Ken Liu's Blog, page 4

The Veiled Throne and Webtoons

The publication date for The Veiled Throne (third of four books in the Dandelion Dynasty) is less than two months away! To the updates then we go.

Reviews for The Veiled Throne

Early trade reviews for the book are coming in. Kirkus and Publishers Weekly both gave it starred reviews.

From Kirkus:

But ultimately, it’s Liu’s poetic style that makes this book so memorable: “We are embedded in strands of love and hatred, a web that glows in the sunlight of history, bedecked in pearls of blood and fragments of bone.”

This is a shelf-bending fantasy masterwork: as good as it gets.

From Publishers Weekly:

Liu’s world is lively, fluid, and above all, original, populated with nuanced characters, mighty flying lizards, sentient narwhals, and living books. Wooden submarines, large scale shadow puppet plays, and airships made of bamboo and silk powered by “silkmotic force” add to the dazzling atmospherics as Liu mixes the drama of heroic wuxia battles with twisty intrigues and the characters’ ever-shifting priorities, balancing each element to create the epic feel of real history.

The most important review of all, of course, will have to come from you. Not much longer to wait now!

Special Edition of the Dandelion Dynasty for Collectors

My UK publisher, Head of Zeus, is collaborating with The Broken Binding to produce a special edition of the Dandelion Dynasty for collectors.

There will be 352 (300 numbered + 52 lettered) hardback copies of The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms and The Veiled Throne with new artwork for the covers, as well as sprayed and stencilled edges. I will be signing all the copies in this exclusive, limited edition.

They are absolutely gorgeous.

The special edition will be released in November and will be available for pre-order from 12pm on September 19th (UK time). 

The Paper Menagerie Webtoon

Manta Comics is turning four of the stories in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories into webtoons. I’ve long enjoyed reading webtoons, but this is my first time being adapted into the medium. It was really fun working with the artists and editors. I’m looking forward to my stories being presented to a new audience.

The four stories that have been adapted are “The Paper Menagerie,” “The Perfect Match,” “Simulacrum,” and “The Regular.” The first, “The Paper Menagerie,” with artist Sena Han and editor Janice Mun, is being released on September 18. You can download the Manta app to read the stories.

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That’s it. Happy September, and thank you, as always.

Annotations, Arc, Awards

Hi All!

I’ve been working on a few secret projects I’m very excited about. Hopefully more to announce as soon as I’m allowed to.

A quick note before getting to the meat of the updates: The Grace of Kings is a Kindle Monthly Deal for July (get it early and be ready for The Veiled Throne in November!). Though August 1 you can get it for $1.99.

Annotations on The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

You know how when you read a book on the Kindle you can highlight passages (and optionally see what passages other readers have highlighted)? Goodreads has a program where authors can annotate the most popular highlighted passages in their books, adding notes, responses, questions, behind-the-scenes commentary, etc.

It’s not quite the memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush, but it’s a step toward that vision where texts are not isolated things, but, true to the word’s roots, are woven into one grand living tapestry of idea-strands in constant conversation.

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I’ve annotated the most highlighted passages in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories — I was surprised by every one of them. If you enjoyed the book, you might find these — what others have highlighted and what I have to say about them — interesting.

Arc, a film by Kei Ishikawa

June witnessed the release (in Japan) of Arc, a film by director Kei Ishikawa, based on my novelette of the same time published in F&SF.

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In general, I try to say as little as possible about adaptations of my work, because they are not my work.

Some writers write with the ultimate goal of reaching as many people as possible with their story. In this day and age, that means through the medium of film or TV. In a sense, the stories they write are nothing more than intermediate stages in the ultimate expression of their vision.

I am not one of those writers. I don’t write with the intent of reaching a big audience, only that I craft the best possible sketch I can make of the vision in my head. I shape the story to my chosen medium: its limitations as well as infinite potential, its flaws as well as advantages, its artifice as well as inherent patterns. The only thing I want is the written story, which is mine and mine alone. (In fact, I don’t even care about the published book as much as the typescript, because the published product has incorporated the input of others in the editorial process and is no longer mine alone.)

Ideal adaptations of my work should thus be independent pieces of art; they neither consume my work nor EW consumed by it — both pieces have the room to earn their separate interpretations. In my view, adaptations should be as different as possible from the original while sharing the same underlying soul that ultimately motivated both.

That ideal is rarely achieved.

So it brings me great joy to see an adaptation of my work that shares my view of the purpose of an adaptation. When Kei Ishikawa—whose work I knew and admired—approached me about an adaptation, he was clear that he had in mind a specific and divergent vision. He would take my very American story about the pursuit of eternal youth and recast it entirely anew in Japan, turning it into his own story told in his own visual language. His story would be different from my story — thereby giving both the room to breathe — but he wanted my input and help in locating that shared soul.

What followed was a wonderful process of collaboration. But reading drafts of the script is not the same as watching the final film. Filmmakers are the ultimate example of writers who write with the aim of creating something else — the script is a mere intermediate representation in the compilation of ideas into the soaring, living process of the finished film.

When I saw the result, I loved how he stayed true to that first vision and made a film about the future that feels timeless, a film that turns the arc of “progress” into the cycling of the tides, that emphasizes the invisible strands connecting the living to the dead, that feels like a watercolor instead of an oil painting. Watching it, I was moved to tears — only possible when an adaptation has achieved that status of independence. It left my story alone, gave it enough space so that I could view the film as not mine.

Everyone who worked on the film — the actors, the artists, the producers, the designers, the crew … I will never know all the work that went into it — they all put a bit of themselves into that final vision. The collaborative nature of the medium — so different from the writing of a novel — is dizzying. I can only admire in shocked wonder.

If you do have a chance to see Arc, go for it.

Awards

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories won the Locus Award for Best Collection in June. Thank you to all the voters, and congrats to the winners and finalists. It’s always nice to see something you create get recognition, even when you don’t create with the aim of reaching a large audience.

In other wonderful news, “50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know” is a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (honored to be in such fine company), and Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds, which I translated, is up for both the SFF Rosetta Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (congrats to Jingfang).

Have a wonderful rest of July!

Ken

The Veiled Throne Updates

Hi All,

Hope you’re having a good June. I’ve been plugging away on some secret projects, and so I’ve not been saying much publicly. But I have two updates this time, both about the Dandelion Dynasty.

The Veiled Throne Giveaway

Goodreads is doing a giveaway of advance reader edition copies of The Veiled Throne, the third volume (of four) of The Dandelion Dynasty, to be published this fall in November. You can enter between now and June 28. So excited to share this next chapter of the saga with you!

Enter the giveaway here.

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Meanwhile, my UK publisher, Head of Zeus, has announced a new set of covers for the Dandelion Dynasty, created by Leo Nickolls. The best way to show them off is just to point you to their announcement directly. I love how these present the expanse of the world.

@kyliu99's epic Dandelion Dynasty concludes with THE VEILED THRONE and SPEAKING BONES, published November 2021 and April 2022. \n\nArtwork by Leo Nickolls ","username":"HoZ_Books","name":"Head of Zeus","date":"Fri Mar 26 13:00:51 +0000 2021","photos":[{"img_url":"https://cdn.substack.com/image/upload...Head of Zeus @HoZ_BooksTwo friends against an Empire...Two civilizations across an ocean...Rebellion... Betrayal... Invention...@kyliu99's epic Dandelion Dynasty concludes with THE VEILED THRONE and SPEAKING BONES, published November 2021 and April 2022. Artwork by Leo Nickolls

March 26th 2021

34 Retweets98 Likes

As always, thank you for your support of my work!

Ken

A new story, a new speech

Hello, everyone, two quick updates.

First, I have a new story out. “Jaunt” is part of Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, edited by Gideon Lichfield for MIT Press. Authors in the collection include Cory Doctorow, D. A. Xiaolin Spires, Hannu Rajaniemi, and others.

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The print version isn’t going to come out until May, but you can grab the electronic version right now.

