The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

by Ken Liu
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

by Ken Liu

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Overview

Featured in the Netflix series Love, Death&Robots

Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his multiple award-winning stories for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.

With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781481424370
Publisher: S&S/Saga Press
Publication date: 03/08/2016
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 119,191
Lexile: 950L (what's this?)
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Ken Liu is an award-winning American author of speculative fiction. His collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. Liu’s other works include The Grace of KingsThe Wall of StormsThe Veiled Throne, and a second collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work, including the short story “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in Netflix’s animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories. “The Hidden Girl,” “The Message,” and “The Oracle” have also been optioned for development. Liu previously worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the history of technology, and the value of storytelling. Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die.

Time devours all.

Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time.

Everyone makes books.

• • •

It is said by some that writing is just visible speech. But we know such views are parochial.

A musical people, the Allatians write by scratching their thin, hard proboscis across an impressionable surface, such as a metal tablet covered by a thin layer of wax or hardened clay. (Wealthy Allatians sometimes wear a nib made of precious metals on the tip of the nose.) The writer speaks his thoughts as he writes, causing the proboscis to vibrate up and down as it etches a groove in the surface.

To read a book inscribed this way, an Allatian places his nose into the groove and drags it through. The delicate proboscis vibrates in sympathy with the waveform of the groove, and a hollow chamber in the Allatian skull magnifies the sound. In this manner, the voice of the writer is re-created.

The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer’s tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller’s breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer’s voice, and are thus shunned.

In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies.

For the most influential works, hundreds, thousands of interpretations exist in circulation, and they, in turn, are interpreted and proliferate through new copies. The Allatian scholars spend much of their time debating the relative authority of competing versions and inferring, based on the multiplicity of imperfect copies, the imagined voice of their antecedent, an ideal book uncorrupted by readers.

• • •

The Quatzoli do not believe that thinking and writing are different things at all.

They are a race of mechanical beings. It is not known if they began as mechanical creations of another (older) species, if they are shells hosting the souls of a once-organic race, or if they evolved on their own from inert matter.

A Quatzoli’s body is made out of copper and shaped like an hourglass. Their planet, tracing out a complicated orbit between three stars, is subjected to immense tidal forces that churn and melt its metal core, radiating heat to the surface in the form of steamy geysers and lakes of lava. A Quatzoli ingests water into its bottom chamber a few times a day, where it slowly boils and turns into steam as the Quatzoli periodically dips itself into the bubbling lava lakes. The steam passes through a regulating valve—the narrow part of the hourglass—into the upper chamber, where it powers the various gears and levers that animate the mechanical creature.

At the end of the work cycle, the steam cools and condenses against the inner surface of the upper chamber. The droplets of water flow along grooves etched into the copper until they are collected into a steady stream, and this stream then passes through a porous stone rich in carbonate minerals before being disposed of outside the body.

This stone is the seat of the Quatzoli mind. The stone organ is filled with thousands, millions of intricate channels, forming a maze that divides the water into countless tiny, parallel flows that drip, trickle, wind around each other to represent simple values which, together, coalesce into streams of consciousness and emerge as currents of thought.

Over time, the pattern of water flowing through the stone changes. Older channels are worn down and disappear or become blocked and closed off—and so some memories are forgotten. New channels are created, connecting previously separated flows—an epiphany—and the departing water deposits new mineral growths at the far, youngest end of the stone, where the tentative, fragile miniature stalactites are the newest, freshest thoughts.

When a Quatzoli parent creates a child in the forge, its final act is to gift the child with a sliver of its own stone mind, a package of received wisdom and ready thoughts that allow the child to begin its life. As the child accumulates experiences, its stone brain grows around that core, becoming ever more intricate and elaborate, until it can, in turn, divide its mind for the use of its children.

And so the Quatzoli are themselves books. Each carries within its stone brain a written record of the accumulated wisdom of all its ancestors: the most durable thoughts that have survived millions of years of erosion. Each mind grows from a seed inherited through the millennia, and every thought leaves a mark that can be read and seen.

