The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu

I continue to work my way through stories about life extension and mind uploading for the class I will eventually teach on the topic. That journey brought me to this collection by Ken Liu (his second; I own his first but have never gotten around to reading it), which contains a sequence of stories about the Singularity. Three of them form a tight sequence about a single character; the others don't share characters, but do seem to be set in the same future history. In this world, imaging the brain destroys it, so you can only be uploaded if you die physically, and quantum considerations mean the programs cannot be duplicated. Though there is a period of initial chaos, by the far future, humanity all exists "in the cloud," essentially, with new, purely digital people being born. The relevant stories are:

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2011-20
Read: July 2021

• "The Gods Will Not Be Chained" (2014) – a girl named Maddie discovers her father has been uploaded
• "Staying Behind" (2011) – a father clings onto physical life when the majority of humanity has been uploaded
• "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" (2014) – Maddie tries to stay alive with the help of her father as the world goes to hell
• "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer" (2011) – a purely digital human tries to come to terms with her mother's decision to die (her mother is an uploaded human, one of only a few left)
• "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" (2015) – Maddie discovers she has a cloud-born sister
• "Seven Birthdays" (2016) – a mother and daughter's relationship across an increasingly long life-span; between the daughter's 49th and 343rd birthdays, the upload takes place

These stories are okay. I think they raise some interesting ideas, but I often felt that Liu didn't have much interesting to say about them, and even though Liu is a software engineer, I felt they overrelied on hoary clichés of mind-uploading stories: anyone in the Maddie stories who is uploaded instantly becomes a super-AI capable of hacking and battling on the digital plane, for example. There's a constant reiteration in some stories that the digital world is less "real" feeling than ours, which seems to me a pretty uninteresting idea for sf to explore. What if a technology some people think is good is actually bad!? I wanted to see more of interest done with it.

That said, I think several of them are worth teaching; definitely the first Maddie story and "Staying Behind"; possibly the second and third Maddie stories. These are ones that raise interesting philosophical and ethical questions that would be worth pursuing in a college course, even if Liu's own answers aren't always the most interesting or plausible.

I did take the time to read all the stories collected here, since Liu is someone I've been meaning to read more of. I found it hit or miss. I found Liu at his best when exploring ideas of race or cultural identity: "Ghost Days," contrasting the way that 2310s space colonists, 1980s Connecticut Chinese immigrants, and 1900s Hong Kong residents dealing with the British all play down or play up their cultural identities was pretty neat. "Maxwell's Demon," the story of a "no-no girl" who ends up spying for the Americans in Japan and developing a weapon out of ghosts was sad but good.

I also enjoyed some of his near future stuff when it wasn't about uploading. "Thoughts and Prayers" is a neat story about the weaponization of algorithms. I had previously read "Byzantime Empathy," about an attempt to put empathy on the blockchain, and I liked it a lot this time around, too. On the other hand, "Real Artists," about making the perfect movie by monitoring how the brain responds to it, reminded me too much of one of those Golden Age stories that was more an idea than an actual story.

Outside of his short fiction, Liu primarily writes fantasy novels; interestingly, I found almost all of the fantasy stories here deadly dull. I just could not buy into them for whatever reason. Mostly they are clustered at the end of the book, which didn't help.

By the end of this book, I was very down on it. I think the issue is that Liu is a very one-track writer, at least as represented by this book. There is no sf idea that cannot be hitched to a heartfelt tale of a father and daughter, or less commonly, a mother and daughter. This is the approach of "Thoughts and Prayers," the three "Gods" stories, "Staying Behind," "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer," "Memories of My Mother," "The Hidden Girl," "Seven Birthdays," and "The Message," over half of the collection's nineteen pieces. Done a little, this can give weight to a story. Repeated so much, the theme quickly becomes saccharine; I really hated it by the time I got to "The Message." Also, daughters every time? (Only "Ghost Days" uses a son.) It quickly felt like less a theme Liu wanted to explore and more a crutch he was using to give emotional weight to banal ideas.

This might be unfair—I think I would have liked many of these a bit more on their own—but this is how Liu put his book together, and that's how I read them. In a strong collection, a writer brings out their themes in such a way that it makes you appreciate their writing more, but I finished this book somewhat less enthused for the eventual moment that I finally read The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.