u/Mathies_27

Liu’s first short story collection, published in 2016, consists of 15 short stories and novellas and plays with a number of genres, including magical realism, hard science fiction, noir, steampunk fantasy, and alternate history. Coupled with this diversity of genre and approaches to storytelling, there are some common themes threading through this collection, including the power of words and meaning; the horrors of colonialism contrasted with the opportunities of multiculturalism; storytelling and how it manifests individually, culturally, and nationally; and the immigrant experience. As with any short story anthology, some stories worked better for me than others, but the latter were far outweighed by the former. Below are some quick teasers for each story and a few thoughts.

My favorites of the collection. Highly recommend:

The Literomancer: Lilly, a young American girl, moves to Taiwan with her father, a U.S. intelligence officer, and befriends an old man, Mr. Kan, and his adopted son, Teddy. Mr. Kan teaches Lilly the magic underlying words, their forms, and their meanings, but can their friendship survive the realities of Cold War politics and American imperialism?

The Paper Menagerie: A beautiful, bittersweet story about the estranged relationship between a Chinese mother and her half-American son and her efforts to connect with him by crafting origami animals that come alive, imbued with her spirit. I can see why this won all the awards it did; it’s beautifully done.

Mono no aware: Another lovely, melancholic story set in the last days of Earth as an asteroid hurtles towards our planet. We see all the different ways human societies react to this news—grief, acceptance, rage, fear. Later, we follow a handful of survivors on a spaceship propelled by a solar sail as Hiroto strives to keep the memory of Japan alive.

All the Flavors: a delightful novella of an Idaho mining town during the gold rush and how a young white girl, Lily, befriends an older Chinese man, Lao Guan, who may or may not be the mythical Chinese god of war. This story has several nice moments of cultural exchange (often accompanied by initial misunderstandings), such as sharing Chinese culinary traditions and Irish folk songs. Interspersed are Lao Guan’s folktales of his past as the god of war.

An ultimately hopeful tale with a positive view on multiculturalism, though as Liu informs us in an endnote, it was not to last. Despite often successful integration of Chinese immigrants into white settler communities, burgeoning anti-Chinese sentiment led to legislation that resulted in the Chinese population of many of these mining towns dwindling and eventually disappearing.

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary: a method is developed that allows individuals to experience the past at a particular time and place, but each viewing can only occur once. One of the creators of this method decides to use it to raise awareness of the crimes and horrors inflicted on the Chinese populace by Unit 731 of the Japanese army during World War II, but his efforts have unintended consequences.

I had never heard about Unit 731 before this story, nor the culpability of the U.S. in shielding its perpetrators in exchange for their experimental data; to call it horrific is a gross understatement. This gut-wrenching story asks the reader to whom does history and historical story telling belong? The victims? “Neutral” interpreters? All of humanity? When we learn about history, what do we do with that knowledge? What is our responsibility moving forward?

Stories I enjoyed:

The Perfect Match: Originally written in 2012, this story hardly even qualifies as science fiction at this point. A social media company that claims to want to improve the world offers an “AI” assistant that can personalize and decide practically every aspect of your life, from the meals you eat, to the movies you watch, to who you date. The catch: omnipresent surveillance of every facet of your life in the name of improving the algorithm. Can Sai escape this surveillance state? Does he even want to?

Good Hunting: Liang and Yan, a monster hunter and a fox-human shapeshifter (a hulijing) must learn how to adapt to a changing world in which colonization and technological advancement are leaching the old magic from the world and maybe even figure out how to subvert those changes to their own ends. Very enjoyable.

Simulacrum: What if you could record not only visual images, but also a subject’s mental state at the time of the recording in such a way that you can interact with them frozen in a particular moment in time? How would that shape how you engage with the past and present? This story explores these ideas, following the creator of simulacrum technology, Paul Larimore, and his estranged daughter, Anna, told in the style of a documentary film.

The Regular: a neo-noir story of Ruth, a private eye, who is hunting down a serial killer who murders sex workers for the recording devices in their heads to use as blackmail. Along the way, Ruth must come to terms with her own daughter’s death and her complicity in it.

The Waves: a crew of colonists set off to explore and settle new worlds but receive news of a startling discovery back on Earth. This story explores posthuman evolution as even death itself is conquered and asks what does it truly mean to be human?

The Litigation Master and the Monkey King: a lawyer for the peasantry must find the courage to do the right thing and safeguard knowledge of a historical tragedy so that its victims might someday find peace.

Stories that didn’t quite work for me:

The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species: a survey of the many ways in which writing manifests across alien civilizations and its relationship to thought and communication—e.g., one species writes by inscribing tablets and playing them with their sensitive proboscis (akin to vinyl records), but this process degrades the writing over time. As such, important texts are rarely read directly, but copies, interpretations, and reproductions are debated intensely.