Some of the more violent races of the universe, such as the Hesperoe, once delighted in extracting and collecting the stone brains of the Quatzoli. Still displayed in their museums and libraries, the stones—often labeled simply “ancient books”—no longer mean much to most visitors.

Because they could separate thought from writing, the conquering races were able to leave a record that is free of blemishes and thoughts that would have made their descendants shudder.

But the stone brains remain in their glass cases, waiting for water to flow through the dry channels so that once again they can be read and live.

• • •

The Hesperoe once wrote with strings of symbols that represented sounds in their speech, but now no longer write at all.

They have always had a complicated relationship with writing, the Hesperoe. Their great philosophers distrusted writing. A book, they thought, was not a living mind yet pretended to be one. It gave sententious pronouncements, made moral judgments, described purported historical facts, or told exciting stories . . . yet it could not be interrogated like a real person, could not answer its critics or justify its accounts.

The Hesperoe wrote down their thoughts reluctantly, only when they could not trust the vagaries of memory. They far preferred to live with the transience of speech, oratory, debate.

At one time, the Hesperoe were a fierce and cruel people. As much as they delighted in debates, they loved even more the glories of war. Their philosophers justified their conquests and slaughter in the name of forward motion: War was the only way to animate the ideals embedded in the static text passed down through the ages, to ensure that they remained true, and to refine them for the future. An idea was worth keeping only if it led to victory.

When they finally discovered the secret of mind storage and mapping, the Hesperoe stopped writing altogether.

In the moments before the deaths of great kings, generals, philosophers, their minds are harvested from the failing bodies. The paths of every charged ion, every fleeting electron, every strange and charming quark, are captured and cast in crystalline matrices. These minds are frozen forever in that moment of separation from their owners.

At this point, the process of mapping begins. Carefully, meticulously, a team of master cartographers—assisted by numerous apprentices—trace out each of the countless minuscule tributaries, impressions, and hunches that commingle into the flow and ebb of thought, until they gather into the tidal forces, the ideas that made their originators so great.

Once the mapping is done, they begin the calculations to project the continuing trajectories of the traced-out paths so as to simulate the next thought. The charting of the courses taken by the great, frozen minds into the vast, dark terra incognita of the future consumes the efforts of the most brilliant scholars of the Hesperoe. They devote the best years of their lives to it, and when they die, their minds, in turn, are charted indefinitely into the future as well.

In this way, the great minds of the Hesperoe do not die. To converse with them, the Hesperoe only have to find the answers on the mind maps. Thus, they no longer have a need for books as they used to make them—which were merely dead symbols—for the wisdom of the past is always with them, still thinking, still guiding, still exploring.

And as more and more of their time and resources are devoted to the simulation of ancient minds, the Hesperoe have also grown less warlike, much to the relief of their neighbors. Perhaps it is true that some books do have a civilizing influence.

• • •

The Tull-Toks read books they did not write.

They are creatures of energy. Ethereal, flickering patterns of shifting field potentials, the Tull-Toks are strung out among the stars like ghostly ribbons. When the starships of the other species pass through, the ships barely feel a gentle tug.

The Tull-Toks claim that everything in the universe can be read. Each star is a living text, where the massive convection currents of superheated gas tell an epic drama, with the starspots serving as punctuation, the coronal loops extended figures of speech, and the flares emphatic passages that ring true in the deep silence of cold space. Each planet contains a poem, written out in the bleak, jagged, staccato rhythm of bare rocky cores or the lyrical, lingering, rich rhymes—both masculine and feminine—of swirling gas giants. And then there are the planets with life, constructed like intricate jeweled clockwork, containing a multitude of self-referential literary devices that echo and re-echo without end.

