Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, with whom he is collaborating on a novel. Besides writing and translating speculative fiction, he also practices law and develops software for iOS and Android devices. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. The year 2011 was great for Ken Liu short fiction. In addition to the story reprinted here, Liu had a relative explosion of candidates for this volume: He also published the short stories “Tying Knots,” “Simulacrum,” “The Paper Menagerie,” “Staying Behind,” “The Countable,” and the novella “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.” And he has eight or ten new works publishing in 2012.
“Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer” was published in F&SF, which had a particularly good year for SF in 2011. This is a post-singularity family story, ostensibly about external reality, in which human feeling remains a factor.