Some of the short stories in Ken Liu’s second collection cannot in all honesty be placed in the genre of science fiction. The title story, The Hidden Girl, reminded me of the famous movie by Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare and Coal Leopard is set in a dystopic future similar to the one seen in The Hunger Games. Thoughts and Prayers with its internet trolling could very well have been featured as a Black Mirror episode. One of my favorites, Byzantine Empathy, is a fictional story that in all probability is happening in today’s world of cryptocurrency and blockchain transactions.

The rest of the stories do belong to science fiction genre. I particularly enjoyed The Message and The Reborn. I wish Liu had written a proper novella grouping the stories about the Gods in which the essence of human intelligence is uploaded into a futuristic Singularity network. He has split them into three individual stories which can be made sense only when read in sequence.

Few stories rely on a futuristic world where the entire human consciousness is uploaded into a mega data center, envisioning complete human existence as digital life, a concept Liu enjoys reusing in several stories.

I’m sufficiently intrigued by Ken Liu’s writing that The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories has made it to my list of books to read.