Liu's debut epic fantasy novel series,The Dandelion Dynasty,is described as silkpunk,a term coined by him to encapsulate the way it blends the material culture and philosophical roots of East Asian antiquity in an alternative vision of modernity.[6]
Liu has also written a new scifi thriller series,Julia Z,which features a hacker with a specialty in AI and robotics.[7]
In addition to his original fiction,Liu has also translated some notable Chinese science fiction works into English,winning Hugo Awards for these translations as well.[8][9]
Childhood and career
Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou,China.[10] He spent his childhood with his grandparents and credits his grandmother as giving him a lifelong love of storytelling.[11] His mother,who received her Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States,is a pharmaceutical chemist,while his father is a computer engineer.[12] Liu immigrated to the United States when he was 11 years old.[10] They lived in California and Stonington,Connecticut before settling in Waterford,Connecticut. Liu graduated from Waterford High School in 1994,where he ran cross-country and track.[13] At Harvard College,he studied English Literature and Computer Science,receiving his A. B. in 1998.[13][14]
After graduation,Liu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft,and then joined a start-up in Cambridge,Massachusetts. He later received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2004 and after working as a corporate lawyer,eventually became a high-tech litigation consultant. He became a full-time writer in 2017.[13][14]
Liu has said he wanted to become a writer so he could make stories that “turn values upside down and inside out to gain new perspectives”.[17]
In addition to magazines and online publications,Liu's short story fiction has been published in two collections,The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016),which blends science fiction and fantasy to ask questions about historiography,cultural reinvention,storytelling,and transhumanism,[18] and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020) which explores ideas such as tradition and progress,the fallibility of memory,and the essence of what it means to be human.[17]
After a long career writing and publishing short fiction,Liu turned to a silkpunk epic fantasy series about an alternative vision of how a multi-cultural society can transition into modernity based on both East Asian and Western values,consisting of The Grace of Kings (2015),The Wall of Storms (2016),The Veiled Throne (2021),and Speaking Bones (2022).[19][20]
He has also written for the Star Wars universe,including the novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017),a series of Canterbury-tale like in-universe legends.[21]
Along with his original work,Liu has translated the works of several Chinese authors into English,including Liu Cixin,Hao Jingfang,Chen Qiufan,Gu Shi,and Xia Jia.[22] His translation of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin became a best seller in English.[23] He has also worked as an editor,with two anthologies of translated Chinese fiction,Invisible Planets and Broken Stars.[24][25] His latest translation is a new rendition of Laozi's Dao De Jing:A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time.[26]
Some of Liu's work have been adapted into visual media. His short story "Memories of My Mother" was the basis of Beautiful Dreamer (2016) by David Gaddie.[27] His short story "Real Artists" was adapted into the short film Real Artists (2017) by Cameo Wood.[28] His short story "Good Hunting",which uses steampunk to interrogate the consequences of Western colonialism and Chinese modernity,was adapted into an animated short as part of Netflix's Love,Death &Robots series (2019).[29][30] Six stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories and "Carthaginian Rose" were adapted by Craig Silverstein into the animated television series Pantheon.[16]
During the COVID-19 pandemic,Liu was disturbed by finger-pointing,jingoism,and xenophobia in the face of what he saw as an existential,global threat to all humanity;he began to seek solace in the Tao Te Ching and subsequently released a new translation of the ancient text,Laozi's Dao De Jing:A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time (2024).[31]
His latest work is a series of scifi thrillers,starting with All That We See or Seem (2025),featuring a young hacker named Julia Z. The series engages with the impact of AI,and in particular its consequences on the arts,the law,and other aspects of everyday life.[7]
Liu frequently speaks at conferences,think tanks,and universities on a variety of topics related to the evolving nature of work,machine-augmented creativity,and other aspects of futurism.[32][33]
Liu's short story "The Paper Menagerie" is the first work of fiction,of any length,to win all of the Nebula,Hugo,and World Fantasy Awards.[2] In addition,his short story,"Mono no aware" won the 2013 Hugo Award,[35][36] and his novella "The Man Who Ended History:A Documentary" was also nominated for a Hugo.[37] The first novel in his The Dandelion Dynasty series,The Grace of Kings,was a 2016 Nebula Award finalist.[38] The novel was the 2016 Locus Award Best First Novel winner.[39]
Liu is well known for his short story "The Paper Menagerie", his Dandelion Dynasty fantasy novel series, and his translation of Cixin Liu's novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequels. For a more comprehensive list of Liu's works, see the linked bibliography page.
Filmography
Television
Pantheon is an animated television series based on Liu's sci-fi short stories "The Gods Will Not Be Chained", "The Gods Will Not Be Slain", "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain", "Staying Behind" and "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer" from the short fictions collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. It premiered on AMC+ in 2022.[55]
His short story "Good Hunting" was adapted into an animated short as part of Netflix's Love, Death & Robots anthology series (2019).[56]
↑Kirtley, David Barr (2015-04-24). "Interview: Ken Liu". Wired (via Lightspeed). Archived from the original on 2019-02-19. Retrieved 2019-03-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
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