Ken Liu’s stories are not just about the future: they are the future ... Liu is the kind of writer who can make such topics as viscerally thrilling as a Lee Child action sequence ... The title story is perhaps the outlier of the collection ... The final story, '50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know', ought to be on the curriculum, not just for its literary excellence but its precision and wit. The more I think about it, the more Liu reminds me oddly of Dostoyevsky ... Whatever he writes next, I shall be first in the queue.
Several of these stories are set in futures so distant that even the stars are no longer recognizable, though others are near enough to be right around the corner. There’s plenty here for both old fans and new readers; even though the majority of the stories were previously published, they will reward re-reading.
