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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn’t terribly helpful. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