But it is the event horizon around a black hole where the Tull-Toks claim the greatest books are to be found. When a Tull-Tok is tired of browsing through the endless universal library, she drifts toward a black hole. As she accelerates toward the point of no return, the streaming gamma rays and X-rays unveil more and more of the ultimate mystery for which all the other books are but glosses. The book reveals itself to be ever more complex, more nuanced, and just as she is about to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the book she is reading, her companions, observing from a distance, realize with a start that time seems to have slowed down to a standstill for her, and she will have eternity to read it as she falls forever toward a center that she will never reach.

Finally, a book has triumphed over time.

Of course, no Tull-Tok has ever returned from such a journey, and many dismiss their discussion of reading black holes as pure myth. Indeed, many consider the Tull-Toks to be nothing more than illiterate frauds who rely on mysticism to disguise their ignorance.

Still, some continue to seek out the Tull-Toks as interpreters of the books of nature they claim to see all around us. The interpretations thus produced are numerous and conflicting, and lead to endless debates over the books’ content and—especially—authorship.

• • •

In contrast to the Tull-Toks, who read books at the grandest scale, the Caru’ee are readers and writers of the minuscule.

Small in stature, the Caru’ee each measure no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. In their travels, they seek from others only to acquire books that have lost all meaning and could no longer be read by the descendants of the authors.

Due to their unimpressive size, few races perceive the Caru’ee as threats, and they are able to obtain what they want with little trouble. For instance, at the Caru’ee’s request, the people of Earth gave them tablets and vases incised with Linear A, bundles of knotted strings called quipus, as well as an assortment of ancient magnetic disks and cubes that they no longer knew how to decipher. The Hesperoe, after they had ceased their wars of conquest, gave the Caru’ee some ancient stones that they believed to be books looted from the Quatzoli. And even the reclusive Untou, who write with fragrances and flavors, allowed them to have some old bland books whose scents were too faint to be read.

The Caru’ee make no effort at deciphering their acquisitions. They seek only to use the old books, now devoid of meaning, as a blank space upon which to construct their sophisticated, baroque cities.

The incised lines on the vases and tablets were turned into thoroughfares whose walls were packed with honeycombed rooms that elaborate on the pre-existing outlines with fractal beauty. The fibers in the knotted ropes were teased apart, re-woven, and re-tied at the microscopic level, until each original knot had been turned into a Byzantine complex of thousands of smaller knots, each a kiosk suitable for a Caru’ee merchant just starting out or a warren of rooms for a young Caru’ee family. The magnetic disks, on the other hand, were used as arenas of entertainment, where the young and adventurous careened across their surface during the day, delighting in the shifting push and pull of local magnetic potential. At night, the place was lit up by tiny lights that followed the flow of magnetic forces, and long-dead data illuminated the dance of thousands of young people searching for love, seeking to connect.

Yet it is not accurate to say that the Caru’ee do no interpretation at all. When members of the species that had given these artifacts to the Caru’ee come to visit, inevitably they feel a sense of familiarity with the Caru’ee’s new construction.

For example, when representatives from Earth were given a tour of the Great Market built in a quipu, they observed—via the use of a microscope—bustling activity, thriving trade, and an incessant murmur of numbers, accounts, values, currency. One of Earth’s representatives, a descendant of the people who had once knotted the string books, was astounded. Though he could not read them, he knew that the quipus had been made to keep track of accounts and numbers, to tally up taxes and ledgers.

Or take the example of the Quatzoli, who found the Caru’ee repurposing one of the lost Quatzoli stone brains as a research complex. The tiny chambers and channels, where ancient, watery thoughts once flowed, were now laboratories, libraries, teaching rooms, and lecture halls echoing with new ideas. The Quatzoli delegation had come to recover the mind of their ancestor, but left convinced that all was as it should be.

It is as if the Caru’ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed.

They read without knowing they are reading.

• • •

Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea. Tumbling, shifting, joining and breaking, they leave behind spiraling phosphorescent trails, each as unique as a signature, as they push and rise toward an unseen surface.

Everyone makes books.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species 1

State Change 10

The Perfect Match 26

Good Hunting 51

The Literomancer 74

Simulacrum 112

The Regular 123

The Paper Menagerie 178

An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition 193

The Waves 208

Mono No Aware 234

All the Flavors 255

A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel 344

The Litigation Master and the Monkey King 363

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary 389

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his multiple award-winning stories for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.

