Book review: The Paper Menagerie has rightly swept the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards
Chinese American writer’s collection is a triumph of speculative fiction
by Ken Liu
Saga Press
5 stars
To borrow one of his titles, Ken Liu stirs All the Flavors into The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories: crunchy hard sci-fi extrapolation, ages-old fantasy, sweet romance, bitter tyranny and trickster surprises.
To call his book one of the best collections of speculative fiction I’ve ever read is simply to begin my praise. Other sci-fi/fantasy story collections in my personal hall of fame, such as Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Cordwainer Smith’s The Rediscovery of Man, are made up largely of brilliant stories written in a single style or mode. Liu’s book compiles brilliant stories written in several different, overlapping modes, a technically dazzling collection of compulsively readable narratives, presenting characters with agonising moral dilemmas and never forgetting the heart.
Take, for example, The Waves, which begins with the creation fable of Nü Wa on a bank of the Yellow River, easing her loneliness by fashioning a human out of mud, then opens up into a story about a generation ship fleeing a dying Earth, then an agonising choice to accept or decline possible immortality – and then several stunning transformations that change nearly everything about what it means to be human except the need for and power of telling stories about being human.