The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Liu's habit of starting from a speculative concept and building the people around it afterward draws real pushback, with readers saying “most of Ken Liu's characters fell flat” next to premises that outshine them. The emotional delivery gets called heavy-handed more than once too: one reader flags that “the letter at the end went on too long,” and another calls a different story “an on-the-nose episode of Black Mirror.” Weaker entries get named specifically: Good Hunting and The Litigation Master and the Monkey King draw the least enthusiasm, and even The Waves strikes one reviewer as forgettable despite others ranking it a highlight. Read straight through rather than a story at a time, the collection starts repeating its themes, and a skeptical reader calls the prose “fairly bland.”