Ken Liu

Presents the author's selection of his best short stories, as well as a new piece, in a collection that includes "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary," "Mono No Aware" and "The Waves."

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

We can poke at the world and it will change, even if it’s a little bit

Nkechi A

I consider Betty's words. lt is the obsession of Americans fo speak, to express opinions on things that they are ignorant about. They believe in drawing attention to things that other people may prefer to keep quiet, to ignore and forget. But I can't dismiss the image Betty has put into my head: a boy stands in darkness and silence. He speaks; his words float up like a bubble. It explodes, and the world is a little brighter, and a little less stiflingly silent.  

Wow. What a cool way of visualising this, using them as graduate students. Also, looking at stars is looking into the past. 

Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light. For example, when you look at this star in the constellation Libra called Gliese 58I, you are really seeing it as it was just over two decades ago because it's about twenty light-years from us. And conversely, if someone around Gliese 58I had a powerful enough telescope pointed to around bere right now, they'd be able to see Evan and me walking around Harvard Yard, back when we were graduate students.

But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don't pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel farther out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.

One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this: As control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory's past? 

 If these debates have a clinical and evasive air to them, that is intentional. “Sovereignty," jurisdiction," and similar words have always been mere conveniences to allow people to evade responsibility or to sever inconvenient bonds. "Independence is declared, and suddenly the past is forgotten; a "revolution" occurs, and suddenly memories and blood debts are wiped clean; a treaty is signed, and suddenly the past is buried and gone. Real life does not work like that.

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