Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022) by Kim Fu

Book Review

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022)

by Kim Fu

  Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is another good example of the permeability of the membrane between science fiction and literary fiction.  While the description of each short story in this collection sounds like an average science fiction short-story: Bride meets sea-monster, woman moves into house invested with swarms of bugs, insomniac falls in love with a literal Sandman; the actual stories themselves seem closer to the territory of literary fiction, with the protagonists dwelling obsessively over their personal unhappiness or regrets over past relationships as common themes.  In other, words, basically, the same territory as non-science fiction short stories written by other authors in North America. 

  Fu is pronoun agnostic, but her website identifies her as agender, and her first book was about the experience of a transgender youth.  If gender was a subtext in any of these stories I missed it, in fact, I was a little dissapointed with the conventionality of the human relationships that Fu depicts in this book.