{5\/5} “There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We’re all just ordinary men — well, I’m an ordinary demon — faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.”<\/p>\n
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories<\/strong> by Ken Liu, published in 2016<\/p>\n In “The Paper Menagerie” Jack thought of himself as an American and grew apart from his Chinese mother — but his mother left him a final letter to be read when he could appreciate it. In “An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition” humans find a new way to search for aliens — and aliens have different ways of thinking. In “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” the litigation master risks helping a fugitive in order to protect a book that tells of a massacre the emperor wants kept unknown.<\/p>\n In the blurbs for this book one word jumped out at me — “profound.” That’s what you’ll find in this collection — many of the stories are so rich you’ll think you’re reading a novel.<\/p>\n The author that Liu reminds me of is Ted Chiang — each story reaches out and grabs you. As with Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others<\/strong>, this collection is one that all science fiction fans should read.<\/p>\n This is the first book of Liu’s that I’ve read — I will undoubtedly read more. In addition to being an author, Liu is also a translator — he translated from the Chinese the novel The Three-Body Problem<\/strong> and the anthology Invisible Planets<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {5\/5} “There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We’re all just ordinary men — well, I’m an ordinary demon — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,27,9,5,8,44],"class_list":["post-9812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-collections","tag-fantasy","tag-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9812"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10735,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9812\/revisions\/10735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}