Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

writing

NaNoWriMo

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Lisa and I are doing NaNoWriMo this year. We aren’t eligible to win, of course, since we are writing the same novel together, but we figured we’d treat this as an opportunity to get our novel, or at least 50,000 words of it, written down.

Neither of us has ever written anything this long (or in such a short amount of time), but so far it’s going pretty well. It helps that we did a lot of planning for it.

Keep up the good work, fellow NaNoWriMo authors! It doesn’t matter how “bad” that first draft is, just that it’s written.

Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer

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My first posthumanist story, “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” has just been sold to F&SF. I’m really excited.

And now I’m working on a prequel for it.

It really helps when you have good first readers who can see what’s wrong with your drafts and give helpful suggestions. Couldn’t have done this without Lisa, my wife, and Erica Naone, my writing partner.

Pneumatic Tube Transport and the Tax Code

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I’ve been thinking for years about writing a specfic story involving the tax code. I’ve also been thinking for years about writing a story involving pneumatic tube transport.

And now I’ve done both. (No, the PTT story is not really about “an Internet made of tubes” — though if you agree that the railroad was the Victorian Internet, then the analogy may apply to my story as well.)

Now we’ll see if I can get them published.

Life on Gliese 581g

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Back in August, Shelly Li and I wrote a short story together (which you’ll see soon) that conjectured about the existence of life on the “fourth planet orbiting Gliese 581”).

From Space.com, today:

Unlike Gliese 581c, the newfound planet Gliese 581g looks much more hospitable. It is orbiting within the habitable zone of its parent star.

Liquid water could exist on some part of the planet’s surface, which seems to have an average temperature between minus 24 and minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31 to minus 12 degrees Celsius). Gliese 581g completes an orbit every 37 days or so.

Gliese 581g is the fourth planet around the star.

Sometimes we get it right :)

Posthumanism

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I don’t think much of scifi is about “predicting the future” at all. A great deal of scifi is really fantasy, just with equations instead of incantations. They are still stories about our world and us.

But one bit of modern scifi, posthumanist or transhumanist scifi, does engage in what I think of as pretty serious future prediction. (I personally call this genre “awesome scifi” because that’s kind of how the prose and technology come across.)

I doubt that writers in this tradition will have any better luck in getting the future right than Jules Verne or the Golden Age writers, but they are thinking seriously about the implications of cutting-edge engineering for us, and their conclusions are interesting.

I myself have not had much luck with writing in this genre — well, we’ll see. I do have one thing making the rounds now…

Sometimes the myopia of contemporary politics makes you forget how quickly technology itself can change the terms of the debate and what people think are worth fighting over. This really is powerful stuff.

Mono no aware

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Mono no aware (物の哀れ), or “an empathy toward things,” describes “the awareness of … the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.”

It’s a pretty common theme in a lot of art from Japan and China (the term “mono no aware” is Japanese, but the sentiment is certainly not unique to Japan). Since many Westerners are manga fans, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行) is an example of this genre that some may be familiar with.

I’ve recently realized that a lot of my stories that have difficulty finding markets exhibit mono no aware as their central sentiment. Nothing much happens in them, save an attempt to give the reader an experience of this wistfulness at the passing of time and things.

Could be that this is just not something that most readers in the West are interested in. (Or, in the alternative, I’m just a terrible writer when it comes to this kind of story.)