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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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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge 'facts' 'everybody' knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" '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. "

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

" Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique. "

" 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. "

" 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. "