The success of Kim Fu’s stories is the element of the unexpected. The connection they find is easily severed. It is contained, and in the end, the protagonist realizes it’s the first and last time she will encounter the operator. The conflict resolves only between these two characters. The operator resists the protagonist’s desires, citing regulations. “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” features the protagonist discussing with the operator what she wishes to experience in the meta universe. The first story of the collection sets up this framework. The conflict in most of these stories often plays out between just two people. The characters are not saving the world, but trying to save themselves. Like these characters, our crises occur individually. This intimacy connects to us as readers at a time when the global tragedy has expanded the distance between our own connections.
There is the bride who doesn’t want to marry her fiancé, the narrator who wants to speed through her life’s experiences, the woman who wants a conversation with a virtual recreation of her mother. That is not to say there are not some traces of unexplained fantasy, such as a girl who sprouts wings from her ankles, but mostly, Fu’s monsters manifest from modernity.Ĭatastrophe looms on the horizon for all these characters, but the devastation remains personal. Technology, rather than magic, catalyzes these changes. The dangers are less ethereal and more present. The threats are less existential and more imminent. In the last century, we would have labeled these stories as magical realism, but the twenty-first century has moved beyond the fabulism of the twentieth. This latest book contains twelve stories drawing on speculative and fantastical elements. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity.įu is the author of two previous novels and a collection of poetry. In Kim Fu’s new collection of stories, Lesser Known Monsters Of The 21st Century, the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. Pandemics, climate change, volcanic eruptions-each sweeping horror seems worse than the last.
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