Technologies of Immortality: Reading List

This is a sequel to last week's post; I wanted to provide my reading list (with commentary) for my co-taught "Technologies of Immortality" course.

illustration by Galen Dara for Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels"

I divided the readings into two halves. The ones from the first half of the course focused on technologies of immortality being in their early stages, societies where they were just being invented or had only recently come into use. In the second half, I wanted societies much further on, where the technologies were commonplace and the long-term ramifications of the technologies on society could be explored. As I said in the previous post, we usually focused on three specific technologies: digital consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic modification to extend life.

If the stories are freely and legally available on the Internet, I've linked to them below. We did a reading ranking on the last day of class, where I had the students sort all of the stories they'd read from 1st (best) to 13th (worst); at the end of each paragraph, I've given how the story ranked by mean and median, and how many students ranked it first or last. Every story was some student's favorite... except two.

Prologue

• Will McIntosh, "Bridesicle" (2009). This is a disturbing story about both cryonics and consciousness uploading; it's about a woman named Mira who dies in a car accident and wakes up in a cryonics facility centuries later. The problem with cryonics has turned out to be that revival is expensive, so the dead don't have the money to be revived... but it turns out that men will pay to revive women who are frozen if the women will sign a marriage contract. The story also incorporates elements of consciousness uploading; people can have mental copies of loved ones called "hitchers" stored in their minds. I liked it a lot as a way to begin; it's a good story, well told, but also works well to grab the attention of students as to the purpose of the course. I think this was Professor Cragun's favorite, and it was something both we and the students referred back to a lot. The story was later expanded into a novel (Love Minus Eighty, 2013), and at first I was skeptical of this, but the students raised a lot of interesting questions about the world in class I'd like to see fleshed out. A student also told me they heard an interview with McIntosh where it was originally written about the man doing the revival; I am curious about this because the story would have nowhere near its power in that format! [ranked 1st by mean, 1st by median, 1st by 18 students, last by 1 student]
  

Part I

• Vanessa Fogg, "Traces of Us" (2018). We began part I of the course with this, because it's actually about the development process for consciousness uploading; it follows a pair of graduate students (later, postdocs) who are working on different aspects of consciousness uploading. It's very cute, a bit sad, and Fogg did some solid research on the science here; Professor Evans-Nguyen was impressed by the rigor and specificity. Fogg's blog post here gives good insight into her inspirations. [ranked 2nd by mean, 3rd by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• José Pablo Iriarte, "Proof by Induction" (2021). This is also about a nascent version of consciousness uploading; a technology called the "coda" has just come into existence, which captures a digital snapshot of consciousness at the moment of death. This consciousness can't evolve or change, but you can interact with a deceased love one to obtain closure (or ask questions like, "where is the will?"). The main character is a math professor interacting with his father, another math professor, as they try to solve a proof together. The story explores the process of grief and dealing with the fact that your loved one will never change. [ranked 4th by mean, 4th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Greg Egan, "Learning to Be Me" (1990). A very weird but very good story about a technology called the Ndoli jewel, an implant in your brain that records your neural processes with the eventual goal of taking over for them. The narrator has a series of existential freakouts over the fact that even if his jewel lives forever, it's not him living forever. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 2 students, last by 2 students]
  
• Channing Ren, "Resurrection" (2020). This is a Chinese sf story, again about consciousness uploading. A military engineer dies in battle, but his duplicated consciousness was copied into an artificial body, and then the body dumped on the doorstep of his grieving mother, who is now very confused—and only has a couple weeks with him before he gets sent back to the front. This one began to shift into looking at the social consequences of the technology; Cragun set up in an earlier class that one way sociologists like to look at situations is to as cui bono?—who benefits? And here we see that; it's not the resurrected who benefits from this technology, but those who already have political and economic power. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 1 student]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Will Not Be Chained" and "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" (2014). These are two linked short stories about a girl named Maddie, who (spoilers) discovers that her dead dad isn't actually dead, but that his consciousness has been uploaded to the Internet. I will admit to finding Liu a bit hit or miss, but it is a very accessible story, and again, we get a shift into the social implications of this technology, as Liu explores both who the actual beneficiaries of consciousness uploading would be, what they would use it for, and what the long term consequences would be. [ranked 8th by mean, 8th by median, 1st by 6 students, last by 4 students]
  

