Seattle author Kim Fu sees you and all your anxieties in this story collection

July 14, 2025 / 9:00 am

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" by Kim Fu in July 2025.

The KUOW Book Club is continuing its summer reading series with Seattle Public Library this month. We're reading Kim Fu's collection of short speculative fiction stories, "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century." Let's get into it.

he titular monsters of "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" are like if the seven deadly sins were more clever and less judgy. Stay with me.

In the first six stories, characters deal with: bureaucracy, budding adolescence, depression, parasocial relationships, insomnia, and, more of a classic, wrath.

Sure, in Fu's universe, budding adolescence is made all the more awkward by the appearance of wings on a girl's ankles and the wrath is undone by special body-printing machines that can resurrect your dead wife (who's totally cool with that fact that you killed her to get an afternoon to yourself, by the way). In this often beautiful, sometimes sinister universe, Fu invites the reader to think about the ways in which her characters are relatable even when they are doing the unthinkable.

Consider the husband in the aforementioned story about a world where body printers exist. In that world, the printer not only recreates someone's body, but it also uploads their recent consciousness into it. Like they weren't even dead, right? Except, what does it mean to have your consciousness transferred to another vessel, even an organic one that looks an awful lot like the body you were born into? Is that you? Our narrator contemplates:

The printer was only a difference of speed. If a machine faithfully re-created you at the cellular level, particle by particle, the enamel of your teeth and the lenses of your eyes and each remaining ovum and all your flaws and all the ways you disappoint yourself and the ones you love, was that you, or someone new? Where was Connie right now, bundled on a disposal truck or in our basement or in the ether of space? LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (TWENTY HOURS), PAGE 95

I should say, I'm not spoiling anything here. The beauty of short stories is in how quickly the author — if they're good — pulls you into the narrative, doling out important details in tight prose — again, if they're good.

Fu does that expertly from the jump in "Twenty Hours," alerting us to the murder and the solution in a swift, breezy sentence. And by the next paragraph, she's also given us the guilty vibe of someone who has done this before.

After I killed my wife, I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs. ... I had poisoned her, a great wallop of poison in her morning coffee. So I didn't have the defense of passion, a momentary loss of reason. Poison took forethought. Poison said: I wanted to be apart from you for a while. Then why not just leave the house? Why not go for a walk? No, it said more than that. Poison said: I wanted you not to exist for a while. I wanted to move through the world without you in it. LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (TWENTY HOURS), PAGE 83

Surely that resonates to some degree with anyone who has had a roommate, romantically or otherwise.

That's the thing about this collection — it's resonate even when it's fantastical.

In "Liddy, First to Fly," the teenage desire to sprout wings and fly away from mundanity takes physical form. The problem is, like so much at that time in life, even something angelic as wings comes in awkwardly. Liddy, who is friends with our wingless narrator, sprouts them from her ankles, making them difficult to operate and actually use.

Still, they're magical, something Liddy and the narrator and their friends hide from their mothers as they try to help Liddy take flight.

If it had been one adult, the magic could have lasted. One adult can be lured into pretend, can taste the tea in our toy cup, hear the voice on the toy phone. One adult could have seen what we saw and carried it quietly within her forever. But not four. Four adults have to agree on what happened, agree on the rules. Four adults can talk to each other until reality straightens, until doubt is crushed, until their memories unstitch and reform. Four adults never see a miracle at once. Liddy's wings would dissolve into the air or reabsorb into her skin without leaving a mark. LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (LIDDY, FIRST TO FLY), PAGE 31

I'm sure there's nothing about shared reality, or lack thereof, to read into there.

The only shared reality you need while reading "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" is Fu's anyway.

These stories are like adult fairytales, and not the kind that BookTok swoons over (no offense). Rather, they're fairytales that take life and make it shimmer, even if that shimmer is made by the tears welling up in your eyes. Fu's characters are grappling with loss and identity in a rapidly changing world, much like her readers are.

In this collection, technology is advancing faster than people are able to comprehend its purpose, and that leads the characters to push the boundaries of what is possible.

It's wonderfully imaginative, and we're only halfway through!

On to the next story. And I hope you'll join Fu and me as we discuss her work on July 30 at Seattle Central Library. Register for free here.

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Spoiler alert: Check out what we're reading for the rest of our live summer series with SPL at the link above. I'm happy to report I also have our September read locked in, too!

We'll be reading Seattle author Daniel Tam-Claiborne's debut novel, "Transplants." And Daniel is set to join me for an interview to conclude our reading.

"Transplants" follows two young women — one Chinese and one Chinese American — on a university campus in rural Qixian, where they're both met with hostility. Together, they learn what it means to be their truest selves in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belongs. It's an exploration of race, love, power, and freedom. That sounds pretty perfect right about now.

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Katie Campbell
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Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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