hidden girl and other stories by ken liu
i have held off on writing this review because it is a short story collection that i read half of. maybe my critiques are sufficiently met by the end of it or no longer justified. but, for the life of me, after months of putting it down, i can't pick it back up. not because i hated it, i didn't, his stories were overall compelling enough for me to feel so strongly about their themes, yet i can't help but dislike his choices.
hidden girl and other stories by ken liu is not advertised as horror. i have known ken liu from studying his previous stories in my asian american lit class, where we went over themes of racism and assimilation in his work the paper menagerie. i have watched the animation produced based on his work, pantheon, and found the first season compelling. liu has shifted into exploring genres of the technological, the anxieties of it, and the horrors brought by its possibilities.
his exploration is deeply rooted in the future and the past, of what could be and what could have been. his first story, about a child on an alien planet taught by refugees of earth, learns to value that history through a token that represented a man's life and struggles. it's a touching story, compassionate in its essence, and almost hopeful. it's a nice beginning. the rest of the stories are bleak.
i won't pour over every story. maybe there's a better way of going about reading anthologies than in left to right order. instead, i'll talk about what i noticed (spoilers). lots of people, usually the pov character, end up killing themselves, murdered, or in an even worse place than the beginning. i am not inherently against having these things happen to characters. though after a certain point, the pattern becomes a theme. and a theme, is purposeful, and just as open to critique.
most all the main characters are marginalized. mainly women. they are mothers, daughters, young adults. one is a man that is in what i would describe as a gay interspecies relationship (that turned out to be non-consensual). (yes). all are subject to a type of oppressive or colonialist regime. all have goals, of course, some are american spies sent to japan in hopes of uncovering important information for the war, some are attempting to spur greater change in the world, and some just want to figure out their life after crises.
they are murdered for their hope. they inadvertently kill themselves after finding out what the regime has done to them as they tried to fight against it. they are subject to technological horrors beyond their comprehension. they are witness to the indifference of the public and the might of the controlled media machine.
these are not inherently wrong conclusions, in the sense that they would be impossible to occur. there is clear historical and true stories that liu is pulling from. and they are explored to their logical extremes.
however, it paints a picture that revolutionary action is self-sacrificial. only a martyr will do what's right. only the victims will die and never see the justice they enact. it's a bleak perspective that feels condescending to those still currently fighting. i can't fully fault liu for it, considering the nigh-dystopic neo sci-fi world we're all now living in. where datacenters can freely poison black towns in the u.s. and genai can be deployed to fabricate the dead and csam.
the story that was one of my final straw's was byzantine empathy, where a woman, jianwen, codes a cryptocurrency called empathium. the codebase she creates allows users to vote and donate to chosen causes, so survivors of natural disasters, war, or other issues can receive aid directly.
she creates empathium after witnessing a vr recreation of a war refugee. her compulsion to help after tasting, seeing, and feeling these horrors up close spurs her into action. these vr recreations of tragedies are dispersed to everyone as a way to compel people to donate, as a mimicry to videos of bombings and natural disaster victims when dropped on twitter. the mc is rooted in the "emotional" side of human nature. her antagonist, sophia, a former classmate meant to reflect the "logical" side of things, is on the side of upholding the status quo and sees the mc's perspective as childish and unrealistic. they go back and forth, both showcasing the limitations of their perspectives in trying to change the world through empathy or rationality. eventually, the u.s. foreign policy department that sophia works for decides that empathium is too much of a threat, compelling sophia to try and find leverage in the cryptocurrency, and therefore the decisions that are being made by the public, on the basis that expertise is more important than opinion.
the downfall, in the end, is a vr recording of sophia being brutalized by rebels that used the money donated from empathium to purchase weapons. ironically, it sparks american outrage. almost instantly, the coin, and the project entirely, is dropped and everything returns to the status quo. the final lines talk of inevitable regional destabilization, war, and geopolitics. where two big enough countries can decide the fates of thousands of people with the aid of propaganda. it is never discussed how sophia's life, an american life, is more highly valued than all the lives of the rebels and refugees and the destabilization of their home.
in the aftermath, jianwen wonders if she has been too naive and hopeful in empathy's reach, as she is left pleading to convince sophia of her perspective-- who remains deaf and indignant-- and entirely feeling justified to her definition of rationality (that is still entirely and hypocritcally emotional). another reflection of the smugness that cynics or "realists" have when the cruelty of a regime is flexed once more.
it's... disgusting. infuriating, even. is it unrealistic? no, but this is a story. no matter the lead up. the reasoning. your ending has a meaning. and it wags fingers at people with compassion, in those hoping for change, and tells them it's unrealistic. the regime is too powerful, too complex, too steeped in many factors outside your reach. and yet they can be threated by one person and one big action. jianwen recognizes this and yet undermines it. the very nature of society was created out of compassion and social responsibility. people are social creatures. is logic important in the face of strong emotions? of course. but to believe so, so, strongly, that the majority of people with compassion, with empathy, will be easily misguided, used, or are ignorant to social conditions is irresponsible. it is as unrealistic as believing that people are inherently cruel and self-serving.
having hope is what gets things done. believing there is nothing to be done is the justification of inaction. in times like these, it is a cynical comfort at best and serves the regime at worst. i would know this, as someone that grew up cynical and hated the world for its constant and overbearing cruelty. being kinder has made me a better person, not because i believe no one can be cruel, but because a kinder world is only possible if i take that first step.
is there a lesson in all this rambling? is this no longer a review? i'm not sure. i found these stories more horrifying than some advertised horror, so that says something. and i didn't even touch on how distasteful it is making the colonizers in one story an alien species of abstract genders and sexualities. that's for a different time.
what is worse, dying for a cause or dying doing nothing at all?