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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Ken Liu

Rich

History

Facts

" The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions. "

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

" I'm very interested in foundational narratives. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For 'The Grace of Kings,' I read Han Dynasty historical records in Classical Chinese, which allowed me to get a sense of the complexity of the politics and the 'surprisingly modern' reactions of the historical figures to recurrent problems of state administration. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "