Jewel Box: Stories

John W. Campbell Award winner Yu’s (The River and the World Remade) writing is utterly descriptive, offering readers multiple worlds of imagining. The book starts with a thoughtful tale about family and duty and proceeds to hit multiple high points in a succession that is bountiful and beguiling. “Music from the Underworld” paints a tragic picture of love and digital enslavement in a future authoritarian state. “The Doing and Undoing of Jacob E. Mwangi” picks up on the theme of technology gone awry but with a positive twist. Several fantasy stories meld traditional themes with modern elements; the heartbreaking “Braid of Days and Wake of Nights” combines unicorns with the fight against cancer. A few stories take sci-fi themes and embellish them beautifully, such as “The Urashima Effect,” exploring time dilation and space travel and the “Eve of the Planet of Ys,” about global disaster and human resilience. The final story, “Small Monsters,” takes the cake for sheer inventiveness, allegory, and pluck.