JEWEL BOX

Twenty-two speculative stories that range from futuristic SF to fairytale remakes.

Each tale in Yu’s stellar collection could be boiled down to a startling “what if” premise: What if a magician arrived into a wintry village selling eyeballs made of ice (“Ilse, Who Saw Clearly”)? What if a witch was a little too helpful in joining a knight on his quest to slay dragons (“The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight”)? What if there were a unicorn in Central Park (“Braid of Days and Wake of Nights”)? But even the most imaginative premises would fail to come to life without complexity, style, and heart—and Yu has all three. In the charming opener, the angel Gabriel offers to help a Cairo man complete the hajj, but winds up in Miami instead (“The Pilgrim and the Angel”). Very often, the stories wield sharp social critique in ways that update, or invert, traditional fables or fairy tales. In “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”—an “Ant and the Grasshopper”-esque story nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards—wasps who make accurate maps on the insides of their paper nests colonize—politically—the bees in a Chinese village. In “The Wretched and the Beautiful,” an alien craft descends onto a beach and the resulting crisis is an allegory for global refugeeism. Stories like this could be didactic and obvious, but Yu deftly evades predictability. Best of all, her sentences shine with unexpected images and turns of phrase—a “goat-slender” man looking in a mirror; spectacles for the soul that allow its wearer to walk “long in clarity and loneliness thereafter.” While a title like “Jewel Box,” especially without a titular story attached, could seem aspirational, Yu’s book lives up to it: Each story here is a gem.

A trove of fantastical treasures.