Interlude

• qntm [Sam Hughes], "Lena" (2021). This is a hermit-crab story, told in the form of a Wikipedia article about the first digital consciousness. The story explores the dark implications of such a technology, how it would lead to exploitation; the story is named for a famous test image, and HeLa cells are another inspiration. (I taught it in the middle of the course, alongside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) What rights do we have to these products of ourselves—our images, our cells, our consciousnesses—that are not ourselves? The story explores these questions in a stripped back, kind of casually horrifying way. I think a couple students really liked it, but most struggled with the unusual conceit. One thing I really liked is this rant from the author: "'Lena' is a true story. You knew it was when you read it." [ranked last by mean, last by median, last by 7 students]
  

Part II

• Greg Egan, "Border Guards" (1999). I opened the "consequences" part of the course with a couple sequels to stories from the earlier parts of the class. This is a sequel to "Learning to Be Me"; it has no characters in common, but instead jumps centuries into the future to see what kind of society might result from the Ndoli jewel being commonplace. How would people treat relationships? What kind of problems would they have? It's a very optimistic story and too much detail about quantum soccer aside, has some beautiful imagery. It's easy to kneejerk reject these technologies, but I liked how this one not only challenges our preconceptions about the necessity of death, but explicitly calls out other fiction that argues for the necessity of death for being intellectually lazy. [ranked 11th by mean, 11th by median, last by 9 students]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" (2015) and "Staying Behind" (2011). These two follow up the Liu stories from the first half. The first is the third Maddie story; the other takes place in the same world, looking at those people still living physical existences after the majority of humankind has been uploaded. The final Maddie story kind of fizzles out, but that's the point, I would argue: Maddie reaches no clear decision about whether it's better to live a physical existence or be uploaded, because Liu wants the reader to explore it for themselves. "Staying Behind" picks right up from the end of the previous story (despite being written first), and like Egan's "Border Guards," it pushes against our preconceptions—the story is told from the perspective of someone resisting this technology, and he's clearly wrong to do so. So... are we? I can find Liu a bit schmaltzy sometimes, but here he's at his best. Really well put together, clever connections, unsettling conclusion. ["Gods Have Not Died..." ranked 12th by mean, last by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 5 students; "Staying Behind" ranked 10th by mean, 9th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad" (2006). In a world where everyone lives forever, wouldn't overpopulation be a problem? Especially if climate change continues unabated, and the amount of resources available to support humanity keeps dwindling. The story follows a police officer on the "pop squad"—he kills illegal babies and arrests their mothers. It's vividly, gruesomely told... but that's the point, as Bacigalupi is actually confronting you with something that happens everyday. Everyday the United States turns away immigrants with children, and those children suffer because we won't share our resources, and we want to continue to live in our current lifestyle, we do exactly what the characters in this story do, we just don't have to see it. [ranked 3rd by mean, 2nd by median, 1st by 8 students, last by 7 students]
  
• Orson Scott Card, "Skipping Stones" (1979). From the moment I knew I was teaching this class, I knew wanted to track this story down and read it, which I read in Card's collection The Worthing Saga. It's about a world where people can use a drug called somec to enter suspended animation; the rich get more than the poor, and it's about a rich boy and poor boy who start out friends but grow apart as one ages years while the other ages decades. Not a very complicated story, to be honest, but a good example of how social class dynamics will impact these kind of technologies. (A student pointed out that as technologies of immortality go, it was "stupid": you don't actually live longer. But as long as people have inequal access to the technology, there is a benefit. The inequality is the point.) [ranked 7th by mean, 5th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 3 students]
  
• Joe Haldeman, "Four Short Novels" (2000). A weird story, but I knew I wanted to end on it: it's four sketches of "novels" about living forever, each with a different conceit: "Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money" or "...unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them" or "...unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it," and so on. They are funny and have some neat ideas in them... but not really about immortality at all. It was important for me to end with a story that demonstrated China Miéville's claim that sf isn't actually about science or the future. But more on that next time! [ranked 9th by mean, 10th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 6 students]
  

[Incidentally, "Pop Squad" had the highest standard deviation, and "Traces of Us" the lowest.]

Overall, I was really happy about the collection of stories we read. They were largely high quality tales, and not a single one of them was a dud in the classroom; I was able to get something interesting out of everyone of them. I do wish there were more stories that were more optimistic about these technologies, but I was limited by what sf authors are actually writing! (Later I should do a post on stories I rejected.)

