The Sci-Fi Author Bridging America and China

In six years, Liu has published more than 100 short
stories. In “Paper Menagerie,” a young Chinese-American boy’s mom makes
origami that comes to life. “Single Bit-Error,” a tale of love
lost after a car crash, uses programming language as metaphor. “Mono No
Aware” tells the story of a Japanese boy who earns a coveted spot on an
American evacuation ship from Earth (hit by an asteroid). “Everything
passes, Hiroto,” the boy remembers his late father saying. “That feeling
in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the
transience of all things in life.”

Liu references his heritage in The Grace of Kings
not by writing characters of his ethnicity, but through the aesthetic
of his futuristic world landscape — “silkpunk,” mixing Victoriana and
East Asian classical antiquity. The world uses East Asian technological
sources like bamboo, silk and wind power, while Liu drew from Chinese
historical romances and foundational narratives well known in Chinese
culture.

At first, most Chinese sci-fi was imported
translations of authors like Jules Verne. In 1932, the same year as
Aldous Huxley came out with Brave New World, Chinese author Lao She wrote a dystopian satirical novel set on Mars called Cat Country. But the communists pushed most sci-fi aside beginning in the 1950s.