Review of Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
[Note: I give 5 stars to a book if and only if I both love it and it really changes the way I think or feel - about my life, the world, the universe...]

tl;dr - Read this book. You will be moved, inspired, enlightened, transformed, or some combination thereof. And perhaps more.

It feels hard for me to write a review for this collection of short stories, because I feel like I could write a review for every one individually. (I’m sure the title short story has had hundreds of reviews written about it alone, as the first fictional work to win all 3 major SciFi awards: Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy.)

So I looked back at my review of Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, and I’ll start there, with the broad similarities. Both books are collections of incredibly mind-expanding and thought-provoking stories. Both are fundamentally speculative, asking “What if…? If only… If this goes on…”, as Neil Gaiman puts these fundamental questions. Both reminded me of my life and brought new meaning to it.

Both are breath-taking in scope. This book ranges from the architecture-based thinking of a microscopic species to the human creation of a trans-Pacific railway to journeys of many light-years. It immerses the reader in romantic and filial love, tells tales of courageous and mythical heroes, sings odes to books and cognition. It made me laugh; it made me cry. It made me think; it made me wonder. It made me stop in my tracks; it made me turn figurative page after page (I listened to the audiobook, which I highly recommend).

One significant difference is that the latter half of the stories are more firmly grounded in Ken Liu’s Asian and American experience. While I enjoyed every story in the book, these held a uniquely poignant and historical power.

Stories that I particularly loved:
The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species, State Change, The Paper Menagerie, An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition, The Waves