He Writes Science Fiction but Talks About Justice and Human Nature: A Candid Conversation With Author and Translator Ken Liu

The first thing you notice about Ken Liu is how candid he is. And candor is a virtue.

In August 2015, Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award — one of science fiction's highest honors — for The Three-Body Problem. But at the ceremony in Spokane, Washington, the man who walked up to collect the prize was not Liu Cixin. It was Ken Liu, the book's English translator.

The following year, Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing also won a Hugo. Its translator was, again, Ken Liu.

Those two events won Ken Liu a great deal of attention in China. Some people believe The Three-Body Problem and Folding Beijing owe their Hugos largely to the quality of his translations. One line that went around: "The gap between China and the world's top science fiction isn't a matter of a few more Liu Cixins — it comes down to a single Ken Liu."

In an interview with QDaily, Ken Liu said he disagreed completely. "There are a lot of people doing translation work, so overemphasizing my role in the awards is really emphasizing a coincidence, not actually seeing the root of the issue," he said.

Ken Liu is not only a translator. He is an accomplished science fiction writer in his own right. Well before Liu Cixin's Hugo, Ken Liu's 2012 short story The Paper Menagerie swept three of the biggest awards in international science fiction: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. In 2013, his short story Mono no Aware won him another Hugo. In 2016, his collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories won the Locus Award for best collection.

Ken Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou, Gansu, and moved to the United States with his family at 11; he is Chinese American. At Harvard he studied English literature and then law, with a minor in computer science. Before he wrote full time he held a string of jobs — software engineer at Microsoft, clerk for a federal judge, lawyer at a big Boston firm, consultant on intellectual-property litigation — and wrote fiction in his spare time, often on the commuter train. "Because there was never enough time," he only turned to writing full time this year.

Ken Liu writes as a Chinese immigrant. He calls his own writing "a form of entertainment," but anyone who has read his fiction will notice that he keeps returning to serious subjects: history, nation, ethnicity, justice, family.

His earlier story The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, for instance, tells of a Chinese American historian, Dr. Wei, who — with help from his wife, the Japanese American physicist Akemi Kirino — uses quantum physics to witness directly the atrocities committed by Japan's Unit 731 in occupied China in 1940. Because the subject was "sensitive," American editors rejected the story again and again. It finally appeared in "a very, very small magazine" that "maybe twenty-some people ever read."

But Ken Liu believes he shares something with Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking: both feel a responsibility to history. "I think history is the truth, and part of justice. It's a matter of principle. You can't just throw it away. Even if everyone says you shouldn't bring this up, I still think it should be brought up — because you're standing on the side of justice, and it has to come out," Ken Liu told QDaily.

It was this concern for justice that sent him back to Harvard to study law after three years as a software engineer, hoping to "change unfair contracts." Earlier, a contract he had signed — a badly written one — had done much to sink his own small company.

The first volume of his Dandelion Dynasty trilogy will soon be published on the Chinese mainland. He has spent seven years on the fantasy series so far; the first two volumes are already out in English, and the story rebuilds the Chu-Han Contention.

The questions Ken Liu is wrestling with are large ones: "To what extent should the power imbalances of history be reproduced in fiction?" "Where do a nation's or a people's myths come from?" "How do you bring together your feelings for both Eastern and Western culture?"

He says he dislikes so-called fantasy novels written against a Chinese backdrop, because they merely cart stereotypes from one place to another — and the same goes for Europe. "The emperor is a tyrant, everyone is oppressed, and there are some dragons that are also monsters." What he wants to do instead is fuse his feeling for Eastern culture with his feeling for Western culture.

Before the Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, Ken Liu had written only short stories. He gave us two comparisons for the difference between short and long fiction. First: "A short story is like a mosquito, and a novel is like an elephant. They're creatures with completely different body structures. You can't blow a mosquito up to the size of an elephant — it wouldn't survive. For one thing, it has no skeleton. For another, a mosquito is an insect. Insects have no respiratory system, and at that size it would suffocate."

Second: "When you write a short story, you can hold everything in your head — call it RAM, random-access memory. With a novel that's impossible. You have to keep saving it to a hard drive and pulling it back out."

This past September, Ken Liu published a Chinese collection of his short fiction, Survivors of the Singularity (《奇点遗民》). Its 22 stories were picked from the more than 130 he has published so far, and together they show how much his fiction turns on family and personal feeling.

"Ken Liu's work stands apart. Few writers in science fiction paint so many scenes of emotional life. His stories often depict family: the closeness and the distance between husband and wife, the misunderstandings between parents and children, the love between couples. All these scenes and relationships we see every day become major themes of his fiction," Hao Jingfang wrote in the preface to Survivors of the Singularity.

