How novelist Ken Liu is bringing Chinese sci-fi to the Western world
With a translating career that started as a favour to a friend, Liu has become the unofficial link between China’s booming science-fiction scene and readers in the West
“Trying to predict the future is a loser’s game,” Ken Liu says from his office in Massachusetts, in the United States. Just how strange this sentence sounds depends largely on which Ken Liu is talking. If it is Ken Liu the corporate lawyer, just beginning his morning’s work, you wouldn’t give the declaration much thought. If, however, you’re quizzing Ken Liu, the 40-year-old rising star of the international science-fiction scene, then a statement disparaging prediction is more intriguing, to say the least.
To be fair, Liu is responding to my crude, if unavoidable, opening question: is something special happening in the universe of Chinese science fiction right now? Last year, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem became a global bestseller and the first translated work to win the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel (the Hugos are sci-fi’s Oscars). This year, Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing won the Hugo for best novelette, beating none other than Stephen King to the prize. And Ken Liu had a hand in the success of both works, bringing them to international attention.
Despite his protestations – “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” – Liu is an ideal person to respond.
Born in Lanzhou, Gansu province, but resident in the United States since he was 11, Liu began his writing career with short stories. His most famous work, The Paper Menagerie, won several awards, including a Hugo. Liu has since expanded his range, producing two novels – The Grace of Kings and The Wall of Storms – that mix fantasy, speculative fiction and a universe founded on Eastern and Western narrative traditions.
When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West
Liu’s preferred term for the hybrid is “silkpunk”. When asked for a definition, he says it is about rebellion, about “respectfully appropriating the past and disrespectfully challenging authority”. This has its political, technological and cultural dimensions, but also literary ones. Liu says his imagination was fired by foundational Western epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey.
