The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Ken Liu
Completed 7/25/2024, Reviewed 7/25/2024
4 stars

My introduction to Ken Liu was in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2013.  It featured the title story from this collection.  I absolutely loved it then and I loved it reading it again for this online book club selection.  In fact, I loved almost all the stories in this collection.  A few were boring, but still had beautiful prose.  The prose was a feature in every story.  It set the mood and enhanced the world-building.  Almost all the stories featured Asian characters struggling with identity.  Several of them were indictments of the treatment of the Chinese people by other peoples and countries.    In my usual manner with collections, I’ll mention a few of the stories here that I thought stood out from the others.

The Paper Menagerie was my favorite.  It’s so poignant.  It shows how a kid who is different, in this case, Chinese, tries to eschew everything about himself that is different in an effort to be like everyone else. This includes his mother, who used to make magical origami animals for him when he was very young.

The Literomancer – the daughter of an American operative in Taiwan befriends an old man and his sort of grandson.  The old man tells the future by analyzing the pictures of Chinese words.  The girl unknowingly tells her father about something the old man says which is sympathetic to the Communists which gets him in trouble. This one was very hard to read, but one of the indicting stories.

All the Flavors – Mixing history with myth, this story tells about the Chinese immigrants from the railroad days who settled in Idaho Territory.  Some of the whites are welcoming, most are not. However, one girl befriends several of them and begins to learn about their culture through stories and food.  

The stories in general are a little fantasy-ish or a little sci fi-ish, just enough to give them some flavor so that it’s not like a history lesson, but many of the stories are.  They give voices to a people who have been shut down for a long time.  It’s like Liu said, “I got a few awards for some of my stories.  Well here they are, plus a bunch that tell some uncomfortable truths about the recent history of the Chinese people.”  They may be uncomfortable, a few downright horrifying, but they are very well written and draw into the way they are told.

I give this book four stars out of five.  I didn’t care for the first and the last stories.  The first was hard to follow and the last was way too long.  I didn’t like the conceit of the last: a man figures out time travel and finds out the truth about Japanese torture of Chinese people pre WWII.   The story is told in a documentary format, which felt repetitive.  One of the stories completely eluded me.  Except for these three, the collection is marvelous.

Some Desperate Glory

Emily Tesh
Completed 7/14/2024, Reviewed 7/15/2024
5 stars

I hadn’t realized I had read this author before until I read the pages at the end of the book.  She previously wrote Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, award winning novellas I loved.  Now she is nominated for several awards, including the 2024 Hugo for this her first novel, and I loved it.  It’s a queer space opera with an unreliable, unlikable main character.  It plays with parallel universes and trying to make the future turn out the way you want it to.  At times it was a little tough to follow the universe jumping, but once I got used to it, it was breathtaking.  The prose is as intense as the main character.  Even though it took me a week to read this, I read the majority of it on just a few nights, going to bed early on the others to catch up from reading so late LOL.  

Kyr, as in Valkyr, is a young warrior woman on Gaea, the last outpost of rebellious humans, a space station built from several war vessels on a planetoid.  She is ready to go claim vengeance on the aliens who destroyed the Earth.  When she doesn’t get the appointment she was expecting, she goes to look for her twin brother who supposedly betrayed the rebels.  Her journey takes her to a planet where a large group of humans live in peace with each other and the aliens.  There she learns the truth about her brother, Gaea, and the aliens.

Kyr is quite the intense character.  She, like almost everyone else on Gaea, lives for revenge on the aliens for destroying Earth.  She is the top female cadet, the darling of Gaea’s commander, her Uncle Jole.  He’s not really her uncle, but he adopted her and her twin brother Magnus after their mother died and their older sister betrayed Gaea.  Despite all the accolades, her “sisters” from the same age group don’t like her.  But she ignores that, living for the glory of humanity.  Even when she goes searching for Magnus, she is still intense, despite all the revelations she encounters.

The other characters are quite believable as well.  They are all pretty intense; that is how they are raised.  I liked that there were multiple queer characters, but no real romance going on.  Romance is basically eschewed for the greater glory of humanity.  And they weren’t all good.  Magnus’ seditious gay friend is bitchy and as unlikable as Kyr initially is.  Ironically, the only character in the first half or so of the book who acts human is an alien.  

The tough part about this book is that there are a lot of trigger topics.  They include, suicide, rape, forced birth, and almost every ism and phobia you can think of.  The society on Gaea exists as a militaristic installation with the sole purpose of the remnants of humanity taking revenge on the aliens.  Swept aside are things that make us human.  This is all represented in the character of Kyr.  Fortunately, she does go on a journey of revelation and change.  But it takes time for her to get there, and that may be problematic for some readers.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  I found it intense.  Kyr has completely bought into the cruel dystopia she was raised in.  When she does begin to transform, it is not sudden, and she learns the hard way what her belief system has done to those around her.  Eventually, you do come to like her, but just like for Kyr, the journey for the reader is not easy.  

Witch King

Martha Wells
Completed 7/7/2024, Reviewed 7/7/2024
3 stars

This book wasn’t my cup of tea.  It was told in two timelines, and despite being clearly delineated by chapter titles, I found it confusing.  I had trouble getting into the initial timeline, the “present,” and when the “past” began, I lost track of the objective of the present.  Then I lost track of the objective of the past.  When it all came together in the end, I was non-plussed.  I have a mixed history with Wells.  I mostly enjoyed her Murderbot series, culminating in the award-winning Network Effect (although several more Murderbot books have been released since).  I didn’t care for her fantasy novel we read for book club, The Cloud Roads.  But this was nominated for several awards, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.   It won the 2024 Locus Award for Fantasy and was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards.  It lost the Nebula; the Hugo will be announced in August.  

The book opens with Kai being revived from being dead for a year, his consciousness being suspended while his body lay trapped in an elaborate water tomb.  He awakens and escapes, capturing a new body from a group of marauders at his tomb.  He also finds and rescues Ziede, a witch who was one of his companions and was also entombed nearby.  Kai himself is a demon with a human body and is known as the Witch King.  He takes the gender of the body he inhabits.  The two begin a quest to find out who was responsible for their situation.  They also search for Ziede’s wife Tahren and Tahren’s brother Dahin.  The book then goes back to explain how Kai was captured when the Hierarchs took over, was rescued, and then with Ziede, Tahren, Dahin, and others try to overthrow the Hierarchs.  

Despite never feeling like I got into the book, I did like Kai’s powers as a demon as well as the magic of the others in the story.  There were magical people as well as mortals.  And the magic system seemed different depending on whether you were a demon, a witch, a Blessed Immortal, or a Hierarch.  It was always an interesting scene when they were using their powers for battle.  

I didn’t care for the world building.  I never quite got the scenario of Kai, Ziede, and their cohorts riding on a boat, and then later a raft through rivers, canals, and bays.  Water played a huge part in the story, but I had a tough time understanding how it all was laid out.  I thought the prose, while extensive, focused on the wrong things at crucial times, like clothing.  Or maybe I just was not getting it as I was reading it.

I give this book a tentative three stars out of five.  A part of me recognizes that a lot of effort went into organizing and executing the production of this novel, keeping the past and the present exciting and the plots moving forward.  I just didn’t get into it enough right from the beginning to understand, appreciate, and care about what was going on.