This past year has been extremely difficult for me. It’s impossible to imagine the future when the present feels so apocalyptic, all-consuming. “Jaunt” represents one of my only successful attempts to write new fiction about the future during this time, and it’s a crystallization of much of my thinking about the wrong direction(s) modernity has taken. The core concepts are telepresence and leaderless mass movements, two trends that the pandemic highlighted and which I think have the potential to alter our world for the better. Like much of my work, I can’t help but be optimistic about the potential of technology, hoping against hope at the end that we can overcome the forces of hatred, colonialism, and perpetual war.

Second, I’ll be a speaker at Orchid Labs’ virtual digital privacy summit, Priv8, March 23-25, 2021. Speakers at the summit include Edward Snowden, Audrey Tang, Zooko Wilcox, and others.

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My talk is not directly about privacy, but about how we articulate and reify fundamental human values through stories, and to get something as abstract as “privacy” right, we have to be more thoughtful about the stories we tell to make sense of privacy. Registration at the summit is free, so I hope some of you will join me in discussing and thinking about this most important aspect of being human.

As always, thank you for supporting my work, and may you always get to tell the stories you want to tell.

Ken

The Armies of Those I Love

Hello, everyone. I have a new story for you, updates about a new movie based on my work, plus info on several other projects. Let’s get to it.

New Novella: The Armies of Those I Love

I write very few novellas, maybe one every five years. The Man Who Ended History, All the Flavors, The Regular, that’s it.

Now there’s a new one. Even among my novellas, it’s special.

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You can get it starting today from Audible: http://adbl.co/Armies.

Fourteen-year-old Franny Fenway lives by herself on Boss, a rumbling, tumbling, stumbling mountain-city roaming over an uninhabitable continent, the last refuge of the few survivors of the devastation of the last days of the oldizens. But a visitor from the City of Angels shatters her tranquility and starts her on a journey to discover the true story of the world that only she can tell.

What else can I tell you about it? It’s science fiction but feels like fantasy (not that I’ve ever put much stock in these labels); it’s full of references to metropolitan Boston; it was written during the pandemic and shows it; it involves people doing terrible things to one another in an unfeeling world, but it never wavers from stubborn hope; it’s like a Hayao Miyazaki film in literary form, but illustrated with circuit diagrams; it is unabashedly patriotic, spilling over with an abiding love for what America could be, and a sorrow for how far it falls short of its own ideals. It is, simply put, a very me story.

It’s also my first long story written from the ground up for the audio market (hence the Audible Originals publication). I’m a big believer in the idea that a story is best served by taking advantage of the unique features of the medium for which it is intended—print, web, audio, comic book, film, TV, game—even if that means it becomes difficult to present the story in other media. Most of my stories are intended to be consumed through the eye rather than the ear. Example: I wrote “Cutting” for the printed page, such that the white space is an integral part of the story. I never even intended for it to be read aloud.

But The Armies of Those I Love is different. It’s inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman (I think of him as the greatest of American poets, one who straddled the age of mythology and the age of electricity). It takes place in a post-post-apocalyptic world, where orality once again reigns. Like Whitman’s poetry, it is meant to be heard in a hypnotic state of trance, not contemplatively taken in off the page. It requires a performance.

Which is why I’m absolutely thrilled to say that Audible was able to ask my first choice, Auliʻi Cravalho, to do the narration. I love what she’s done with the story. This is a performance that must be heard to be believed.

Above all, I wish you as much joy in listening to it as I experienced in crafting it.

A New Film Based on My Work: Arc a.image2.image-link.image2-905-640 { padding-bottom: 141.40625%; padding-bottom: min(141.40625%, 905px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-905-640 img { max-width: 640px; max-height: 905px; }

Based on my short story of the same name, Arc (アーク), directed by Kei Ishikawa from a script by Kei Ishikawa and Kaori Sawai, is the story of Lina, the first human to be given eternal youth by technology. The cast includes Kyoko Yoshine, Shinobu Terajima, Masaki Okada, Kurumi Shimizu, and Kai Inowaki.

Synopsis: Lina was separated from her new-born son at the age of 17 and lived a wandering life. She met her mentor, Emma at the age of 19 and got a job doing BodyWorks at a major cosmetics company. The job involved an incredibly popular treatment developed by Emma’s younger brother, Amane, that preserved the original looks of people after they died. However, Amane was actually attempting to create immortality. Lina, now 30, becomes the first woman in human history to gain Amane’s eternal life treatment. But as the world becomes a place without death, Lina finds her potential future crumbling around her. [© Far East Films]

The film will be released in Japan on 6/25 — fingers crossed it gets a global release too. You can read the original story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2012.

