The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
This is a book that I’ve heard quite a lot about and the author, so when I ran out of reading material, I decided to start it. As with most of my books lately, I’ve been doing audio books and this was no different.
The first impression I had after listening to the first half of the book is…the sheer asianess of all the stories. My problem with this is that when I’m listening to a short story collection, I typically compare them (doubly so for this) to my first experience with Asian Americans writing short stories, which is Ted Chiang’s Story of Your life (and others), and Exhalation. Its very hard to live up to that, ESPECIALLY when Ted Chiang’s book has never been about the asian experience.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but getting bombed by it in almost every story felt a bit much. This wasn’t like I’m reading My Father, the Panda Killer where the point of the book is talking about the asian dispora in America….this is science fiction, and getting stories of asianess just felt. off? =) its probably my innate racism speaking where I feel like sci-fi should be mostly race free, but that’s probably on me more than anything else. Anyway, suffice to say that you should be warned the book is heavily skewed with the asian POV in almost every story.
That said there are a few gems. the title story, Paper Menagerie is a really really good story, and the last story, the one where history ends because time travel (travel as in you can look, but upon the looking, the historical record is destroyed) has made history books irrelevant and also highly contentious is also a great story. The one about Zhang Fei in a midwest gold mining camp was…unexpectedly compelling as well.
There are other stories that are pretty fantastical, like the one about what intelligence/text would be like for all species (one of the few stories where asianness isn’t an innate topic), but I felt those are relatively weak compared to the highlights.
All in all, I think once I got past the fact that I have to look at the asian lens on sci-fi, I enjoyed some of the book, while thinking to myself the whole time “this isn’t as good as Ted Chiang’s stuff, but i’m not sure its coz i’m being shoved the asianness in my face, or just because its not a very good story” =).
So i think giving this a 3* is fair. I’m not into asian dispora in my sci fi, but that’s on me. Recommended to read the good stories, but whats good for me might not be good for you so maybe read the whole thing?