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7
edited by Neil Clarke

I have come to look forward to Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes, the only (I think) best-of anthology going to cover all of the sf genre and nothing but the sf genre. I like getting a sense of the best of the genre has to offer, especially from the not free-to-read magazines, which often get a lot less attention online, and the original anthologies, which rarely cross my radar. I pepper the stories from them in among my other reading; this year that meant it took me about six months to get through the thirty-one stories collected in this volume. If I had a complaint, it would simply be that the pandemic has put the series behind and it still hasn't caught up: volume 7 came out in 2023 but collects stories originally published in 2021.

Collection published: 2023
Contents published: 2021
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023–March 2024

As always, there's a lot to like here even when every story isn't exactly to my taste, and I appreciate the anthology introducing me to writers I haven't (as far as I remember, anyway) previously experienced. My favorite in this volume was the very first story, "Muallim" by Ray Nayler, which I previously wrote up here, a neat story about the uses to which a remote Asian village puts a UN educational robot that the its benefactors didn't quite intend. But that doesn't mean it was all downhill from there or anything. Other highlights included:

• "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte. This was a 2022 Hugo finalist, so I had read it before, but it's a neat story about digital consciousness uploading and what some of the implications of that might be.
• "The Pizza Boy" by Meg Elison. A neat tale about a pizza delivery boy... in space! Where he works is a war zone, and the lengths he has to go to to gather ingredients are often illegal. Fun but serious at the same time, which is how I like my fiction.
• "I'm Waiting for You" by Kim Bo-young. Complicated story about a man taking a relativistic flight so that he can line up with one being taken by his fiancée, so they will keep their ages consistent at their wedding, only then his flight is delayed, so she has to adjust, so then he has to adjust, and it all gets quite convoluted and sad.
• "Hānai" by Gregory Norman Bossert. Aliens come to Hawaii to track down a woman who allegedly committed an enormous anthropological crime. Well observed character work and strong prose, neat exploration of a variety of cultural differences.
• "The Equations of the Dead" by An Owomoyela. A kid in a criminal organization is supposed to eliminate someone he's fallen in love with... and then ends up getting in way over his head, in a story involving mind uploads.
• "Complete Exhaustion of the Organism" by Rich Larson. I didn't totally know what was happening here but I very much enjoyed it anyway. Two people are on some kind of walk, trying to get away from some kind of weird society, but are followed by a child who comes back no matter how often they abandon it.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer. Like "Proof by Induction," this was a reread, but I find Palmer's Bot 9 stories incredibly charming and well written, so I was happy to reread it. A little robot is the only hope of a massive spaceship that finds itself out of control, its human crew incapacitated, in what is possible hostile territory.

Those are just a few that stick out to on skimming back over the table of contents, but there are a number of other worthwhile stories here. There were only a couple that I did not enjoy; there were several stories included from an anthology called Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, and these I found missed more than they hit, the kind of near-future futurism that dates too quickly because it's too timely; only three years later, I didn't feel like the authors had called it correctly. One of them was my least favorite story in the book, Ken Liu's "Jaunt," which was less a story and more like worldbuilding and background for a story. (It's a bit hermit crabby, actually.) But I have previously established on this blog that Ken Liu works for me much less often than he seems to work for other people.

Some of this content you can get online, of course (I have linked to them above when so), but the benefit of the volume is to get all of it in one place. Hopefully this series catches up soon!

Five More Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

I liked writing this up last time, even if as far as I know it's yet another post that no one read, so here's another list of five very good short stories I've read recently (in no particular order), so you don't have to read about them buried in some anthology review or something. Go and read some excellent short fiction!

"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky

There was something about the way Rose loved him that he didn’t yet understand. Earlier that morning, he had plucked a bloom from his apricot tea rose and whispered to its petals that they were beautiful. They were his, and he loved them. Every day he held Rose, and understood that she was beautiful, and that he loved her. But she was not his. She was her own. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a love like that, a love that did not want to hold its object in its hands and keep and contain it.

This is a 2009 short story originally published on Tor.com. I read it in the anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. It was a finalist for Best Novelette at the 2010 Hugo Awards, but came in third to two stories I haven't read; it beat out a Paul Cornell story that I have read, and in that, at least, I agree with the voters.

