Ken Liu’s The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (432 pages) contains nineteen stories, several of which intersect or (at the very least) occupy the same fictional future. Most of the stories are great, some of them are good, and one of them is downright terrible. If you enjoy speculative fiction, you’ll enjoy Liu’s latest collection, though you too will wonder if the terrible story found its origin in some ill-conceived movie pitch for less than literate producers.
Let’s start with the terrible one, shall we? It’s titled, “Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard,” and it’s a mix between a superhero story and an animal shapeshifting story. The protagonist is a young woman whose family focused all of its resources on helping her rise up from their peasant class to join the nobility, a process that culminates in the great reveal of her inner being, which manifests as a wondrous and powerful animal. Unfortunately, the process does not go as planned, and the young woman walks away from it with the knowledge that she has shamed herself and her family and wasted all of their efforts to help her. Now she and her little brother comb through society’s wastelands, living off the detritus as professional scavengers, rather than walking among the upper classes as a noble creature of power. Until this one day…
I won’t go further into the narrative because the plot is decent and the conceit of Liu’s speculative world intrigues, but I will add that in this one story Liu telegraphs the bigger moments, and he seems to possess low expectations for his audience, explaining thematic intentions and character development the way one might explain them to a conference room full of high-powered, half-listening executives.
Outside of this one story, however, none of the other eighteen disappoint. Several revolve around the concept of uploading one’s mind to the Internet and the tragedies and victories that might follow. Others explore a future Earth with a transformed climate or alien planets where future Earthlings are trying to find or create a refuge after escaping Earth’s new climate. Some explore the past through different eyes, as in the title story, “The Hidden Girl,” which takes place during the eighth century in China and focuses on a young assassin trained in the art of dimension shifting whose first real target provides her with a moral dilemma.
I enjoyed Liu’s curation of these stories. The interconnectedness of several of them kept me guessing at which ones harkened back to others and which ones stood alone, creating a strange kind of anticipation on the title pages of each story.
This is the fourth book I’ve read by Ken Liu (two of which were written by another author, but which he translated into English). I’d enjoyed all of them thus far, and I was glad to have this latest collection (minus that one story) live up to my expectations.