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. Ken Liu Read Quote
Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
The ‘silk’ in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote