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" 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

Ideas

Interesting

Time

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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. "

" 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. "

" I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that. "

" When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West. "

" Trying to predict the future is a loser's game. "

" The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers. "

" 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

I Can

Way

" Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful. "

" 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. "

" Translation is an act of recreation. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Language

Way

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic. "

Ken Liu

Way

Past