Fiction Quotes by Ken Liu

15 Fiction quotes by Ken Liu

Ken Liu’s 15 quotations weave together his love of myth, technology, and human frailty. Each line reveals how he balances lyrical prose with tight plotting, giving you a taste of his versatile storytelling toolkit.

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I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that…

Ken Liu

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My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an…

Ken Liu

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

Ken Liu

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As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are…

Ken Liu

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Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven…

Ken Liu

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For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over…

Ken Liu

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

Ken Liu

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I am not an expert on Chinese science fiction. I probably know more than anyone else in the West, but that doesn't…

Ken Liu

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Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic…

Ken Liu

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I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't…

Ken Liu

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I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author…

Ken Liu

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I certainly have been writing stories that are hard science fiction, that are very reminiscent of 'Golden Age tales' from the '40s…

Ken Liu

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What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer…

Ken Liu

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The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn't conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that's going…

Ken Liu

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It's kind of cool that I know of all this great science fiction being written in China, and most of it is…

Ken Liu

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More by Ken Liu

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

Ken Liu

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People who are ambitious - politicians who crave power - think that they're in control of it, but at some point, the movement that…

Ken Liu

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“My goal is to act as a faithful interpreter, preserving as much of the original's nuances of meaning as possible without embellishment or omission.…

Ken Liu

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“It’s hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way,” she told me once.”

Ken Liu

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The 'silk' in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.

Ken Liu

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“A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.”

Ken Liu

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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

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“Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.”

Ken Liu

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“I can only wish that someday you’ll also be pestered by a student as persistent to learn what you do not wish to teach.”

Ken Liu

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I think male authors who want to try to tackle these issues of representation of women can generally do a better job if they…

Ken Liu

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“Surveillance is surveillance. I can never understand why some people think it matters whether it's the government doing it to you or a company.”

Ken Liu

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Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines - they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical…

Ken Liu

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