Q = QDaily

L = Ken Liu

The Core of Science Fiction Is Still Human Nature

Q: Reading Survivors of the Singularity, I noticed that in several stories — The Algorithms for Love, The Carthaginian Rose, Arcadia — the narrator, the first-person "I," is a woman. As a male writer, does writing that way bring anything different to your work?

L: I don't think it's any different — they're all people. The most important thing in writing is being able to step into another character's point of view and see how they look at the world. All the protagonists I write are completely unlike me, and I find that rather wonderful.

You read a book because you want to live a life different from your own; you write one for the same reason. So when I write, I write people who are different from me. That's part of the appeal of imagination. Why do we read novels at all? To live more fully.

Q: Could you say more concretely about your aesthetic ideas for writing science fiction?

L: I don't much like talking about lofty things. I think of writing as a form of entertainment. What I write is meant to be read. Every story I write is a story I like to tell but that no one else has told. I haven't seen anyone else write it, so I write it myself.

My thinking is: here is an emotion I find interesting, here is a part of human nature I think is worth taking seriously — so I write a story to explore how human nature changes once technology magnifies it. Or which parts of it stay eternal and don't change.

The core of science fiction is still human nature. However you explore it, the technological pieces in science fiction are really just a metaphor. My view of science fiction is that it uses the language and the premises of scientific and technological development to probe the limits of human nature: where can it improve? What can't be changed? What is worth celebrating? What is worth criticizing? I look at human nature magnified under science-fictional technology, and use that to explore human nature. That's what I want to write.

Q: Exploring human nature is something many novelists do, but the themes you pick — as Hao Jingfang notes in her preface — are more about emotion and family. Is that a deliberate choice, and is it what sets you apart?

L: It isn't a deliberate choice either. It's simply what I like. "Deliberate choice" sounds to me like a writer with some big, lofty goal. I don't have one. I just write the novels I want to read myself, and hope other readers like them too.

I think the best thing about fiction is that it lets you and the reader put two ideas, two trains of thought, together through this strange medium. That's a wonderful thing. The story I imagine sits inside my head where nobody can see it. I turn it into language, then Geng Hui turns it into Chinese, and then a Chinese reader reads it and turns those symbols back into pictures in their own head. If those pictures happen to resemble mine, and the reader ends up loving the story I loved writing — to me that's wonderful, and very science-fictional. I love that feeling.

Q: But family and kinship really are something you care about a great deal?

L: Yes. Part of why I dislike certain novels is that, especially in America, in a Western setting, romantic love has become the most important emotion. Every novel is about romance. I think a person's other feelings matter just as much: the bond with friends, with parents and grandparents, all sorts of relationships. I think they all matter.

Cultural Fusion and Change Matter More Than Cultural Conflict

Q: From a cultural angle, how do you see your own writing? What do American culture and Chinese culture each mean for it?

L: American culture is a big sea that all sorts of small rivers can flow into. Everyone comes from somewhere else in the world and brings their own cultural background in as part of American culture.

I was born in China. When I write these stories, what I bring with me becomes part of American culture. I don't think the distinction between American and Chinese culture means much — my own culture is a personal culture; it belongs to no country. But when I write, I write as an American, and that makes it part of American culture.

I'd rather say the most important part of American culture is exactly this capacity to take in cultures from everywhere else. In the process of merging into American culture, those cultures change themselves, and they change American culture too. Every time someone calls themselves American, they change the culture as well. American culture is a culture that keeps changing — and that's where its strength comes from.

Sometimes people put a lot of stress on cultural conflict. To me it isn't conflict; it's cultural fusion and change. If readers look at my work and see it as part of American culture, but also as Chinese culture changing overseas, that would make me happy. It's a wonderful thing.

Q: How do you think about literary tradition?

L: I studied English and American literature. What I write is part of that tradition. This tradition, especially in America, is very much alive, and it leaves a lot of room for different writers to develop. I feel proud of that, because so many masters ahead of me have already opened a road. I know which directions I can take and which I can't. That lets me find my own place and open my own new ground.

Q: There's a literature professor named Harold Bloom who has a famous idea, "the anxiety of influence." Do you feel that anxiety?

L: I do. My novels, for instance, are epic fantasy. Whatever style of epic fantasy you write, you're always writing in Tolkien's shadow, because The Lord of the Rings is so famous, so formidable. It is the founding work of the whole genre.

So my anxiety is: how do I write in a way that makes it clear I'm not imitating him, or writing inside his shadow? Of course his shadow matters too — without it, this whole territory wouldn't exist. So it really does make you anxious. You have to recognize how important your predecessors are, and at the same time write something completely unlike them. That's very hard.

Apart From Emotion, the Pursuit of Justice Matters Most in My Fiction

Q: In an earlier interview you said one of the problems you had to face was "to what extent the power imbalances of history should be reproduced in fiction." In the end you decided to frame your story as "the opening chapter of a grand narrative of rebellion and revolution aimed at building a more just society." Could you share how you worked that problem through?

L: There is a lot of injustice in history. History is also a history of technology. Look at history and you see all kinds of political change — really, they are changes in the technology of collective decision-making. Because politics, stripped down, is just a set of technical expressions of collective decision-making: congresses, parliaments, emperors, kings, courts, juries. Each of them is a technological invention, and each one pushed forward the way we make collective decisions that are fairer and more just. So my thought was: could I take history as a starting point and write a fantasy novel that walks away from the actual footsteps of history? Could I write the evolutionary history of how new technologies of collective decision-making might be invented inside a fantasy world?

Q: That leads to another subject. I feel "justice" is a theme that comes up again and again in your work. What place does it hold in your writing? Is it the value you consider most important?

L: I think it's very important. I also think it may be one of the values humanity considers most important, because we seem to be born pursuing justice and fairness. In my fiction, if you set family and personal feeling aside, this human pursuit of justice is probably the most important thing. I think that sense of awe before moral rectitude — before a noble, righteous spirit — exists in every civilization in the world.

Q: Following on from that, how do you see the relationship between fiction and reality? Reality is often full of injustice, and Folding Beijing, which you translated, happens to be a novel about exactly that kind of injustice.

L: I don't think a novel is an essay, or an argument. If you write an argument, it's like a single-log bridge: the reader has no other choice but to follow your line of thinking to the end, because your aim is to make them understand and reach one particular conclusion.

A novel is different. Write a novel that way and nobody will read it. A novel's story is something the author and the reader build together. The reader reads my words and then builds a world out of them inside their own head. So the setting you create has to feel comfortable and roomy to the reader, and leave a lot of space for them to explore on their own. If you write it like a single-log bridge, the reader feels suffocated, and it isn't interesting.

So for criticizing reality, I don't think the novel is the best vehicle. But a novel can do something an argument can't: it can give you an emotional understanding of injustice. In an argument it's hard to produce that shared feeling — empathy. So I prefer to use fiction to reflect these things: to say something about injustice in emotional terms, but let readers work it out and reach their own conclusions.

Q: Why does history interest you so much? What is your view of history, and what does it do to your fiction?

L: I don't have any lofty view of history, but I think this may be one expression of the American spirit. There's a stereotype of Americans as people who like to say what others don't dare to say, who like to do what others won't do. If everyone says don't bring this up, some American is bound to stand up and say, I insist on bringing it up. I think what I write comes out of that.

It's like when Iris Chang published her book — The Rape of Nanking — and many people asked, why bring this up? What good does it do? Let the past be forgotten. But she said: I insist on bringing it up. I feel the same way.

I think history is the truth, and part of justice. It's a matter of principle. You can't just throw it away, even if everyone says you shouldn't bring this up. I still think it should be brought up, because you're standing on the side of justice, and it has to come out.

And history matters enormously for the present and for the road ahead, because the world today is unfair. Many people hold more power, many countries and peoples hold more power, while others hold none. Why? You have to look at history to understand. Our present circumstances were made by history; today's outcome comes out of historical injustice. If you don't grasp that, you won't understand why some people are lucky and others aren't. People often say, look at them, why don't they work harder? But it isn't that they don't work hard. It's that they never got the various good chances that we, history's lucky ones, were given.

And if you follow that line further, the important thing, I think, is this: if we want the future to be fairer and more just, a crucial part of it is understanding why today's world is unfair, and how it got this way. Understanding history is what gives me a sense of how to take a different road ahead — or at least how to see the trends and patterns history shows us, and why they led to bad outcomes — so we can avoid walking the same road, and can hope to make the future better and more just.

Chinese Science Fiction Shouldn't Be Stereotyped Either

Q: In your view, compared with science fiction writing and the market in the United States, what problems exist in China?

L: First, I'm not an expert on Chinese science fiction. I really haven't read much of it. I've read far more than most American readers, but compared with real Chinese science fiction fans I've read very little, so my grasp of it is shallow. But I know a lot of friends in the science fiction world, and I get a sense of things from talking with them.

My impression is that there still aren't enough Chinese science fiction writers, and that the community is fairly small. Another problem: in America you see science fiction writers coming from every class of society, while in China they generally seem to be people who graduated from top universities and hold very good jobs, the kind that demand modern, specialized knowledge. So their field of vision may be a bit narrower, and doesn't cover all of society.