The story is about the disintegration of a marriage, but the marriage is between a human woman and her robot husband and they have a human daughter. We simultaneously follow the woman and daughter after the break-up, the husband as he sets out on his own, and (in a series of flashbacks) how everything got to this point to begin with. It's beautifully told, well observed, and genuinely moving, with some haunting images. Yes, it's about a woman in love with a robot, but it uses that as a jumping-off point for a powerful meditation on kinds of love, especially what it means to own something you love—in many different ways.

"A Better Way of Saying" by Sarah Pinsker

The title after the mugging included an editor’s note: “Aphasia is a mental condition, vouched for by all our best novelists and dramatists.” Why was that necessary? It followed “For five years after this unfortunate occurrence, Florian’s life was a blank to him,” but it pulled the viewer from the narrative, in my opinion, by reminding them of the writers in the very moment they should have been losing themselves in the story. The acting was fine, the film well enough made, but I could barely stand to utter the words.

This is another Tor.com story, one I encountered in Pinsker's collection Lost Places; it was originally published in 2021.

It's a first-person tale set in the early twentieth century; the narrator is a boy hired by the owner of a movie theatre to read the intertitles of silent films aloud, for the benefit of the recent immigrants in the audience whose ability to read English isn't so great yet. Only he begins to decide that he could write those titles better himself. This is paralleled with his later participation in a real incident, where the actor Douglas Fairbanks on a press tour demonstrated his skill with a bow and arrow. It's a story with a small but powerfully effective fantasy element, and it's difficult to say much more about it without giving it all away. As usual for Pinsker, it's beautifully told, and it demonstrates why she continues to be the best writer of short sf&f of our times.

"Finisterra" by David Moles

Bianca had not thought hardly at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasping on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratanes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.
     There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died.

This was originally published in F&SF in 2007; like the Swirsky above, I encountered it in Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden's Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Here, I've linked to an on-line reprint of it in Clarkesworld.

It's about an engineer who's from Earth, but an Earth devastated by the economic impact of interstellar civilization; for her in particular, her options as a woman are limited with increasing conservative Muslim influence on society. She travels to a gas giant called Sky that has an oxygen atmosphere and giant flying animals, so large that communities have sprung up on their backs. It's evocatively written and sharply characterized, and it depicts a really interesting civilization that it explores in rich ways, connecting what's going on on Sky (a rich man is seeking to poach one of the giant beasts) to broader thematic concerns in the story. I had never heard of Moles before, but the story left me wanting to read more by him.

"The Education of Junior Number 12" by Madeleine Ashby

“Of course it’s funny. It’s hysterical. You’re railing at me for teaching my kid how to recognize the smutvids that won’t fry his brain, and all the while you’ve been riding a three-year-old.”
     “Oh, for—”
     “And very eagerly, I might add.”

Again, I encountered this in C21 SF. It was published on Ashby's publisher's web site in 2011, and it remains there, but somewhere along the line, a web site reformatting means that the current version of the story is missing all its paragraph breaks, so I'm linking to a Wayback Machine version of it.

This is sort of the dark mirror of "Eros, Philia, Agape" above—not that "Eros, Philia, Agape" wasn't itself pretty dark! A tie-in to a novel by Ashby called vN, it's about a self-replicating android (a von Neumann machine, or "vN") who derives its pleasure from pleasing humans at all costs, but also is forced to periodically reproduce; it trains its "Juniors" before releasing them into the world. The world of this story is a harsh one: the main character, Javier, does his best for his Juniors, but is limited by the need he has to please humans. It overrides every other desire he has. But, as the story points out in many ways, humans have desires to that aren't exactly ethical or rational, or vNs wouldn't be the way they are in the first place. It really works in its depiction of human selfishness. Is a vN so bad? They are callous to please others but humans are callous to please themselves. Cool technology, neat extrapolation of how it might be used and abused in society.

"The Algorithms for Love" by Ken Liu

“People have always associated the mind with the technological fad of the moment. When they believed in witches and spirits, they thought there was a little man in the brain. When they had mechanical looms and player pianos, they thought the brain was an engine. When they had telegraphs and telephones, they thought the brain was a wire network. Now you think the brain is just a computer. Snap out of it. That is the illusion.”
     Trouble was, I knew he was going to say that.

You might be noticing a pattern here: this story was also one I found in C21 SF. It was originally published in Strange Horizons back in 2004. Unlike most people, I find Ken Liu hit or miss, but this one I enjoyed a lot.