I have seen the film and it is breathtaking. I think of an adaptation as a separate, distinct piece of art, related to the original material but with its own independent aesthetics, goals, and perspectives. In the best case, the two—the story and the film—should each do what the other cannot and be appreciated as two works of art in conversation.

I believe the filmmakers have accomplished this. For that I congratulate them and celebrate their achievement. And I’m very proud of my very small role in the making of this film.

Updates on Pantheon

More news on Pantheon, the AMC animated drama series series based on my Singularity stories. As Andrew Liptak reports for Tor.com:

According to Deadline, William Hurt, Maude Apatow, Corey Stoll, and Lara Pulver are the newest members of the cast. They’ll be joining some other notable names for the series, which the network announced back in August: Krystina Alabado, Katie Chang, SungWon Cho, Paul Dano, Rosemarie DeWitt, Chris Diamantopoulos, Kevin Durand, Aaron Eckhart, Grey Griffin, Raza Jaffrey, Daniel Dae Kim, Ron Livingston, Scoot McNairy, Anika Noni Rose, Samuel Roukin, and, Taylor Schilling.

Chang will lead the series as Maddie, a teenager who’s experiencing some trouble and who gets some advice from a mysterious online source, who turns out to be her dead father, David (voiced by Kim), who had his consciousness uploaded onto the internet, and who has become a new type of entity, an “Uploaded Intelligence.” His existence—and others—spells a potential pivotal moment for the future of the human race.

Can’t wait for the show to be out!

Other News

New publication: “Excerpt from Theuth, an Oral History of Work in the Age of Machine-Assisted Cognition” is a brand-new story I wrote for Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories, an anthology edited by Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt, and Eric Schwitzgebel that just came out last month from Bloomsbury Press. It also includes stories from awesome authors like Sofia Samatar and Aliette de Bodard (personally, anything with both of them in it is an instant buy for me). My story here, dealing with the nature of knowledge, is one of the few I’ve written based on my own experiences as a practicing lawyer.

Kate Elliott, who has taught me countless lessons on how to write the kind of epic fantasy I want to write, is hosting a series of webinars on worldbuilding for Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. She invited me to be a guest on her latest session, which is about technology in worldbuilding. You can catch the recording on SFWA’s YouTube channel at the end of this month (I’ll edit the post to add a direct link to the video when it’s up).

I will be a speaker at Priv8, a virtual summit on digital privacy being held March 23-25. My talk is on privacy as a value, and how we define values through stories. Featured speakers at the summit include Edward Snowden, Audrey Tang, and Sheila Warren. Hope to see you there!

Until next time, thank you for supporting my work!

Booktalks

Hello, everyone,

Taking a break from working on copyedits for Speaking Bones to send out this update. (Btw, my copyeditor is a genius, I tell you. It’s so great to feel the book getting better with every keystroke.)

My big update this time is that The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is out in paperback! You can use this link from the publisher to get it from your favorite retailer.

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The hardcover came out just before lockdown last year. The occasion of the paperback’s issuance has made me reflect on everything we went through in between. I like to say that we’re all the heroes of our own epic fantasies, so I hope this trial has made us all more resolute in the stories we wish to tell.

I’ll have more to say about the Dandelion Dynasty soon. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you about a few online events at which I’ll be talking about books with awesome authors.

On February 2, at 5:00 PM ET, I’ll be in conversation with Karen Lord and moderator Diana Pho at an event sponsored by Serial Box (theme: decolonizing SFF). I’ve been wanting to do an event with Karen forever. I’m really looking forward to learning from this conversation (registration link).

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And later on that same day, at 9:00 PM ET, I’ll be talking with E. Lily Yu about her debut novel, On Fragile Waves, at an event sponsored by University Book Store. Lily will be reading from her incredibly beautiful book and then I’ll ask her questions about it (registration link).

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Hope to see you at one or both of these events.

The Last Update of 2020

Hello! This will be very, very brief.

