Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Translation is an act of recreation.
I'm very interested in foundational narratives.
Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.
I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.
I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.
The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers.
There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.
I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.
I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that.
'The Grace of Kings' was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.
When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.
We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.
The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.
The evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.
Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.
The 'silk' in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.
The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.
Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.
It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.
Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to the result.
My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.
In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language.
I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.
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.
I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.
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.
It's okay if you get rejected 20, 30 or 200 times... You don't need everyone to like your story - you just need one person who really likes your story.
I like the law. I like the part that's about reasoning, about persuasion, about telling stories, about trying to build structures that fall within rules.
In general, writers who talk to their colleagues and neighbors constantly about their own writing seem to me pretty insufferable. I try not to be that guy.
My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career.
I was not trying to write some sort of serious meditation on war and peace. 'The Grace of Kings' is meant to be a fun book. It's meant to be an epic fantasy.
The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.
For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines - they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality.
If I end up having a novel that sells really well and that allows me to pay for health insurance and mortgage without having to work at a day job, that would be great.
I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they're writing from.
Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.
'The Grace of Kings' draws on Western traditions as much as it does on Chinese traditions, though the bones of the story are drawn from the Chu-Han Contention period before the Han Dynasty.
It's incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able to reach across the void between them and touch at all.
I think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It's exclusionary. It essentially tries to argue that some Americans are more real than others.
Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.
In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?
I don't have a specific message for 'The Grace of Kings' and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy.
It's true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It's miraculous.
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.