for reading

State Change” is a story about a young woman named Rina who lives in a world where everyone’s soul manifests in a physical object from the moment you are born, from Cicero’s stone to T.S. Eliot’s coffee can. Rina’s soul is an ice cube, required to be kept close to her and frozen everywhere she goes, which understandably puts a damper on her social life. Liu uses this concept as a clever allegory to speculate how one might live with such a limitation, treating Rina’s personal journey with empathy but also some light humor.

“The Perfect Match” was one of the better stories in this collection, imagining what a world would look like if, say, Apple and Amazon and Google all got together and decided to take over all our lives. The scary thing is that if this ever happened, we’d probably not even realize it. The story’s main character Sai shares every detail of his life with his phone so that the AI named Tilly can plan his day using his personal data to cater to his every needs, making suggestions that range from what he should have for dinner (she has a coupon!) to whom he should date. But what is a life without predictability and its surprises? As Sai grows closer to his paranoid and conspiracy theorist neighbor Jenny, he begins to question this himself.

The Literomancer” was probably even harder to read emotionally, because it is a sad story that ends with a punch in the gut. Lilly Dyer is a young American girl living with her expatriate parents in Taiwan in the early 1960s during the height of communist rule in China. Having not made many friends at school, Lilly immediately grows closer to a local boy named Teddy and his grandfather Mr. Kan who is literomancer, someone who reads fortunes based on written words. Mr. Kan tells Lilly stories, which she innocently repeats to her parents not understanding the unfortunate consequences that could lead to

The Regular” was my favorite story in this book, an easy 5 stars if I am rating it on its own. A perfect blend of sci-fi tech and crime noir, this is a compact tale starring Ruth, a private investigator on the trail of “The Watcher”, a serial killer who targets prostitutes—except what he’s after is not sex but something far stranger. It’s your standard murder mystery, but with its cybernetic sci-fi twist and fantastic protagonist, this one had me riveted from beginning to end, which isn’t something all mystery/thriller writers can achieve, even with full length novels.