reading ken liu always feels like an otherworldly experience. the hidden girl and other stories touches themes of transhumanism, memory, communication, death, consciousness, and embodiment. it was magical seeing multiple stories thread together, building generations and layers of complexity onto a single timeline. this short story collection is captivating, thought-provoking, and heartwrenching all at once.
but it's a sign of the times when a futurist trades bedtime stories for warning lights.
like other reviewers mention, this collection is also darker and more cynical than liu's last. in the hidden girl, he gets explicitly political: colonialism, environmental degradation, great power wars. he sounds skeptical of authority, skeptical of government, and skeptical of techno-solutionism. i felt less wonder and more fear: the reader's attention is repeatedly drawn to the inherent tension between scarce resources and irreconciliable difference, between our affective ties to "humanness" versus the out-of-body technology required to sustain our growth.
i closed the book feeling unsettled in my skin. i think that means it worked.
(sep 2, 2020)
NOTE: You can find my Kindle highlights for this book here. I use Readwise to sync and manage my highlights.
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