Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版

Photo

In 2012, “The Paper Menagerie,” a short story by the Chinese-American writer Ken Liu, became the first work of fiction to win all three major English-language science fiction awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. It explores the experience of growing up between two cultures, through the eyes of a boy whose mother came to the United States as a mail-order bride from Hong Kong. As he grows older, he comes to resent her for burdening him with her non-American ways — until an unexpected event forces him to reconsider what a mother’s love means.

Photo

Mr. Liu’s debut novel, “The Grace of Kings,” published in April, is a reimagining of Chinese history, in which two young men set out to revolutionize the archipelago kingdom they call home, only to turn into rivals. The author has described the novel as silkpunk, a riff on the “steampunk” genre of fantasy writing that incorporates 19th-century design and technology.

Mr. Liu, who was born in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, migrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 and went on to earn bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard. In addition to writing and translating, he works as a litigation consultant on cases involving technology. In an interview, he discussed the literary uses of history, blending Western and Chinese traditions, and the meaning of silkpunk.

Q.

How did Chinese history inspire your new novel?

A.

“The Grace of Kings” is an epic fantasy reimagining of the Chu-Han Contention [the period between the Qin and Han dynasties, 202-206 B.C.]. It’s not alternate history or time travel. Rather, the major plot points of history are reimagined in a brand new fantasy world with new characters, new technologies, new politics and new cultures.

Yet, some of the themes from [the Han dynasty historian] Sima Qian’s historical account persist in the reimagining. The hope is that the reimagining will offer a critique of that source, as well as of the conventions of epic fantasy.

Q.

What difficulties did you face weaving a historical account with more traditional fantasy elements?

A.

One of the most interesting issues I had to deal with is how much of the power imbalances of history to replicate in fiction. We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others. Women, for example, were an oppressed group at the time of the Chu-Han Contention, though some prominent women were able to exercise power in ways both traditional and nontraditional.

Epic fantasy based on European sources has also traditionally replicated the relative powerlessness of women in medieval Europe, though often such works don’t get the nuances of how women did exercise power correct. In any event, this is a trend that’s being challenged by many writers nowadays.

Since I was writing fantasy, there was no need to replicate the injustices of the past exactly. Or to follow the model of other epic fantasies that repeat outdated myths about the past. Instead, I decided to tell my story as the first chapter of an overall arc of rebellion and revolution toward a more just society.

This was a challenging task, since societies don’t change overnight. Attitudes change only slowly, the way tree roots crack stone over decades. The “Grace of Kings” begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices — among them the oppressed position of women — but gradually transforms into something better through a series of revolutions. But since real social change takes a long time, even by the end of the book only the seeds of deep change have been planted.

Q.

Historical, or speculative, fiction is often a metaphor for issues in contemporary society. Is this the case for “The Grace of Kings”?

A.

I think this depends on the reader. 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.

Historical fiction certainly has been used often to comment on contemporary issues, and sometimes historical fiction also offers interesting critiques on historiography. Though I’m not writing historical fiction, the novel’s connections to history are obvious and deep.

I’ve been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique. But if the author wants to draw a rough comparison that may be enlightening for multiple political perspectives, fiction works much better.

Q.

You describe the novel as silkpunk. Why?

A.

This is a label intended to give the reader a hint of the aesthetic of the novel. Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity. My novel is filled with technologies like soaring battle kites that lift duelists into the air, bamboo-and-silk airships propelled by giant feathered oars, underwater boats that swim like whales driven by primitive steam engines and tunnel-digging machines enhanced with herbal lore, as well as fantasy elements like gods who bicker and manipulate, magical books that tell us what is in our hearts, giant water beasts that bring storms and guide sailors safely to shores, and illusionists who manipulate smoke to peer into opponents’ minds.

The silkpunk technology vocabulary is based on organic materials historically important to East Asia — bamboo, paper, silk — and seafaring cultures of the Pacific — coconut, feathers, coral — and the technology grammar follows biomechanical principles like the inventions in “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” [a Chinese novel set in the fall of the Han dynasty]. The overall aesthetic is one of suppleness and flexibility, expressive of the cultures that inhabit the islands.

At the same time, the “punk” suffix is taken seriously because this is a story about revolution. The “Grace of Kings” isn’t a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent and only lurches toward more justice. It questions and subverts both the source as well as the new cultural framework into which it has been transposed.

Q.

Are there any other novels that you would consider silkpunk?

A.

If you stretch my definition a little, I would say something like Richard Garfinkle’s “Celestial Matters” would qualify. The book is set in a world in which both classical Chinese theories about the universe as well as Aristotelian physics are true, and amazing feats of engineering are then expressed using this combined vocabulary. It’s wondrous.

Zhang Ran’s “The Snowdrifts of Jinyang” would probably also qualify. This is an imaginative alternate history tale in which medieval Chinese engineering managed to essentially create something like the Internet. The engineering aesthetic definitely has a kind of silkpunk feel to it.

Q.

In what ways does the novel draw on your identity as a Chinese-American?

A.

The novel is a deliberate attempt to meld two literary traditions, both of which I consider my own: the Western tradition of Homeric epics, Anglo-Saxon poetry and contemporary epic fantasy, and the Chinese tradition of historical romances, lyric poetry and wuxia [martial arts hero] fantasy.

It should read as both strange and familiar to readers steeped in either of those traditions.

Q.

What elements of Western and Chinese literary traditions are featured in “Grace of Kings”? Who are your favorite authors from these traditions?

A.

In “The Grace of Kings,” a reader will find ideas based on the technology theories of W. Brian Arthur as well as references to classical Chinese treatises on mathematics, Anglo-Saxon-style kennings as well as proverbs modeled on Chinese folk wisdom — both transformed to feel at home in this new world, allusions to “Paradise Lost” as well as quotes from [Sima Qian’s] “Records of the Grand Historian,” wuxia-style flashback character introductions as well as Homeric catalogs, poems based on Tang dynasty models as well as songs imitating Middle English lyrics, rhetorical devices taken from Greek and Latin epics as well as formal descriptions reminiscent of Ming dynasty novels.

As for favorite authors, I have too many to list. But I will say that in the context of this novel, the most important figures for me are Jin Yong for the general wuxia aesthetic, [Song dynasty poet] Li Qingzhao for her lyrics, John Milton for narrative approach and Ursula K. Le Guin for world-building.

Q.

What are you working on now?

A.

In November, Saga Press will be publishing my first English-language collection, “The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.” Next year, the first collection of Chinese science fiction I’ve translated into English will be published by Tor Books.

Right now, I’m finishing up the sequel to “The Grace of Kings,” which should come out in the second half of 2016.

This article was adapted from an interview that first appeared in cn.nytimes.com, the Chinese-language website of The New York Times.

