The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a collection of 15 short stories from the award-winning science fiction author, Ken Liu. The collection includes tales of magical realism, futuristic technology, historical fiction, and gritty noir. Simon and Schuster published the book in 2016.

Through these narratives, which often switch back from past to present or from story to book excerpts or legends, Liu invokes several diverse worlds with many Asian protagonists. In his stories, he references Chinese and Japanese games, language, folklore, and history and covers themes of memory, the implications of advanced technologies, and immigrant experiences in America.

In stories like “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” and “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” Liu details the unique storytelling, story recording, and cognitive abilities of different alien species. The first of these functions as a faux nonfiction account of alien species, and the second is a book composed by a mother astronaut who leaves her husband and daughter for a century-long journey into space.

Magical realism appears in several of the stories as well. In “The Paper Menagerie,” for example, the origami animals that the speaker’s mother creates for him come to life. When the speaker, Jack, abandons his mother and his Chinese culture to assimilate to American culture, he loses both his mother and her magic, only to regain it at the end of the story.

Another major theme in the collection is the future of technology and its potential for both good and bad. Stories like “The Perfect Match,” “Simulacrum,” and “Good Hunting” embody this theme. In “The Perfect Match,” humans have become so dependent on artificial intelligence that the AI seems to be controlling them, and in “Simulacrum,” a desperate father creates a replica of his daughter as a young girl, as his real, adult daughter grows distant from him. In “Good Hunting,” Westernization moves into China with the arrival of the railroad, leaching the Chinese magic. Magical creatures adapt by using technology and changing into mechanical shapeshifters.

A few of the stories are science fiction tropes with a fresh spin. “The Waves,” for example, is about humans in a generational starship who gain immortality and eventually evolve into light beings. In “The Regular,” Liu combines a gritty noir detective story with science fiction in his character Ruth, a half-bionic detective who uses an emotion Regulator to help her ingore her tragic past.

History inspired some of Liu’s stories. “The Literomancer” for example, takes place after World War II when the US had operations in Taiwan, and follows the friendship of an American girl and an elderly man. “All the Flavors” is another piece of historical fiction, set in Idaho in the 19th century, when a girl befriends the Chinese gold miners who arrive with strange customs and foods. “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” delves into a World War II atrocity, the “Asian Auschwitz,” through time travel technology that only allows travelers to visit that point in time once.

Other stories mirror history, like in “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” which details a Japanese underground pneumatic tube that takes travelers to the other side of the Earth. The effectiveness of the story comes, in part, from its parallel to the historical time when Asian workers labored to build American railroads.

In the story “State Change,” the characters’ souls live outside their bodies in the form of everyday items, like ice cubes or salt shakers. In “Mono No Aware,” the main character, Hiroto, saves one of the last spaceships full of humans by sacrificing his own life, and in “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King,” Litigation Master Tian dies to save a banned book that details the corruption of his country’s leaders.

Some of the tales are “silkpunk,” which is a term coined by Ken Liu to describe a blend of science fiction and fantasy that is informed by Eastern Asian ideas, aesthetics, and inspiration. Many of these tales also won or were nominated for awards, including the Locus Award, Hugo Awards, FantLab’s Book of the Year Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Nebula Award.