Top 45 Ken Liu Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

I think that what’s unique about sci-fi – at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers – is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they’re writing from.

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.

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.

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

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.

Translation is an act of recreation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.