it?
* The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species ♥️♥️ I loved this one so much!! This story was written in a similar style to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is one of my all-time favourite reads. I loved how it explored the myriad ways knowledge could be processed and communicated.
* State Change Interesting piece exploring what it means to change and adapt, by having the characters’ souls take the tangible form of everyday objects.
* Perfect Match A matchmaking algorithm on steroids. Could totally be a Black Mirror episode.
* Good Hunting One of the more forgettable stories for me, although I liked the reframing of the hulijing’s alleged seduction of men really being about men vilifying the subject of their infatuation.
* The Literomancer Lots of fun wordplay on Chinese characters.
* Simulacrum ♥️ This is one of those stories that I’d love to hear what people thought after reading it. It explores the human need to hold on to core memories—positive or negative—and immortalise an impermanent reality.
* The Regular ♥️ I would love to watch a movie adaptation of this sci-fi murder mystery story. The idea of an emotional regulator was also pretty interesting, and got me thinking about whether emotional regulation and hormonal regulation (effectively how the regulator works) is really the same thing.
* The Paper Menagerie I’d forgotten that I’d read this one before (years ago, likely to see what the hype was about). It’s probably not surprising that I didn’t find it especially memorable the second time around either.
* An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition ♥️♥️ It had some elements of The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species interspersed throughout a narrative about memory and love. This was the one story that hit me right in the feels from the entire collection.
* The Waves This read a little like a sequel to the previous story, describing some kind of evolution cycle(?).
* Mono no aware Compared to all the other stories in this book, this one felt kinda meh in terms of creativity.
* All the Flavors A heartwarming tale that points out the cognitive dissonance in the xenophobic rhetoric toward immigrants.
* A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel Told from the perspective of a migrant worker who spent most of his life on a multi-year subterranean construction project. He’s both the victim and perpetrator of a system that effectively sacrifices human lives in the name of technological advancement.
* The Litigation Master and the Monkey King This one reminded me of the Chinese fiction I came across during my schooling years, where court cases are argued through witty rhetoric.
* The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary ♥️ (Trigger warning, there’s a fair bit of gory detail on war crimes in this story.) Who owns the history of a land? Who gets to determine the narrative, which facts are documented and which are erased? If there were a way to obtain incontrovertible evidence of events in the past, would any political system actually greenlight it?