Ken Liu Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.
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The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers.
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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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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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Translation is an act of recreation.
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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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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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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 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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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.
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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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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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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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'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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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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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 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.
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I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.