The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories by Ken Liu review: 'precision and wit'

Ken Liu | Contributed

Ken Liu’s stories are not just about the future: they are the future. The term “speculative fiction” used to be widely used, and it is apposite for Liu in that his oeuvre spans science-fiction, fantasy and horror; and although he might be seen as a genre writer, his combination of popular forms with philosophical insight raises him to a different level. His work is comparable to “fabulist” postmodernists such as Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, although it might be argued he has slightly more heart. These are human stories, not parables about two blind men in a dark room playing chess to Bach partitas. Liu has previously published two collections of equally admirable stories – The Paper Menagerie and The Hidden Girl, and has just embarked on a new series of crime novels with a hacker heroine, Julia Z, beginning with All That We See Or Seem; but is also the author of the four volume epic fantasy, The Dandelion Dynasty. It seems heretical, but I think it is far more sophisticated that George RR Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice. It should be a multi-series HBO extravaganza, and there might even be a chance as in addition Liu is the translator of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem trilogy, recently filmed.

Like its predecessors, The Passing of the Dragon has traditional science fiction, quirky fantasy, proper horror and ingenious avant-garde fables. It deals with the absolutely current: uploaded consciousness, artificial intelligence, life extension, climate catastrophe, organic-machine hybridity, how we are reshaped by our online lives, and the ethics and problems of extra-solar colonisation. The Hidden Girl had one story about blockchain and cryptocurrency, “Byzantine Empathy” which made the topics comprehensible to me. 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. In it, an artist, Kay, goes on a fruitless search to find the remote home of a late poet, FRZ Chilton. While there she has a sort of out-of-body experience, where it is no longer midwinter but high summer, and a dragon flies overhead, in a place of “preposterous grass, the impossible flowers, the lush, inconceivable trees, already fading”. She herself does not know if is was “real or a vision” but is sure that magic is “too small a word for what she saw”. She paints what she remembers, and yet no-one can see the dragon in it. They come up with various theories, it is co-opted into an ecological protest movement, she is denounced, lauded, mocked. An article about it is “reshaped, clapped, hashtagged and memexed around the web” as it becomes the “icon for this latest outrage-hurricane to sweep through the attention economy”. What makes the painting human – non-machine reproducible – is its absence. In a brilliant final twist, Kay does the sensible thing: she becomes a critic – albeit she is deemed “insufficiently ironic”.

Dragons appear again in “A Whisper of Blue” - set in our world, but most energy comes from dragons. It is not an allegory for nuclear power or indeed windfarms, but a very smart analysis of how infrastructure determines politics, rather than vice versa. For me, the standout piece was “Idols”. Liu has written about AI and uploads before, especially in the novella split across three parts in the previous book, “The Gods Will Not Be Chained”, “The Gods Will Not Be Slain” and “The Gods Have Not Died In Vain”. Here it is different: the icons are reconstructions made from social media profiles, old videos, captured emails and suchlike. These fragments we have shored against our ruins. They were “developed as a way for celebrities to engage with their fans”. The narrator says “the idol is a consensual illusion. It isn’t some copy of my father.” – it’s important to note the narrator never knew his father - “It’s just algorithms encoding basic insights about human nature being applied to data, making probabilistic predictions about possible reactions”. And yet, at the end of the first section, he confesses “I can’t stop the damned tears”. The third section features vox-pops from participant in an art project when they interact with their own idol. It is by turns grimly comic and genuinely spooky. Someone who has never talked or posted or tweeted about their love of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal is terrified that the idol starts quoting him. Another worries that “maybe there is nothing to this ‘self’ we prize so much except this totality of collection of masks” and – “we think to be human is to be inhuman”: ChatGTP or Alexa or whatever are never anything but sinisterly polite.

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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, or rather Bakhtin’s The Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. Bakhtin argues that Fyodor’s greatness lay in holding opposing arguments or positions in suspension. That is exactly what Liu does: he is neither a Luddite nor a Utopian, a sceptic or a zealot. Whatever he writes next, I shall be first in the queue.

The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, by Ken Liu, Head of Zeus, £20

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