Ken Liu Quotes
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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.
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Translation is an act of recreation.
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I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.
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I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result.
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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.
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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.
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'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.
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'The Grace of Kings' was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.
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The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.
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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.
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I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.
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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.
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I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
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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.