Posts Tagged: Ken Liu

Interview

The End Has Come: An Interview with Ken Liu

By Aidan Moher May 12th, 2015
Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

Buy The End Has Come, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey

In collaboration with editors John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, A Dribble of Ink is proud to introduce a series of interviews with the authors of The End Has Come, the final volume in the The Apocalypse Triptych. Following on The End is Nigh, and The End Is Here, The End Has Come contains 23 stories about life after the apocalypse.

Interview with Ken Liu about “The Gods Have Not Died In Vain”

(Interview by Georgina Kamsika)

I love the format of the story. Did the story come first, then the formatting, or did the format help shape the narrative at all?

I decided from the start that I’d write all three of the stories in the series as a mix of “chat” transcripts and traditional narrative, so the format was determined at the start. The way the story is told is of course part of the *story* itself, and the two are inextricably linked.

I understand that you love researching for your stories. Can you tell us about any research you might have undertaken for this one.

One of the persistent themes in my science fiction is dealing with the social and economic challenges of artificial intelligence. Even without fully self-aware AI, increased automation threatens the employment prospects of many workers, including those in the service industry and “white-collar” office jobs that are traditionally understood as being relatively free from such threats. For this story, I did more reading about the field, especially companies like Narrative Science that are trying to use automation to perform some tasks that are usually thought of as the domain of “knowledge workers.” Read More »

Review

The grace of kings has many forms

By Kate Elliott April 16th, 2015

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

Publisher: Saga Press - Pages: 640 - Buy: Book/eBook
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

[Editor’s Note: What follows is a critical essay in the traditional sense: an in-depth and spoiler-filled analysis of Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings—focused particularly on the women in the novel. It’s thoughtful, beautiful, and important—but if you’re sensitive to spoilers, you might enjoy reading it more after you’ve completed Liu’s epic novel. If you’re looking for an (almost) spoiler-free review to help you determine whether to buy it, let me suggest Justin Landon’s review on Tor.com.]

Many months ago Joe Monti, editor of Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s SFF imprint, sent me a copy out of the blue of Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings for a possible quote. More precisely, and using the proper polite etiquette, he contacted my editor at Orbit who forwarded his email to me.

I knew Ken’s name, of course. He’s a multiple award winner (Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy) for his short fiction. He has also done an important service to the sff field by translating short fiction and novels from Chinese into English, works that readers in the English-speaking market would not otherwise be able to enjoy. The Grace of Kings is Liu’s debut novel. Read More »

News

Cover Art and Details for The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

By Aidan Moher March 27th, 2015
Paper-Menagerie-his-rez

Saga Press revealed the gorgeous cover for Ken Liu’s upcoming short fiction collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, today. Liu, who’s best known for his award winning short fiction, is publishing his first novel this year, an epic fantasy called The Grace of Kings, which has been receiving some great praise from early readers.

The full Table of Contents:

  • Preface
  • The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
  • State Change
  • The Perfect Match
  • Good Hunting
  • The Literomancer
  • Simulacrum
  • The Regular
  • The Paper Menagerie
  • An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition
  • The Waves
  • Mono no aware
  • All the Flavors
  • A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
  • The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
  • The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

In an interview with Andrew Liptak of the Barnes & Noble Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog, Liu and Saga Press Editorial Director Joe Monti reflected on the collection’s award winning short fiction. “It’s great to be able to offer readers who are new to my fiction, or who have read only a few stories, a convenient selection of the best non-novel work I’ve done in a well-designed package,” Liu told Liptak. “[I] was surprised by how much I remembered of what I was thinking about at the time of writing them—memories that often are not obviously connected to the stories themselves, yet resonant in some way. It was like looking through an album of old snapshots of my mind.”

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories includes many familiar stories, including the title story, “The Paper Menagerie”, which won several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award – and “An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition,” a previously unpublished short story.

“This is not a ‘Best of Ken Liu,'” Monti told Liptak. “[It’s] more a representation of the themes and voices that his work has explored.” Liu’s back catalog of short fiction is impressive, all the more so when you consider that he has only been publishing regularly since 2010.

“I think it ranks up there with the greatest collections of the field, alongside Le Guin, Butler, and Sturgeon,” Monti said. “If you enjoy George Saunders, read Ken Liu.”

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories will be released by Saga Press on November 3, 2015. It is available now for preorder.

News

Ken Liu, award-winning short story writer, announces his first novel, The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion

By Aidan Moher November 26th, 2013

ken-liuKen Liu, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Paper Menagerie, announced yesterday the sale of his first novel, The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion, and its sequels. The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion is the first volume of The Dandelion Dynasty. A full synopsis of the series was provided on io9:

The Dandelion Dynasty follows Kuni Garu, a charming bandit, and Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke. At first, the two seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, they quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures. The scope of the series is epic, involving gods, massive armies, diverse cultures, multiple plotlines, numerous characters, politics, war, courtly intrigue, and love.

He describes the series as “a loose retelling of the historical legends surrounding the the founding and early years of the Han Dynasty.” Liu further explains the impact that these legends have had on Chinese culture and literature, likening them to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. They’ve “been an important part of the mythic imagination of people in the Sinosphere for millennia,” he says. The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion is Liu’s attempt at address an issue that he sees in contemporary narrative. He says:

Most of my stories are reactions against something I don’t like: a popular narrative leaves something out that I feel is crucial, a set of assumptions and myths being told and retold that I feel is damaging and limiting, or the kind of story I want to read isn’t being written. This series is no exception. I wanted to write a novel that told these stories that I loved to a readership that might be unfamiliar with them, but I didn’t want to write a straight historical novel or a “magic China” fantasy series — these approaches are fraught with the kind of appropriation issues that I find so problematic.

So I decided to do something different. I wanted to retell the stories in a new setting, with new cultures, new peoples, new technologies and magic that are not tied to their Chinese roots directly.

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