Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

Ken

Too Close

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It really is true that writers sometimes are too close to their own words.

I recently had a story rejected by a couple of markets, and the editors had the same reaction: the part of the story that felt the most pure to me, the part that I thought was the best and loved the most in writing, was the one part they singled out as not working for them.

They’re right. I just couldn’t see it. I fell in love with that one section so much that I couldn’t see what was wrong with it.

Always be very skeptical about the one part of the story that you think is particularly good — chances are, it is good, but not necessarily good for the story. “Murder your darlings” — that’s what this is about.

Kindle 3 and Chinese

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The Kindle 3 provides some support for display of non-Latin scripts. But the support is not perfect. For example, if you convert Chinese books in UTF-8 via calibre into mobi books for the Kindle, the default configuration will result in many characters showing up as little squares.

A solution is provided by user “hyraxer” at Kindle Boards:

click the home button
click the enter button
just input
;debugOn (click enter button)
~changeLocale zh-CN (click enter button)
;debugOff (click enter button)

and then restart your kindle, everything will be OK.

I’ve tried it and it seems to work.

Two Faces

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Sometimes a person will appear one way in public, but another in private. He might be polite and thoughtful and gentle with one group, and cruel and paranoid and evil with another.

Sometimes that’s true of an entire country or people.

Now, this isn’t just because people behave differently depending on who they’re with — supercilious to those they deem inferior, ingratiating to those they deem superior — though that is one part of it. There is also a cognitive bias at work here.

Our minds work in such a way that we construct most of what we perceive from memory. When we look at a photograph of our family, we fill in much of the picture not from new sensory data, but by how we remember and anticipate them to look.

A similar principle is at work in news gathering and news consumption. Reporters with a certain notion of how things ought to be will focus on those details that they anticipate. And readers with a certain notion of how things are will pick out words, sentences, ideas that match their predictions. If you expect to see certain traits among a people, you will see them.

And so sometimes a place will appear in the media of one country as a paradise, and in the media of another as a hell on earth.

These biases and filters are more powerful than any form of censorship. That’s why I think it’s best to get your news from multiple perspectives: different countries, continents, systems of government, languages. And always remember that you may be wearing colored glasses yourself — you’ve just become so used to them that you never knew they were there.

Ad Block

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I’ve always been ambivalent about advertising.

First, there’s the issue of definition. Almost any communication is designed to “sell” you something: an idea, a belief, a faith, a feeling, a product. The Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto, and the Bible can all be seen as “advertising” in the right context. Is trying to sell you (or “persuade you of”) an idea inherently better than trying to sell you a thing? You always pay for it, one way or another.

Second, there’s the issue of value. It’s not clear to me that advertising is inherently crass and without any redeeming value. Sometimes our pleasure in a thing, a brand, is very much associated with the intangible marketing message. The emotional power of pop music and Coca Cola, especially to those who aspire to the American Dream, is very much dependent on marketing.

And this barely skims the surface of the body of issues around the idea of “advertising.”

Some of these ideas drove me to write “Ad Block,” which you can read at Kasma Science Fiction.

Sky’s the Limit

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Janet Maslin, reviewing James Gleick’s The Information:

…why the telephone and the skyscraper go hand in hand. Once the telephone eliminated the need for hand-delivered messages, the sky was the limit.

Must. Read. This. Book.

The pile of books I mean to get to just keeps on growing…