“All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu, the Chinese God of War, in America” by Ken Liu is a mesmerizing blend of historical fiction and fantasy, exploring the intersection of Chinese mythology and 19th-century American frontier life. Set in Idaho City during the tumultuous times of post-Civil War America, the story follows Logan (Lao Guan), a Chinese immigrant who embodies the legendary Chinese God of War (Guan Yu), as he navigates life in a hostile new land.
I have no simulacra of her from back then. The prototype machines were very bulky, and the subject had to sit still for hours. That wasn’t going to happen with a baby.
This is the first simulacrum I do have of her. She’s about seven.
More than seven thousand processors were wired together into a computing grid in the basement of the Semaphore campus. This was where Big Semi — the “semi” was short for either “semiotics” or “semantics,” no one knew for sure any more — lived. Big Semi was The Algorithm, Semaphore’s real secret.
… Cthulhu and I did indeed have a “dream-conversation,” as Otto would say. It’s not so much conversing in words as showing each other pictures—a skill I’m very good at, as the Pancake Factory is a big believer in not using words where pictures will do, considering we have visitors from across the globe. They don’t call us “imagineers” for nothing.
Long ago, when you were just a baby, we went to the Moon.
The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it. The acceleration pins all of us against the decks, gives everything weight.
I understand the aesthetics of its design, the efficient, functional skeleton softened by touches of cuteness and whimsy. Peggy and I once saw a show about caretaker robots for the elderly in Japan, and the show explained how the robots’ kawaii features were intended to entice old people into becoming emotionally invested in and attached to the lifeless algorithm-driven machines.
“Rebecca went on shaping the mud. She was not a great sculptor, but since God gave her dispensation to be “rough” and liberal in her interpretation, she finished quickly.
“What do You think?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s very modern,” God said, diplomatically.
The letters on the page wriggled like the worms her husband strung on hooks the one time he took her fishing. Every time she tried to focus on a letter, it stretched, twisted, and rolled into a meaningless black squiggle.
Rina imagined her ice cube in the dark, cold cocoon of the freezer. Stay calm, she thought. Block it out. This is your life. This bit of almost-death.
We die to make place for our children, and through our children a piece of us lives on, the only form of immortality that is real.
The ships gave off a dark metallic blue sheen in the sun. They dwarfed the 747s beside them. There were three ships, all identical, with no external protrusions or indentations to mar the smooth cigar shape.
Tendrils of red mist rose from within the box and curled around her, pushing at her nostrils. She took a deep breath.
The spirits like to play jokes on us. I have seen more in my lifetime than any Nan in recorded history, and yet I am also the most shortsighted, practically blind.
A werk is a work of art. It is a chimera made from the genetic material of two zygotes, a mixture of tissues from two species. It is a creature sprung from the mind and curiosity of Man.
So this was the secret of shimmer silk. Not silkworms, but spiders.
“I want this,” I said.
He glanced at the display on the dock. “I see there’s a bit of Woolf, a bit of Joyce, and a lot of this new author from Taipei, Annie W. She’s popular. Very malleable prose, I understand, adaptable to lots of books.”
Ever since Tian was a little boy, he had been obsessed with the exploits of the Monkey King, the trickster demon who had seventy-two transformations and defeated hundreds of monsters, who had shaken the throne of the Jade Emperor with a troop of monkeys.
The “Monkey Shakespeare” project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and the science departments. But after a short clip of the monkeys pooping into the typewriter was circulated online, everyone began to distance themselves from it.
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