Monday, February 3, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on February 25, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

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.
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