“Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge ‘facts’ ‘everybody’ knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.”
― Ken Liu
“Translation is an act of recreation.”
― Ken Liu
“The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn’t conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that’s going to save the world, so there’s a different tone that comes out in the way speculative fiction is done. That’s refreshing to read.”
― Ken Liu
“In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that’s not?”
― Ken Liu
“My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia – Chinese historical romances. They’re kind of analogous to Western epics. They’re based on history, just like ‘the Iliad’ and ‘the Odyssey’ are based on history, but they’re romanticized, and a lot of fantasy elements have been added.”
― Ken Liu
“It’s true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It’s miraculous.”
― Ken Liu
“My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author’s voice really is.”
― Ken Liu
“What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there’s a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that’s just not the reality of it.”
― Ken Liu
“I think that what’s unique about sci-fi – at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers – is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they’re writing from.”
― Ken Liu
“Labels like ‘Chinese Science Fiction’ or ‘Western Science Fiction’ summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.”
― Ken Liu
“My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.”
― Ken Liu
“I’ve been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.”
― Ken Liu
“Trying to predict the future is a loser’s game.”
― Ken Liu
“The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.”
― Ken Liu
“The ‘silk’ in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.”
― Ken Liu
“The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.”
― Ken Liu
“Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.”
― Ken Liu
“There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.”
― Ken Liu
“I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.”
― Ken Liu
“I like the law. I like the part that’s about reasoning, about persuasion, about telling stories, about trying to build structures that fall within rules.”
― Ken Liu
“It’s kind of cool that I know of all this great science fiction being written in China, and most of it is not really well-known in the West.”
― Ken Liu
“In general, writers who talk to their colleagues and neighbors constantly about their own writing seem to me pretty insufferable. I try not to be that guy.”
― Ken Liu
“I’m very interested in foundational narratives.”
― Ken Liu
“There’s this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can’t even fight against because they’ve been there so long that they’ve become part of the Western imagination of China.”
― Ken Liu
“I was not trying to write some sort of serious meditation on war and peace. ‘The Grace of Kings’ is meant to be a fun book. It’s meant to be an epic fantasy.”
― Ken Liu
“I’m conscious of the fact that I’m sort of a bridging figure. I have my Chinese literary heritage and cultural background, so I’m comfortable with these things, but at the same time, I have to navigate the Anglo-American tradition, which has a self-centred view of what Asia and what being Chinese means.”
― Ken Liu
“It’s okay if you get rejected 20, 30 or 200 times… You don’t need everyone to like your story – you just need one person who really likes your story.”
― Ken Liu
“If I end up having a novel that sells really well and that allows me to pay for health insurance and mortgage without having to work at a day job, that would be great.”
― Ken Liu
“I think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It’s exclusionary. It essentially tries to argue that some Americans are more real than others.”
― Ken Liu
“I’m often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there’s no single way; every story is different.”
― Ken Liu
“Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.”
― Ken Liu
“The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the ‘messages’ in a novel are put there by the reader. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. That’s how literature functions.”
― Ken Liu
“We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.”
― Ken Liu
“The ‘Grace of Kings’ begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices – among them the oppressed position of women – but gradually transforms into something better through a series of revolutions. But since real social change takes a long time, even by the end of the book, only the seeds of deep change have been planted.”
― Ken Liu
“Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity.”
― Ken Liu
“The ‘Grace of Kings’ isn’t a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.”
― Ken Liu
“I am not an expert on Chinese science fiction. I probably know more than anyone else in the West, but that doesn’t actually mean I am an expert.”
― Ken Liu
“What is fascinating to me is the way I view everything in terms of parallels and connections. When I read about Achilles and Odysseus in Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ I can see parallels in Chinese historical romances, in the way the first emperor of the Han dynasty and his chief rival are portrayed.”
― Ken Liu
“When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.”
― Ken Liu
“Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn’t terribly helpful.”
― Ken Liu
“Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.”
― Ken Liu
“For ‘The Grace of Kings,’ I read Han Dynasty historical records in Classical Chinese, which allowed me to get a sense of the complexity of the politics and the ‘surprisingly modern’ reactions of the historical figures to recurrent problems of state administration.”
― Ken Liu
“It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.”
― Ken Liu
“The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.”
― Ken Liu
“I was a tax attorney for something like seven years, so I was a tax geek. I was really into it. Tax is one of those things that people think is incredibly boring, but like any science about systems, once you get into it it, becomes incredibly intricate and interesting.”
― Ken Liu
“Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.”
― Ken Liu
“People who are ambitious – politicians who crave power – think that they’re in control of it, but at some point, the movement that they started overtakes them, and they lose the ability to direct things anymore, and they become essentially riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to go along.”
― Ken Liu
“For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in general – over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.”
― Ken Liu
“I’m not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.”
― Ken Liu
“I don’t have a specific message for ‘The Grace of Kings’ and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy.”
― Ken Liu
“I think male authors who want to try to tackle these issues of representation of women can generally do a better job if they try to question traditional notions of masculinity and the sort of toxic nature of traditional ways of presenting masculinity.”
― Ken Liu
“Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines – they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality.”
― Ken Liu
“I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized – to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn’t so cloying and exotic and strange.”
― Ken Liu
“I don’t really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.”
― Ken Liu
“I certainly have been writing stories that are hard science fiction, that are very reminiscent of ‘Golden Age tales’ from the ’40s and ’50s. I’ve also written stories that are very high fantasy that are the direct opposite of that style.”
― Ken Liu
“I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.”
― Ken Liu
“The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers.”
― Ken Liu
“In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language.”
― Ken Liu
“The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.”
― Ken Liu
“As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.”
― Ken Liu
“I find most ‘rules’ about how to write a ‘good story’ confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don’t look like stories at all on the surface.”
― Ken Liu
“There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.”
― Ken Liu
“Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it’s fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.”
― Ken Liu
“It’s incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all.”
― Ken Liu
“Because my writing time has always been very limited, I try to be very choosy about which stories I work on. There are many ideas that would make interesting stories – too many – so it’s important to be ruthless and say no to most of them.”
― Ken Liu
“Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I’ve collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.”
― Ken Liu
“I don’t believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I’ve never done that.”
― Ken Liu
“There’s inherent cultural imbalance whenever you’re translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references – history, language, culture, all this stuff – but to be well-versed in Western references as well.”
― Ken Liu
“I think writing novels has taught me more about the value of patience and being organized. I’ve learned to use timelines and wikis to track decisions and make sure everything still fits together. It’s both easier and harder than writing short fiction.”
― Ken Liu
“’The Grace of Kings’ was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.”
― Ken Liu
“’The Grace of Kings’ draws on Western traditions as much as it does on Chinese traditions, though the bones of the story are drawn from the Chu-Han Contention period before the Han Dynasty.”
― Ken Liu
“My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career.”
― Ken Liu
“As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction – indeed, it’s a key part of a great deal of science fiction.”
― Ken Liu
“Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result.”
― Ken Liu
“The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.”
― Ken Liu
“I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can’t think of any deal that’s better for me, and I’m always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.”
― Ken Liu
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