Conservation of Shadows

Yoon Ha Lee is rapidly becoming one of my favorite new talents. This short-story collection contains 16 of his favorite works, covering the usual themes: weapons and war criminals, betrayals and apocalypses, symbols and shadows, a high-tension mixture of math, calligraphy, and Eastern mysticism.

If you like what Lee is about, you probably like it a whole lot. It feels a lot like H.P. Lovecraft meets Alistair Reynolds, but Lee is by far a better writer than the two of them. If you don’t like it, you’ll probably find the stories bleak and abstract. And we’re all free to have different opinions, but if you can’t enjoy a story about a gun that erases the target’s ancestors from history, leaving the shooter in an alternate universe, then I don’t even know what.