“The Cleaners”

As part of the Faraway Collection of modern fairytales from Amazon Original Stories, “The Cleaners” is out today.

If you’re a member of Amazon Prime or a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited, this story (and the other stories in the collection) is available to you for free. There is also an audio version narrated by the wonderful Kate Rudd. Non-members can get the story for $1.99, with the audio narration added for free.

I loved telling this fable (loosely inspired by the Princess and the Pea) about the power of memory and self-narrative. If you enjoy it, please leave a review!

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Besides me, the other authors in the collection are Gayle Forman, Nic Stone, Rainbow Rowell, and Soman Chainani.

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A Measure of Good Faith

The Washington Post published “What Money Can’t Buy,” a holiday guide to “gifts that don’t exist but should.” I contributed a little piece — something I really wish we had, especially in a turbulent and strange time like this.

Happy holidays! I’ll see you in 2021.

Ken

A Time to Reflect

Finally, the holidays are coming up, bringing with it a sense of … well, endings and beginnings. The year 2020 has been … something.

Time to reflect on the year that just passed and look forward to the next.

“In the Beginning Is a Story”

In my work as a futurist, I talk about what it means to imagine the future at industry conferences, think tanks, governments, universities, etc. As a result of conversing with people from around the world in that capacity, I’ve been struggling with one particular question: What does making up stories have to do with building a sustainable, humane future?

It is, in fact, a more personal and specific version of the question asked perennially of writers and artists in general: What value is there in art?

As a general rule, I dislike instrumentalist justifications for art. I don’t think reading or crafting fiction is very “productive” in an economic sense; nor do I think formalized narrative does much in terms of inculcating empathy or other socially desirable psychological traits (surely you can think of many writers and filmmakers who may tell great stories but are terrible people).

Rather, I think the value of fiction isn’t in how it helps us, but in how the practice of storytelling is at the core of what it means to be human. We live inside the stories; we are stories. Good stories matter far more than good institutions.

I’ve tried to lay out my thoughts on storytelling and sustainable futures recently in an essay commissioned by The EUGENE Studio of Japan, “In the Beginning Is a Story.” I hope you’ll give it a read and think about this subject with me.

Fiction Year-End SummaryNovels

Because of the pandemic, I didn’t get much done this year writing-wise. I’ve always been a slow writer. Of all writers I know, I’m among the least productive (it took me ten years, remember, to tell basically one story, the Dandelion Dynasty). And this year, I’ve even lowered the bar on my own poor record.

I’m all right with that. I think in general we should all try to be gentler with ourselves. In the end, “How productive were you?” is not anywhere near the top of the list of important questions to ask yourself about your life.

Still, I feel good about what I have done. By far my biggest accomplishment, I feel, is finishing the edits on The Veiled Throne and Speaking Bones. Wrapping up the longest, most substantive piece of fiction in a way that did justice to my vision felt good.

Speaking of which, I have an update on publication dates. Because of the pandemic and the economic uncertainty of these times, my publisher, Saga Press, has decided to push the release dates of the two books back by a season each. Thus, The Veiled Throne will be published on November 2, 2021, and Speaking Bones will be out April 2022.

As much as it pains me to see the books being pushed back (since I turned in the manuscripts for the two books back in summer 2019, this means that by the time Speaking Bones is out, I will have waited almost three full years), I think this is the right decision. Bookstores and the general process by which people discover books both took a hard hit this year, and recovery has been slow. Pushing the publication dates back, while not a guarantee of anything, is the only way to give my books the best chance possible to succeed in the market.

Needless to say, I hope to earn your delight and pleasure when the books finally do come out, and I’ll do my best to make the wait worthwhile by getting started on the next long-form project. I have some ideas for the next novel I want to write. Stay tuned.

Short Fiction

All in all, I wrote five stories in 2020 (just finished the last one this week). Most of the stories I wrote this year haven’t been published yet (and I can’t even talk about some of them), but I can say that most were influenced by life during the pandemic in some sense. A couple I would say are among the stories that have mattered the most to me.

Coming soon:

“The Cleaners,” my magic realist story about cleansing (literally) memories, is part of the Faraway Collection from Amazon Original Stories. This is going to be available on December 15, so please keep an eye out for it if you’re interested.

