I haven\u2019t read Ken Liu\u2019s books before reading this collection, so I was going in blind. There are some parallels with another author I have read: Ted Chiang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both writers are Asian American, both explore themes related to fantasy (although Liu\u2019s book is more technology and race focused) using short stories as a medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The stories in this book were sort of hit or miss for me. I couldn\u2019t help but feel like the writer started with an interesting idea, shoe-horned in some shallow characters to illustrate the idea, and then checked the idea off the list and went on to the next one. Some stories were really well-written, including \u201cState Change\u201d about a quiet woman living in a world where people\u2019s souls are contained in ordinary objects, \u201cThe Paper Menagerie\u201d about bridging the cultural differences between generations, \u201cAll the Flavors\u201d telling the legend of the Chinese god of war through a telling of Chinese immigrants to the early American West, and \u201cThe Litigation Master and the Monkey King\u201d which tells a fable-like story of a clever man who pays a heavy price to preserve history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those were the good ones, but the rest of the stories felt too contrived to me. I\u2019m sure the writer\u2019s full length novels have the opportunity to flesh out the characters – writing short stories gives less chance to really develop things – so I may check out his novels in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven\u2019t read Ken Liu\u2019s books before reading this collection, so I was going in blind. There are some parallels with another author I have read: Ted Chiang. Both writers are Asian American, both explore themes related to fantasy (although Liu\u2019s book is more technology and race focused) using short stories as a medium. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-Rw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}