Update: AMC releases Pantheon, based on tales in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.
AMC has made Pantheon, an animated drama series for adults, based on the “Singularity” stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. Specifically, the stories are “The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” “The Gods Will Not Be Slain,” “The Gods Have Not Died In Vain,” “Staying Behind,” and “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer.” The interconnected stories take place in a single universe, and Craig Silverstein, an extraordinary storyteller, expanded on them to create the world of Pantheon, in which uploaded minds (“UIs”) bring an end to life as we know it and force us to examine what it means to be human.
You can see the show on AMC+ or HIDIVE starting September 1, 2022. Update: the show is available on Netflix for US subscribers starting November 22, 2024.
Back to the book—from the publisher:
From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories.
Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette.
In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.
Among other selections from my recent short fiction, this collection contains the series of interlinked short stories that forms the basis for AMC’s new series, Pantheon, as well as “Memories of My Mother,” which is the basis of the film-within-a-film of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s La Vérité (The Truth), and “The Hidden Girl,” which is being developed by FilmNation into a TV series.
There is also an audiobook version narrated by Ramón de Ocampo, Cindy Kay, Michael Kramer, Emily Woo Zeller and Nancy Wu.
Here’s an excerpt from my preface:
A good story cannot function like a legal brief, which attempts to persuade and lead the reader down a narrow path suspended above the abyss of unreason. Rather, it must be more like an empty house, an open garden, a deserted beach by the ocean. The reader moves in with their own burdensome baggage and long-cherished possessions, seeds of doubt and shears of understanding, maps of human nature and baskets of sustaining faith. The reader then inhabits the story, explores its nooks and crannies, rearranges the furniture to suit their taste, covers the walls with sketches of their inner life, and thereby makes the story their home.
Unlike The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, the selection here is much more guided by my own personal taste, including some of my newest work, a never-before-published novelette, as well as an excerpt from the next Dandelion Dynasty novel.
Praise for The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
Liu’s fantasies may be more freewheeling than his SF, but The Hidden Girl and Other Stories leaves us wanting a lot more of both.
– Gary K. Wolfe, Locus.
Woah man, that’s deep. Yes, let the marble that is your (non-uploaded) brain roll around in that cosmic Klein bottle as you make your way through the book.
– Sarah Fallon writing for Wired.
As progress continues to march forward, the posthumans of The Hidden Girl and Other Stories come to doubt their long-held assumptions about humanity concerning itself and nature and the role played between embodiment and parenthood. … [L]ike Hayles, Liu’s stories create an expansive universe teeming with human minds, where the only question that remains is what “are we to make of the posthuman[s]” we have already become?
– Ben Berman Ghan writing for Strange Horizons
Full table of contents
- Preface
- Ghost Days
- Maxwell’s Demon
- The Reborn
- Thoughts and Prayers
- Byzantine Empathy
- The Gods Will Not Be Chained
- Staying Behind
- Real Artists
- The Gods Will Not Be Slain
- Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer
- The Gods Have Not Died in Vain
- Memories of My Mother
- Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts
- Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard
- A Chase Beyond the Storms, an excerpt from The Veiled Throne, Book 3 of the Dandelion Dynasty
- The Hidden Girl
- Seven Birthdays
- The Message
- Cutting
Interviews and Reviews
- “Ghost Stories for the Apocalypse”: Bennett McIntosh interviews me for Harvard Magazine.
- “Modern Mythmaking in Ken Liu’s ‘The Hidden Girl and Other Stories'”: Katherine Ouellette interviews me for WBUR’s The ARTery.
- “Parenting After the Singularity in Ken Liu’s The Hidden Girl“: Sarah Fallon reviews my book for Wired.
- Paul Di Filippo reviews the book for Locus.
- “Memory and Humanity in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu”: Martin Cahill reviews the book for Tor.com.
- Gary K. Wolfe’s review for Locus.