Rating: 5/5
This is a collection of 15 short stories, many of them which won awards or were at least nominated, covering a gamut of subjects. The thing that strikes one the most about this collection is the staggering scope of Liu's imagination, and set in different time periods — the stories one about different methods of writing books by different species in the universe, a world in which a person's soul resides in external objects, Chinese legends and magic, a typical serial-killer-detective story, space travel, engineering marvels, atrocities during WWII, and even about a Google-like company. The second thing that strikes the reader is the fact that Liu does not allow his imagination to take precedence over everything else — ultimately, his stories are about sacrifice, awareness, optimism, love, respect for different cultures, and undoing injustices — the magic and the science fiction are just props for the story.
It's extremely difficult to rank the stories in a collection like this, and this ranking would differ from one reader to another. If I had to choose four stories (in the order in which they appear in this collection), the first would be State Change, where everyone has her soul in an object and die when that object ceases to exist. It is a metaphor on how humans never live to their fullest in fear of death, and only when that fear is overcome can they maximise their potential. The second is Literomancy where a young American girl in Taiwan, Lily, meets a young Chinese boy and his kind grandfather who teaches her the art of literomancy (seeking messages from symbols). Lily inadvertently brings bad luck to them but hopes to keep the art alive. The Paper Menagerie explores the relationship between a mother and a son, who have nothing in common, and who are finally bound together by a menagerie of paper animals that magically come to life. And The Litigation Master and the Monkey King is a story of an ordinary man, Tian Haoli, who turns into a hero after protecting a fugitive and preserving a secret that eventually overthrows the Manchu empire. The Monkey King is his imaginary guide and symbolises his conscience all along.
Collections like these usually have some stories that were probably not worth being included. The amazing part of this collection, however, was the fact that I enjoyed 14 of the 15 stories. The only exception for me was The Perfect Match, about a Google-like company called Centillion that started off as a search engine but now controls all aspects of life through AI and data mining. This story discusses the perils of having AI control our lives, a topic that has been done to death in other books and media.
A bonus: don't miss out the episode of the Netflix show, Love, Death & Robots based on the story, Good Hunting. This is a story incorporating Chinese legends and magic, about hulijings who could change their shape from a fox to a bewitching woman and about their hunters. It’s also a story about the transformation of old customs and practices to modern ones. But the story ends on an optimistic note where modernity is used to keep the old traditions alive.
Pros: The wide heterogenity in the stories, the focus on human emotions first and foremost
Cons: One of the stories is jaded (but that's just one of fifteen)
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