“Jaunt,” my contribution to Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, edited by Gideon Lichfield, published by MIT Press (part of the Twelve Tomorrows series). This is a collection of stories inspired by the pandemic, and should be available early 2020/

I published a total of seven stories in 2020 so far (most of these were written before 2020):

“50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know” — Uncanny, November 3, 2020 (read).

“A Whisper of Blue” — The Book of Dragons, edited by Jonathan Strahan, July 7, 2020.

“Idols” — Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, edited by Jonathan Strahan, March 17, 2020.

“Uma” — part of the Avatars, Inc anthology from XPrize, edited by Ann VanderMeer, illustrated by Ian Murray, March 13, 2020 (read).

“Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard” — , February 25, 2020.

“How to Build a Dragon at the End of Time” — Sub-Q, a piece of interactive fiction, February 2020 (play).

“How to Survive the Next Science Fictional Disaster, A Guide for the Wise” — L’Uomo, February 2020.

Accolades

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories continues to gain recognition — I’m so grateful to the jurors, librarians, and readers who highlighted my book for praise.

My little collection was:

A finalist in the 12th annual Goodreads Choice Awards.

One of New York Public Library’s Best Books for Adults 2020.

One of NPR Book Concierge’s Best Books of 2020.

Frankly, all of this has been shocking. I wrote these stories thinking that no one will like them except myself. The positive response from readers has been a most unexpected bonus.

I hope you all have as lovely an end of the year as possible, and thank you again for all your support.

Cover Reveal for The Veiled Throne, and Other News...

Happy November, everyone.

I’m getting this month’s note out early because … well, we all know why. My fellow Americans, go vote if you haven’t done so already.

Lots to share. So let’s get to it.

Cover Reveal for The Veiled Throne and Time Magazine Mention

We have a lovely cover for the third book in the Dandelion Dynasty series, courtesy of Sam Weber (artist) and Michael McCartney (art design).

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Isn’t this gorgeous? I love how the design reflects the series so perfectly. The dandelion and chrysanthemum motifs are obvious, but I also want to draw your attention to the little bird skulls and kunikin decorations at the top of the crown, as well as the dangling claws that have been added to the strands in the coral-and-pearl veil whose purpose Kuni explained to his daughter Théra with great care. (Not spoilers for where the saga is going, but a hint as to the direction of events in Dara.)

Saga’s description of the book:

Princess Théra, once known as Empress Üna of Dara, entrusted the throne to her younger brother in order to journey to Ukyu-Gondé to war with the Lyucu. She has crossed the fabled Wall of Storms with a fleet of advanced warships and ten thousand people. Beset by adversity, Théra and her most trusted companions attempt to overcome every challenge by doing the most interesting thing. But is not letting the past dictate the present always possible or even desirable?

In Dara, the Lyucu leadership as well as the surviving Dandelion Court bristle with rivalries as currents of power surge and ebb and perspectives spin and shift. Here, parents and children, teachers and students, Empress and Pékyu, all nurture the seeds of plans that will take years to bloom. Will tradition yield to new justifications for power?

Everywhere, the spirit of innovation dances like dandelion seeds on the wind, and the commoners, the forgotten, the ignored begin to engineer new solutions for a new age.

Coming June 29, 2021 (Preorder at your favorite retailer).

I’m eyeballs-deep in copyedits for this book right now. (My copyeditor is amazing, by the way. Her suggestions are just so spot-on, and she catches all these continuity issues I missed. Sometimes I think she knows my book better than I do, haha). It’s so exciting to see the book inching step by step toward publication and finally getting into your hands.

(What about Speaking Bones? you ask. Cover is being worked on. More news soon … soon!)

Oh, one last thing about the Dandelion Dynasty. The Grace of Kings and The Wall of Storms made it onto Time magazine’s “The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.” To be in the company of amazing authors like Jin Yong, David Mitchell, N.K. Jemisin, Tochi Onyebuchi, Charlie Jane Anders and so many others is an incredible honor. Absolutely thrilled.

“The Cleaners”

There was an announcement a few weeks ago about Amazon working with Dominic Orlando and Orland Bloom to develop a magic realism story from me as a TV series.

