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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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" 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

Work

Great

End

" There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader. "

Ken Liu

Chinese

" It's incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all. "

" 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. "

" It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand. "

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

" 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. "

" I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career. "

" We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Ken Liu

Own

Colleagues

" 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. "

Ken Liu

Decisions

Patience

" 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 evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience. "

" There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages. "