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Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

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scifi

Posthumanism

September 25, 2010 by Ken

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.

Filed Under: writing Tagged With: scifi

Annus Mirabilis

August 26, 2010 by Ken

Just had my very first sale to John Joseph Adams. My story, “Simulacrum,” will appear in Lightspeed sometime next year. Lightspeed recently got a lot of great buzz due to Adam-Troy Castro’s incredible story, “Arvies”, and I’m really honored to have a chance to be published in the same market.

This has turned out to be a pretty incredible year for me. The greatest miracle, of course, is the birth of little Esther. And to think that in the same year, I managed to break into F&SF and Asimov’s, and got to meet Gordon Van Gelder, Ted Chiang and Paolo Bacigalupi.

If I’m dreaming, please don’t let me wake up.

Filed Under: writing Tagged With: lightspeed, scifi, simulacrum

Thaumatrope

August 13, 2010 by Ken

A mini-story of mine is out in Thaumatrope, the Twitter fiction zine.

Filed Under: writing Tagged With: scifi, twitter

First Sale to Asimov’s

August 10, 2010 by Ken

I just sold “The Countable,” the first of my “math stories,” to Asimov’s. Woohoo!

Filed Under: writing Tagged With: scifi, the countable

The Life Cycle of Software Objects

August 6, 2010 by Ken

Ted’s Chiang’s latest novella sounds simply amazing.

Life Cycle of Software Objects

My copy just shipped. I’m going to have to work really really hard not to open this until my next story is done.

Filed Under: reading Tagged With: scifi, ted chiang

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