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" Translation is an act of recreation. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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'm conscious of the fact that I'm sort of a bridging figure. I have my Chinese literary heritage and cultural background, so I'm comfortable with these things, but at the same time, I have to navigate the Anglo-American tradition, which has a self-centred view of what Asia and what being Chinese means. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different. "