Ken Liu Quotes
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Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm very interested in foundational narratives.
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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.
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Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.
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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.
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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.
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Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.