Starting in the preface, author Ken Liu discusses the importance of storytelling: “We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable” (vii). He sees writing as a brief connection of two minds that are very disparate.

This theme continues in several important stories, beginning with “The Bookmaking Habit of Select Species,” in which he discusses how every species passes down information: “Everyone makes books” (1). Likewise, in “The Waves,” humans evolve into different forms, yet in every form they return to the protagonist, Maggie, who tells stories from the beginning of time. She says, “We humans have always relied on stories to keep the fear of the unknown at bay” (220). In “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King,” a forbidden book tells a story that the Manchu conquerors do want known, and as a result Tian Haoli is tortured.

In “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Evan Wei says in a speech, “We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been taught not to trust an individual speaker” (434).