Seven Birthdays 9
Message 13
Maxwell's Demon 45
The Reborn 85
The Hidden Girl 117
Ghost Days 163
Thoughts and Prayers 209
Byzantine Empathy 251
Real Artists 345
Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit. Special contribution: "48 Hours in the Massachusetts Sea."
Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of ​​Massachusetts -365
Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard -395
A Chase Beyond the Storms: An excerpt from The Veiled Throne, The Dandelion Dynasty, book three -463
Cutting 495

Using science fiction to examine the present and predict the near future

"Memorial and Prayer" begins with the story of a female student who was killed in a shooting and those around her.
A cyberattack that began with parents opening an online memorial to remember their deceased daughter ultimately left the family in even greater pain by manipulating the daughter's body into a virtual video and turning it into a meme.
Despite all the security evasion methods to prevent this, the ridicule continues, and eventually the family is torn apart, and the victims are only further hurt.
Ken Liu's novel is told in the form of interviews with each character, enhancing the sense of realism while also warning of how cyber-terrorism in virtual reality, such as through AI and deepfakes, can be exploited in the real world.
As Internet trolls and trolling have been receiving significant attention in Korea until recently, Ken Liu's short story "Memorial and Prayer" is a must-see in this collection.
Another short, "Byzantine Empathy," is set in a near future where immersive experience suits allow viewers to experience the plight of refugees during international conflicts.
The film depicts the dark side of a future society called the "commodification of pain" through two main characters: Sophia, the executive director of Refugees Without Borders, which operates through donations by stimulating sympathy, and Tangenwon, who is leading a new platform that uses blockchain technology to deliver donations more transparently without going through existing platforms such as various organizations.
"True Artist" depicts a surprising future where AI creates works based on consumer reactions rather than the pain and effort of the creator.
In a reality where creators of various cultural and artistic fields, including painting, music, and writing, are already experiencing a job crisis due to AI, this work is a prediction of how AI will develop and be utilized in the future through Ken Liu's imagination.

"Ken Liu's story cuts deep into my bones and reveals painful truths." -NPR

"Like Octavia Butler, Ken Liu exposes our ethical wounds by examining injustice and oppression with a gaze that is bound to be uncomfortable." - Seattle Times

Incorporating a strong sense of history into science fiction.

In addition to writing novels, Ken Liu is also well known as the translator who introduced Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem to the English-speaking world.
He is also the person responsible for re-editing the Cultural Revolution story, which was located in the middle of the work, to bring it to the forefront, making it a huge success in the West.
This was also applied to the filming of "The Three-Body Problem," as Ken Liu has shown a greater interest in history, especially Northeast Asian history, than anyone else.
All four of Ken Liu's short story collections available in Korea contain short stories based on history. In his first work, "Paper Menagerie," "Waves," which sheds new light on the February 28 Incident in Taiwan, and "People Who Put an End to History," which deals with the stories of victims of Japan's Unit 731 and the Japanese lobbying of American politicians, received significant attention.
In 『Somewhere in an Unimaginable Place, a Herd of Reindeer』, there are 『All Flavors in a Bowl』 about the Chinese during the American Gold Rush and 『Towards the Moon』 about Chinese immigrants, 『Gods Will Not Be Killed』 about the large-scale massacre of the Qing army in Yangzhou, China, 『Even if I Tie Grass, Even if I Bring a Ring』, 『North Star』 about the Imjin War, which was the Sino-Japanese War, focusing on the Ming Dynasty's Wanli Emperor and Li Rusong, and 『Ussuri Brown Bear』 about the story of Japanese soldiers who came to Manchuria.
This collection also includes "Maxwell's Demon," which deals with the discrimination and persecution faced by Japanese-American scientists during World War II and the brutal experiments of the Japanese military in Okinawa, and "Byzantine Empathy," which deals with the connections between international relief organizations and massacres in conflict zones around the world, demonstrating author Ken Liu's deep interest in history.
Among them, "People Who Put an End to History" suffered the ordeal of being excluded or partially deleted from the official publication of Ken Liu's short story collection in Japan and China, respectively, due to its subject matter of Japan's Unit 731 and its criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.