The Cleaners tells how … inanimate objects carry the memories of people’s experiences, and a certain number of the population have the ability to relive those memories by touch. Cleaners are specialists hired to sanitize the objects and relieve emotional burdens these memories may hold. At the center of this story is a young man who inherits his family’s cleaning business, and takes on a mysterious new commission.

The story, which is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and The Pea, is part of Faraway, a collection of retold fairy tales that is set to be published on December 15 from Amazon Original Stories.

Now I can tell you more about the story itself.

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As you probably know from my previous work, I don’t much care about genre boundaries. In my fiction, I enjoy taking some aspect of reality that we normally speak of metaphorically and making it literally true. I never consciously aim at any genre. Sometimes the result of what I write is called “science fiction,” sometimes “fantasy,” and sometimes there is applicable no label at all. I don’t care what you call it as long as you get the story.

This particular story is probably closest to “State Change” in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. The fantastical element—that memories form deposits on objects and thus can be interpreted, shared, manipulated, stolen, and most importantly: cleansed—all by other people—is simply accepted as a given, and the characters try to live as mundanely as possible in such a world. It’s a story about Boston, about modernity, about families that become strangers and strangers that seem like family, about the difficulty of telling our own stories and the even more difficult task of accepting love with grace.

I really enjoyed working with Heidi Pitlor as my editor on this story. The team at Amazon Original Stories has been amazing as well. Definitely one of the best publishing experiences I’ve had.

You can find out more about the Faraway collection, which includes stories by Rainbow Rowell, Nic Stone, Soman Chainani, and Gayle Forman (in addition to “The Cleaners”) here on The Nerd Daily.

The collection will be available free to Prime members, as well as Kindle Unlimited subscribers on December 15, 2020. Readers can download each story individually, or get the whole collection with just one click. Stories are also available for non-members for $1.99, with the option to add digital audio for free.

“50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know”

I have a new story coming out with the November issue of Uncanny, one of my favorite magazines. This story is my collaboration with robo_ken and should be available online starting November 3. In the same issue is an interview about the process of writing with robo_ken, conducted by the always-insightful Caroline Yoachim.

I won’t spoil the story for you, but I can recommend two pieces of writing that go along with it.

The first is “Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know,” the direct inspiration for the story. I don’t know how to describe this wondrous work by Michael Sorkin, the great architectural critic and designer, so I won’t. Just go read it.

The second is You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, by AI expert, research scientist, and author Janelle Shane. If you don’t know much about the state of contemporary AI, this is an accessible, informative introduction that is also very funny. (Shane also writes extensively about the intersection of AI and creativity, a topic of great interest to me, as you know.) You should follow her AI Weirdness blog.

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories in the Goodreads Choice Awards

My collection is a nominee in the Goodreads Choice Awards this year!

Just the fact that readers thought enough of my book to mention it in this context fills me with joy. Should you want to participate in the voting, here’s the schedule:

Opening Round: October 27 - November 8
Semifinal Round: November 10 - November 15
Final Round: November 17 - November 30
WINNERS ANNOUNCED: December 8

Make your voice heard and go vote!

Events, Interviews, etc.

Vanity Fair has a little project to which I contributed:

“For four years, together and alone, we’ve quietly authored our own endings to the Trumpian roller coaster, whether in a week or another 100 years. Here, in part one of two, writers, poets, and politicos—from Adam McKay to Alexander Chee to Eileen Myles—weigh in with ideas of their own.”

“Making Our Home in a Story”: I had a great time as a guest on Andy Cahill’s “The Wonder Dome” podcast. Andy is an author, musician, life coach, and a fantastic interviewer. In this interview we talked about my philosophy on storytelling as an essential part of our journey as human beings.

I was part of 5G Things at Ericsson D-15, “a new cross-industry meeting forum for all things using 5G as the fabric for innovation.” I really enjoyed my session with Mo Katibeh, Chief Product & Platform Officer, AT&T Business. I was in my futurism mode and we chatted about the potential for 5G to make our lives meaningfully better. These moments of hope are so necessary. All the presentations at the conference are available to watch on-demand.

