Ken Liu’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children.

Whether his characters are adjusting to life on a new planet or grappling with moral quandaries—like whether a consciousness uploaded to a server is still human—they struggle with the age-old task of forging identities that set them apart from the definitions and limits imposed by society, biology—or their parents.

“We all have the experience of not wanting to be labeled, of being put into categories that we naturally feel a sense of resistance to,” Liu says.

On the episode, he discusses several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020) and talks about the art of translation and the role Liu has played in introducing English-speaking readers to some of today’s great Chinese science fiction writers.

Liu was on New Books in Science Fiction in 2015 to discuss the first book in his epic fantasy trilogy The Dandelion Dynasty.

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape.

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