Bouncing up and down this timeline across many stories in the collection, Liu explores with painstaking clarity, the reality of giving up one’s body, leaving a world behind, the mystery and thrill of a digital frontier and mindscape, and the heartache of leaving your known world behind ... This collection has something for everyone: science fiction, some fantasy, flashes of historical fiction, interlinking stories, a novel excerpt, and more. Liu truly is a writer with no limits, whose ability to craft a story that folds interesting characters with high-minded concepts with effortless worldbuilding, while commenting on the modern world around us at the same time is nothing short of magical. Like I said, there’s a reason he’d be on a list of authors that are masters of the form. Whether it’s one thousand words or ten thousand words, Ken Liu is a master at crafting short stories that pack a punch, and linger in your mind long after they’re over ... four hundred pages of effortlessly beautiful, haunting fiction, that will have you coming back for more.
There’s a stunning 250-page collection hidden within this 400-page book ... The title story belongs in a different collection altogether ... 'Dispatches From The Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours In The Sea Of Massachusetts,' a travelogue set in a future ravaged by climate change, at times resembles a Wikipedia summary more than a work of fiction ... Like a lot of genre fiction, most of Liu’s stories are puzzle boxes; you don’t get the full picture until the final page ... makes many of these stories emotionally poignant and powerful, but when read one after another after another, all of the dead children and traumatic flashbacks become exhausting. One starts to lose interest in opening more boxes.
In no sense do any of the stories here feel like leftovers from [Liu's] first collection, although a couple seem a bit fragmentary ... What most of the stories reveal, however, is what Liu seems to be thinking about the past few years ... the notion of the digital singularity ... what emerges as an abiding concern of his humanist side is even more interesting: the problems, pitfalls, and rewards of child-parent relationships ... Those same relationships often reveal a third theme: balancing dual identities ... Liu can write with the best of them ... Liu’s fantasies may be more freewheeling than his SF, but The Hidden Girl and Other Stories leaves us wanting a lot more of both.
... isn't even really a book of discreet short stories so much as a series of tightly interlinked, self-referential chapters of a distributed novel, broken up by diversions, digressions, thought experiments and a couple pieces that read like intellectual exercises in imaginary brand PR ... These linked stories are broken up by unattached tales that fall like partial non-sequiturs in Liu's larger conversation about family, memory and immortality ... There are beautiful moments in these stand-alone tales, to be sure ... as fun as such dissembling can be for those more interested in the way a writer's brain works than settling down with a good yarn, The Hidden Girl just doesn't hang together as a complete collection. It meanders and repeats itself. It can't commit to a single tone, but can't arrange disparate ones into a sensible flow. There are too many places where process overshadows character, or where Liu presents an argument clothed in threadbare narrative rather than a story that proceeds along the natural path of an argument. Like the rogue intelligences that skulk in its pages, The Hidden Girl is smart, sure. How could it not be?...But something about it feels not altogether human.
Neither new readers nor fans of Liu’s previous work will be disappointed, although those interested in his fantasy writing may want to start elsewhere.
Liu deftly and compassionately draws connections between a genetically altered girl struggling to reconcile her human and alien sides and 20th-century Chinese young men who admire aspects of Western culture even as they confront its xenophobia ... Much of the collection is taken up by a series of overlapping and somewhat repetitive stories about the singularity ... However, one of those stories exhibits undoubted poignance ... There is also some charm in the title tale ... A mixed bag of stories: some tired but several capable of poetically piercing the heart.
... [an] inconsistent second collection. Though Liu’s dexterous prose is on display throughout, static story structures and sketchy characters plague these 19 idea-driven tales. At their best, these stories inject high-minded scientific concepts with deeper themes ... The worst offenders...read as infomercials for fictional technologies. Readers will also be disappointed in how the female protagonists frequently descend into cliché. Though some readers will struggle to find a way in to these emotionally flat stories, Liu’s strong sentences and intelligent what-ifs will appeal to fans of Asimov-ian science fiction.