This story didn’t do much for me; it had some imaginative species and exploration of how meaning can be transformed or even enriched through cultural exchange. However, it was fairly meandering and experimental, with a largely non-existent narrative.

State Change: each person is born with an intrinsic manifestation of their soul that symbolizes and/or shapes their interactions with others and with the world. Rina’s soul is a single ice cube that must be carefully guarded, as when it melts away, her time is up.

An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition: a companion piece to Bookmaking Habits…, this one again didn’t do much for me. It explores the different ways thoughts might manifest across alien species and what this means for their culture, individuality, and worldview.

A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel: an alternate history tale of the creation of an underwater tunnel as an economic stimulus program during the Great Depression, the hidden horrors of its construction, and how you can never really go home again.

Overall, this collection was quite enjoyable, with many more hits than misses for me. I also found it rewarding to learn a bit about moments in history I was unfamiliar with (e.g., Unit 731, the history of Taiwan and the Republic of China, the Gold Rush in the American West); not coincidentally, those stories were some of my favorites in the collection.

Bingo Squares: Five Short Stories (HM), Author of Color, the novella “All the Flavors” works for Feast Your Eyes, and HM is quite doable (a stir fry with tofu, pork, bitter melon, scallions, and mala seasoning over rice, perhaps with a glass of American whisky as an aperitif).

The third book of the Earthsea series (and its conclusion when it was first published), we follow Arren, the young prince of Enlad, who seeks out Ged and the other mages on the isle of Roke for their guidance and help. A mysterious malady is spreading throughout the land, leading to magic failing, people and animals becoming sickened, and the meaning of words being lost. Ged sets out, accompanied by Arren, in search of the source of this malady. Over the course of their search, they visit various islands and societies and see how this illness is sapping away not only at magic, but the color and vitality of life itself. Some highlights for me included the Children of the Open Sea, a nomadic folk who live most of their lives on rafts following the whales and ocean currents, and the Dragon’s Run, where we get to learn more about dragons and their nature in this universe.

For me, this is the weakest of the first three Earthsea novels (I’ve not yet read further). Much like the first two, this is a bildungsroman, this time focused on Arren. However, it didn’t feel as engaging to me, I think in part because Arren is a relatively passive character, especially when compared to the previous books’ protagonists: headstrong Ged in his youth and Tenar, who is seeking identity and connection after being psychologically abused her whole life. In contrast, Arren’s struggles are mostly internal, as he grapples with the nature of power and responsibility, the consequences of action, and the value of death as the counterpart to life. I generally appreciate introspective writing, but something about the presentation here consistently failed to draw me in. I think part of it is that Arren doesn’t do much to engage with these lessons directly (the closest being an incident with some slavers until the finale) but mostly observes and questions Ged as they travel.

We do get a nice thematic resonance with A Wizard of Earthsea, as Ged must once more confront a shadow of his past, but instead of being an impetuous youth, he is now older and wiser—a man who considers the limits and application of power.

As with much of Le Guin’s writing, the book is infused with her interest in Taoism. One of the central philosophical discussions in the book centers on the duality of life and death and how the former is meaningless without the latter. In this view, without death and eventual renewal, life would stagnate; thus, clinging to life without regard for consequences is a selfish act. Exploration of these ideas is often beautifully told—I especially loved Ged likening it to preserving a single wave at the expense of the sea:

“You will die. […] Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. […] That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever?”.

One of Arren’s struggles is to accept death as an integral part of life and even see the potential beauty in the process.

There are a few elements that didn’t age especially well, though they were likely less glaring back in 1972. For example, Ged believes that many of the ills of Earthsea—the drug use, the nihilism, the loss of balance—would be cured if only there was a true, righteous king sitting on the empty throne in Havnor. We also have a convenient prophecy about a prince-who-was-promised, and it’s no secret who that might be. Reading this for the first time in 2026, these aspects felt simplistic and naïve, with an overly romantic view of monarchy. To be fair, Lord of the Rings pulls the same shtick; I guess nostalgia softens those edges for me.

I wanted to like this book more than I did, especially given how much I loved The Tombs of Atuan. In the end, though, of Le Guin's works that I've read, it ranks towards the bottom for me.

Bingo Squares: The Afterlife (HM), Published in the 70s (HM), Vacation Spot (Roke, Gont, and the Children of the Open Seas would be lovely to visit; if Ged accompanies as a tour guide and mediator, I’d love to visit the Dragon’s Run).

