Yoon Ha Lee: Conservation of Shadows

[bibliogramma]

Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee's collection of short stories, is a treat in every way. Lee's voice is a unique one, his rich and evocative prose telling stories synesthetic in their blending of the diverse languages and symbologies of words, music, mathematics and programming.

There is an otherworldliness to his stories, but not the kind of otherworldliness one is accustomed to find in stories of science fiction or fantasy. It is not just the story itself that is in another world, but the very means of perceiving the story. There is something in these tales that reminds me of Borges and Calvino (not just in the one story Lee acknowledges to be a homage to Invisible Cities), something steeped in the history and myth of this world but translated (in both the linguistic and the mathematic sense) into a new dimension.

Richard Lawson, in his review of the collection for Strange Horizons, says:

The stories in Yoon Ha Lee's debut collection, Conservation of Shadows, are fantasies steeped in history—disguised histories, made-up histories, invented histories, however you want to describe them—taking place in worlds strikingly imbued with a rich sense of the past. The present moments of these stories are so rife with narratives of the past that they provide a real sense of a setting as lived-in, fully realized. These aren't historical fantasies, but rather history fantasies: stories that engage with the idea of history by employing the fantastic, creating worlds with pasts as rich as that of our own so as to engage our innate conceptions of history, our often conflicted relationship with our own past. (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2013/07/conservation_of.shtml)

I'm not sure that it's possible to concisely describe what Lee has done in the crafting of these stories, but It is truly something extraordinary.