After his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, took the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist short fiction, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono no aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Awards finalist), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).

Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and most original voices.

Topics and Questions for Discussion

1. In the preface, on page vii, Liu writes “Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.” Is this true for two people speaking the same language or does it mean that no one is ever speaking the same language? Discuss how this idea relates to the collection as a whole.

2. In making this collection, Liu carefully selected these works from more than seventy pieces of his own short fiction. Why do you think Liu chose these stories in this order? The stories cover a variety of topics, genres, and themes and contain distinct structures and characters—is there one story, arc, or idea they come together to illuminate? Are there any works you would rearrange?

3. Discuss the significance of the Allatian method in “The Bookmaking Habit of Select Species.” Why do you think the rest of the story is structured as reference-like sections? Talk about storytelling as a universal constant throughout this piece and this collection as a whole.

4. Talk about how Liu handles historical events in “All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America,” “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” and “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.” How does he as the author, and you as the reader, distinguish fact from fiction?

5. Within the collection, we see people—and aliens—communicate through a variety of ways: scratches on a surface, oral histories, paper figures, life experiences, written words. Is there a time when something appears to be mistranslated? How well does each method work to communicate straightforward ideas and hidden meanings?

6. “The Paper Menagerie” made history as the first work of fiction to win a Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award—why do you think it has resonated across so many audiences? Why was this chosen to be the collection’s titular story?

7. In “Good Hunting” Liang and Yan adapt to a world that has completely changed their way of life. In “The Paper Menagerie,” Jack separates himself from his cultural identity in order to fit in. Though they share some themes, the stories are tonally disparate. Discuss why. What are the differences between Liang, Yan, and Jack’s modes of integration? Talk about the distinctions between adaptation, assimilation, and cultural abandonment.

8. When does convenience outweigh independence? “The Perfect Match” shows a future in which people allow their “smart” devices to make their decisions. Discuss your image of the future. How do you think technology will change the human mentality?

9. “Mono no aware” flips the trope of a future “monoculture” to show a character infused with Japanese ideals. Discuss the significance and meaning of the phrase “mono no aware” and how it influences Hiroto’s fate.

10. On a surface level, “The Regular” is one of the stories that is most dissimilar to others within the collection. Amid stories of storytelling and translation, memory and identity, how does the sci-fi noir fit into the collection?

11. “Wildflowers can bloom anywhere” is one of Mr. Kan’s messages to Lily. Talk about how his statement relates to the collection. Discuss the structure of Chinese characters as ideograms. Think about the moments Liu chose to use Chinese characters: Why those moments in the text? What does it add to that moment and to the larger narrative?

12. “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” shows a future in which history can only be experienced once by one person. What does that say about who history belongs to? History and heritage are themes throughout the collection, so what does it mean that the final story is about “ending history”?

13. Talk about the structure and style of “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.” Why did Liu decide to include editing notes and directions? How did it affect your experience as a reader?

14. The collection ends with “We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.” Discuss what you think Liu means. Why did he decide to end the collection with these words? What do you think this means to Liu?

15. The stories of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories cross genre lines. Within the collection are works of science fiction, alternate history, magical realism, fantasy, and noir. Discuss how these stories affect the boundary between science and history with fantasy and spirituality.

Page Break

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Rina’s soul in “State Change” manifests as ice. Before meeting, ask all members to write three random objects on slips of paper. Combine all of the papers and have each member draw from a hat. Each person’s random object is the physical representation of their soul. Discuss how your objectified soul would change your everyday life. How does this speak to privilege and the circumstances of birth?

2. Immigration is one of the most significant issues of the 21st century and a recurring theme in the collection. Discuss some current events as they relate to the immigrant experience shown within this novel.

3. Before meeting, think of some of your own cultural or familial traditions. Which of those have faded away and which have stayed constant? Why do you think some last longer than others?

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