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Thursday, April 30, 2020

Review: The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is Ken Liu's giant collection of short stories. The stories run the gamut, from the title story (a fantasy set in the tradition of the Chinese martial arts stories), to a series of related short stories about a post-singularity, uploaded human digital world. Many stories explore contemporary technology trends though given the current state of the world, we're seeing how over-optimistic some of those projections are.

Liu cannot compared with his contemporary Ted Chiang --- some of stories (e.g., the ones about crypto currency) clearly do not age well and were probably written in a hurry. One of the stories in the book is actually an excerpt from one of his novels, which I thought was cheating, but obviously intended to sell his novel series, which was sort of lackluster.

But by and large, the stories were decent and made for a good break. Mildly recommended.

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