Q: You've said before that "science fiction has a place in Anglo-American literature partly because of the continuing multicultural, multiethnic contact Westerners have had to face — they have always had to think about how to deal with aliens. The alien civilizations in science fiction can be seen as that social mindset mapped onto literature." In China that context doesn't seem as pronounced. Is that part of why Chinese science fiction remains fairly marginal within Chinese literature?

L: That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way. To me, China is also a place with many ethnic groups and many differences. China has 56 recognized ethnic groups, and that's only the official count; if you really counted, there are many more distinct groups than that. And modern China has had a great deal of contact with and stimulation from foreign cultures. Look at Chinese culture today. In ordinary Chinese conversation, when we talk about anything connected with modernity — sociology, say, or economics, or physics and chemistry — as far as I know a large share of that vocabulary was borrowed from Japan rather than coined in Chinese. So in many ways modern Chinese history has been a process of mingling with something like an alien presence. Put it that way, and Chinese culture might actually suit science fiction better than Western culture does. That's how it feels to me, though I may not be right.

Q: But it didn't turn out that way. Perhaps there are some real-world reasons.

L: (Laughs.) So I find this quite interesting: Western writers love to use Chinese history to make a point. They love to say, look, Chinese history has seen so much upheaval — a dynasty is barely established before everything falls apart, then another dynasty, then chaos again. They say that must be why Liu Cixin has Chaotic Eras and Stable Eras in The Three-Body Problem.

I say that doesn't seem right, and it isn't very scientific. Look at world history — Egypt, Europe, North America — which country's history isn't like that? Upheaval and stability alternate everywhere. It's just that you have this stereotype about China, so people often say, "Chinese history is especially turbulent, which is why China is especially fond of centralized power."

So what I'm saying is that I don't much like using broad cultural stereotypes to decide how a writer should write, or how a country's science fiction should be understood. Because I think the difference between one writer and another is far bigger than the so-called cultural difference between one country and another. I'd rather see each writer's own work and let the work speak — explore what that particular work does to us — instead of always raising it into some claim about what Chinese culture is like.

A Few Other Things

Q: Folding Beijing and The Three-Body Problem both won Hugos, but readers in China have judged them very differently. I've seen a lot of people criticize Folding Beijing as badly written, saying it won only because it fed American imaginings of Chinese class rigidity. What do you make of that?

L: I disagree completely. I like Jingfang's writing and her work very much. Generally, when I choose something to translate, what I look for is whether I'm still thinking about it 24 or 48 hours after I finish reading. With a lot of fiction, you finish it and forget it at once; it never comes back. But if a work keeps coming back to you two or three days later, it must have something of its own.

Folding Beijing is that kind of work. After I read it I kept thinking about it, and I felt it was worth translating, that it had something of its own. As for whether it won an award and why anyone would give it one — I'm not one of the voters, and I don't much like guessing at what they thought. But my own view is that Folding Beijing addresses a question that concerns all of humanity: in an age of heavy automation, with robots taking a growing part in production, what becomes of the workers who do the basic, ordinary, repetitive, tedious jobs? That's a global question. It isn't a Chinese problem. So I think the story Folding Beijing tells matters for the whole world. I don't know what readers think, or what the voters thought, but that's why I find the work meaningful.

Q: As a translator, what is your view of translation, or your basic principles? I recall you once said something about disturbing the author's original text as little as possible, and about avoiding mystification. Could you say more?

L: It isn't exactly about disturbing the author's original text as little as possible, because when you translate between languages you sometimes really do have to change how something is written… Since I'm a writer myself, I know that sometimes you do things a certain way because there's a particular feeling you want the reader to have. My view is this: if I can see that an author wrote something a certain way in order to give the reader a particular feeling, I want to do my best to keep that same feeling alive in the new reader.

My other principle is that, because the West holds a lot of stereotypes about China, it's best if the act of translating avoids reinforcing them wherever it can. For example, there's a kind of translation that takes a great interest in Chinese characters' names, rendering them so they sound interesting or meaningful to English readers. To Western readers that actually looks rather silly — it feels like a fantasy novel. I try to avoid it.

Q: Do you have any advice for young people today?

L: My only advice is: play more… do more of what you love, do more of what you feel passionate about, because chances will always come. Don't spend your time on things you find tedious.

Q: Do you have any counsel for society today, or anything you especially worry about?

L: Every one of us has a view of society — of what is most dangerous in it, and what is most worth cherishing. I think that plurality of views is exactly what our society prizes most. So I think everyone should think for themselves, explore for themselves, and decide for themselves what is dangerous and what needs to be preserved.

(Reporter Wei Qian also contributed to this article.)

Cover image: Ken Liu, © Lisa Tang Liu, from his personal website