If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. – Raymond Teller

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. -Albert Einstein (apocryphal)

All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with. – Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd

Blindsight is one of my favorite books I’ve read in the past couple years with its fantastic mix of cosmic horror, hard sci-fi, and mind-blowing ideas, so I was especially excited to dig into its “sidequel” that fills us in on events back on Earth. While there is a lot to like in Echopraxia, I felt it never quite reached the same heights as Blindsight. That said, I think Echopraxia has the distinction of possibly being the only book I have ever finished and immediately started a second read-through, so clearly it succeeded in getting its hooks (pseudopods?) into my brain.

Echopraxia is told from the viewpoint of Daniel Brüks, an old-school biologist (parasitologist, specifically) in a world where bio/technological upgrades are required to remain competitive in science, business, etc. Daniel clings to his baseline human status as society, nature, and even his wife leave him behind. After one of Daniel’s research projects is hijacked by bioterrorists, causing the death of thousands, Daniel retreats to the Oregon desert on a research trip and self-imposed exile.

During this trip, he is accidentally swept up in a conflict between the Bicameral Order (a human hivemind harnessing faith-based insights to drive scientific progress), an escaped fugitive vampire, Valerie, with her own inscrutable goals (vampires, as we learned in Blindsight, are obligate cannibals and an extinct, short-lived offshoot of Homo sapiens that have been resurrected Jurassic Park style), and baseline human society. Daniel soon finds himself on the Crown of Thorns, a spaceship crewed by the Bicameral hivemind, a soldier with a past full of regrets, a vengeance-fueled pilot, and Valerie the vampire, hurtling towards the sun to make first contact with a mysterious alien entity.

Whereas Blindsight’s central question might be summed up as “what good is consciousness anyway? Is it just an evolutionary dead-end?”, Echopraxia is more concerned with the limits of empirical science and contrasting it with intuition or faith as ways of knowing. In Watts’ own words, this is his attempt at “taking invisible omnipotent sky faeries seriously enough to incorporate into … faith-based hard SF.” The Bicamerals essentially supercharge their pattern-recognition brain circuitry—the same circuitry that is involved in many religious experiences—such that their methods of inquiry often induce a rapture-like state. Religious themes and imagery permeate the book, including pillars of fire, a Moses figure (>!Valerie, seeking to free her people from bondage!<), the Crown of Thorns, Heaven (where people abandon their bodies for solipsistic paradise inside their own minds), and even bio-hacked locusts whose stridulations can start fires (as Daniel muses to himself, “Plagues and firestorms in a single package. How very apocalyptic”). Throughout the novel, Daniel struggles with his loss of faith in empirical science and the world at large but cannot bring himself to trust the Bicameral Order’s new faith-based ways of knowing (despite their proven track record).

Along the way, Watts draws on diverse, thought-provoking concepts (supported by an extensive bibliograph and entertaining notes section), including digital physics, the concept of “god-as-a-virus”, the evolutionary underpinnings of religiosity, harnessing tornados as power sources, consciousness-devouring viruses, and jumping spider cognition. On a personal note, as a biologist myself, I was tickled to recognize Watts riffing on the work of one of my scientific mentors, which was confirmed in the Notes section.

Hard sci-fi can occasionally lean towards dry prose, but I’m happy to say this is not the case here. Watts paints a vivid world, whether in the Oregonian desert or trapped on a claustrophobic ship hurtling through space, with clear attention given to word choice and sentence structure. Also, his selection of epigraphs is fantastic; I’ve included a couple of my favorites at the top. I found the characters to also be compelling. Though most undergo relatively little character development, their personalities, motivations, reactions, and beliefs felt fleshed out and realistic. Understandably, given that the story is told entirely from his perspective, we get the most insight into Daniel, who is a complex, though not especially likeable character. It’s easy to sympathize with him as he struggles to adapt to a changing world, but he can also be arrogant and inflexible with a bit of a vicious streak (which comes out in his interactions with Lianna, a young woman who acts as his intellectual and philosophical foil).

My primary issue is the main narrative (beneath the surface level sequence of events) can be hard to follow at times. Part of this is intentional, as we are in the head of a baseline human dealing with not just one, but two post-human entities (Valerie and the Bicamerals) with their own plans and goals and who can think rings around poor baselines like us. If Daniel could understand what it is they are doing and communicate that in plain words, they couldn’t be all that smart, could they? Part of why I felt compelled to dive back in after finishing was to get a better understanding of the narrative with foreknowledge of where things were heading.

Bingo Squares: One-Word Title (HM), First Contact, possibly Older Protagonist but unfortunately, we never get a definite answer regarding Daniel’s age.

Bonus Bingo Squares for Blindsight: First Contact, Explorers and Rangers, One-Word Title (HM)