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" 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. "

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" 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

" I'm very interested in foundational narratives. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 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 think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It's exclusionary. It essentially tries to argue that some Americans are more real than others. "

" 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 really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

Ken Liu

Wife

Fantasy

" 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. "

Ken Liu

Acceptance

Technology

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "