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I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.
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
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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.
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 -
It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.
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 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 -
The 'silk' in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.
Ken Liu
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 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 -
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
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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 -
The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers.
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 -
The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.
Ken Liu -
We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.
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
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I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.
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 -
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 -
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