“Thoughts and Prayers” was reprinted in the Cyberpunk in 2020 issue of The London Reader. I’ve already gotten my copy and it looks fantastic (with stories by Lauren Beukes, Cat Rambo, Gwyneth Jones, and many others). Please check it out.

“Byzantine Empathy” was reprinted in Lightspeed. Though written a while ago, this story feels even more true now than it did before the pandemic.

I’ll be in conversation with R.F. Kuang in support of Rebecca's new book, The Burning God (the conclusion of the Poppy War series) on November 17, 2020. The event is sponsored by Brookline Booksmith (thank you!). Please sign up to get a copy of her fantastic book and to see her talk about the book and share advice on craft.

That’s it. Take care everyone!

Ken

The Hidden Girl in Development; George Takei, Conventions and Appearances

Happy October, everyone.

I have some great news to share, and this month presents multiple opportunities to see me in conversation with awesome authors. Let’s get to it.

FilmNation Developing “The Hidden Girl”

As reported by Variety:

[FilmNation Entertainment] has acquired Ken Liu’s sci-fi short story “The Hidden Girl,” with the intention of adapting it into a series. Liu is attached to executive produce the project, which sources say is already in discussions with potential directors and showrunners.

“The Hidden Girl” blends sci-fi and historical reality into a story set in a never-before-seen fantasy world derived from the cosmopolitan realities of Tang Dynasty China. In the story, a diverse group of women assassins travel through the fourth-dimension traversing space and time to kill their opponents, honor their professional code, and face down ethical dilemmas only too relevant for our conflict- and doubt-driven modern world.  

“The Hidden Girl” is the title story in my collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

One of my favorite books is Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which enthralled me as a child with its melding of social observation and mathematical wonder. I wrote “The Hidden Girl” to create a fantasy world in which that same kind of mathematical beauty can be a metaphor for ethical dilemmas more relevant to our world with each passing day.

It’s a story about abdicating individual moral responsibility to group identity, to professional codes, to rationalizations that are fundamentally monstrous. It’s about how it is easy to tear down but hard to build up. It’s about how our mentors can also be our abusers, and we need not forgive them even if we understand them. It’s about how in a terrible world, it’s still important to be decent, to empathize, to go against all that you’ve been taught and do what is right.

The folks at FilmNation are amazing. It’s still early days, but I have a good feeling about this.

George Takei Reads My Stories

That’s right. The great George Takei narrated two of my stories for Serial Box: “Saboteur” and “Summer Reading.”

Takei says he immediately appreciated the profound themes and characters that Liu’s two stories allowed him to explore. “The two are wonderful compliments to each other," he explains. "Saboteur is about man against technology. Summer Reading is where technology has absorbed all the things that make us human, the essential qualities of compassion, of treasuring the past, and the sharing of the past. These are human qualities that have been absorbed by this robot that is now the caretaker of this derelict, ancient planet. Now, it’s just visited by humans who have lost those essential qualities. They are just tourists. But the robot finds a spark of what makes him humane with a young human life.”

I’ve long admired Takei for his deep humanity and enduring activism. It’s a great honor to know that he read my stories and that they resonated with him. May we all live a life as generous as his, and hold on to hope in the face of despair.

Events

My confirmed appearances in October (everything is online):

NYCC Panel: “Can Mermaids Get Drunk? And Other Important Questions about Science and Fantasy,” with Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, Kat Leyh, Rebecca Roanhorse, and SB Diyva. October 11, 2020 (4:45-5:15 EDT).

Capclave 2020, October 17-18, 2020 (I’ll be doing one panel and a kaffeeklatsch, so please sign up and we can chat about what you want).

Conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse in support of Rebecca’s new book, Black Sun, sponsored by Brookline Booksmith, October 19, 2020. This is seriously the most epic book ever, and I can’t wait to talk to Rebecca about it. The book is so good that it hurts to think that you still haven’t read it!

Tech in SF discussion with Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz in support of Cory’s new book, Attack Surface, sponsored by Interabang Books, October 20, 2020. Anytime you get to see Cory and Annalee talking about anything, you should drop everything and sign up. Seriously. These are smart people.

Next week I’ll have a new publication to announce and some more events to share. Stay safe and be well.