A lot of Ken Liu stories, I would argue, use relationships as a crutch for creating emotional investment in a technological concept, but this one is actually about the emotional relationship and the way it will be affected by technology. It's about a programmer who works on creating extremely realistic dolls, and it alternates between her life story and what she's up to in the present; eventually her dolls begin passing the Turing test—and this has her unsettled at the implications. Dark and creepy, I really liked it both for what it said about our future technologies and for what it said about ourselves.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6
edited by Neil Clarke

I only jumped aboard with volume 4, but I've quickly become a devoted fan of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series. I think Clarke provides a good sampling of what the genre is up to, and his tastes broadly align with my own. Clarke edits Clarkesworld Magazine, and I find that I often particularly like stories that have been "double selected" by him: when a Clarkesworld story turns up in Best SF of the Year, it's almost always excellent. (Plus, there's no fantasy in it!)

Collection published: 2022
Contents published: 2020
Acquired: January 2022
Read: January 2022–January 2023

This collects the best fiction of 2020, but due to pandemic knock-on effects, ended up coming out in 2021. (Similarly, the 2021 volume will see release in 2023, but my understanding is they hope to catch up this year by doing two volumes.) Like volume 5, I read this slowly. I often find that if I read a number of stories from an anthology in quick succession, they blur together and don't leave much of an impression: I think I end up approaching the start of a new story like the start of a new chapter in a novel, and not slowing down to acclimate myself to the new narrative. So I rotated this volume's thirty-plus stories between my other reading, averaging two or three stories per month. I started it in January 2022, and I finished up the last story almost exactly a year later in January 2023!

I found this a strong volume on the whole, slightly stronger than I remember volume 5 being. Indeed, I've already written up four of its stories on this blog in a separate post, so much was I taken by them: Rebecca Campbell's "An Important Failure," Sameem Siddiqui's "AirBody," James Patrick Kelly's "Your Boyfriend Experience," and Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Exile's End." I in particular find myself thinking about "An Important Failure" a lot (a beautiful story about climate change) as well as "Exile's End" (a tragic story about cultural appropriation).

 

While those are definitely the four best stories in the volume (and you can click the link above if you want to know more about them), there were a number of other ones I really enjoyed: (I will link to ones freely available on the Internet)

• "The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi. A Neuralink-esque device records all thoughts in the brain (among other things). Some of these memories get packaged and sold; the main character is an old woman dying of cancer who keeps experiencing memories of death to try to come to terms with her own impending death. Good worldbuilding, a little saccharine, but enjoyable.
• "Invisible People" by Nancy Kress. I find that I don't always get on with Kress's writing (and she once complained about me on her blog!), but this I thought was a really interesting story, about parents who discover that their daughter was genetically modified, but in a really interesting way.
• "This World is Made for Monsters" by M. Rickert. I'd never encountered M. Rickert's writing before, I think, but after this I'd like to seek out more. This is a beautifully told story about a spaceship landing in a small town and the way its residents react. Soon there's an annual festival but no aliens, yet the traces of their presence linger on.
• "Salvage" by Andy Dudak. So much going on in this very well told story! Aliens discover that observing the universe harms the universe, so they imprison humans in their own minds, each one not even knowing this has happened, as they're all caught up in their own simulations continuing on from where reality left off. The protagonist (who was on a relativistic ship at the time this happened, and thus protected) "salvages" these people, uploading their consciousnesses into computers. But she has her own secrets, and is soon caught up in issues surrounding the salvage of a notorious dictator. Great stuff.
• "Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air" by Matthew Kressel. Interesting story about people trying to commune with powerful alien intelligences that may or may not be gods. Dark and disturbing.

Of course there are some that didn't work for me, but I could imagine working for others; beyond that, there are the rare ones that I don't get why they were picked at all. Thankfully there were just three of those in this volume... but two were by probably the two most famous authors in the book! "Uma" by Ken Liu, like a number of Ken Liu's stories, felt more like exposition about future technology than an actual story, and James S.A. Corey's "Elsewhere" just didn't have much going on it: neat tech idea, but the story didn't have the depth to make it work. "Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love" by Usman T. Malik had a neat idea again, but it was implemented in a way that made absolutely no sense to me and destroyed the storyworld's credibility.

On the whole, this is a strong volume, and shows that short sf is in good health. As always I would rate much of what I read here above the Hugo finalists for the relevant year (e.g., had "An Important Failure" been on the novelette ballot for 2021, I would have ranked it above everything except "Helicopter Story"). I look forward to volume 7, and to eventually going back and reading volume 1-3.

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.