The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1)

by Ken Liu

A NOTE

Welcome to Dara! You’re about to get started on something that took up the bulk of my time and creative energy over a ten-year period. I learned a lot about myself as a writer, as a father, as a husband, as a grandchild, as a technologist, as a lawyer, and as a person. I can’t wait to take you from the opening lines of this book all the way to the final period after the last sentence in Speaking Bones. A quick preliminary note: I invented the term “silkpunk” specifically to describe the aesthetic in the Dandelion Dynasty series. (Other authors have used my term to describe their own books, and I won’t be talking about their uses. My only concern here is my definition, for my aesthetic.) Silkpunk involves a technology vocabulary that uses bamboo, silk, paper, animal sinew, ceramics, feathers … materials of great historical importance to China and other East Asian cultures, as well as a technology grammar that emphasizes biomimicry, wind/water power, wooden architecture, balance with the local environment, an integrated view of the artificial and the natural … concepts central to East Asian traditions of engineering. It is, in the simplest terms, an alternative technology evolutionary tree based on East Asian historical antecedents and philosophies. It is not “Asian steampunk.” It is not “Asian fantasy.” The “punk” part is also not a worn suffix devoid of content. To me, silkpunk is about a key punk project: re-purposing what was for what will be. These books are my rewriting of the narrative of modernity (and in the later books in particular, the modern American national narrative). Using Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian for the plot, I begin to sketch in this novel an alternate vision of modernity, an imaginative edifice whose outlines will not come into focus until the next book. This is a vision of modernity no longer exclusively centered on what we think of as the “Western” experience. Rather, it melds multiple traditions and myths important to me, from the Iliad to Beowulf, from Paradise Lost to wuxia, and transforms the Chu-Han Contention into the foundational political mythology of a brand-new, modern people. The Grace of Kings is just the first step in the project of modernity: forming a new understanding of the pre-modern order. As a technologist, I had a lot of fun coming with up the silkpunk technology in these books: the submarines, airships, battle-kites, wax logograms, city-ships, electrostatic automata … Most are based on historical antecedents, and I performed enough calculations and experiments to be comfortable that they should function, give or take an order of magnitude in the forces involved — close enough for fantasy engineering! But no point in telling you about them here. Go on, enjoy discovering them in this volume and the rest of the series.

Creation seems to favor making friends of those destined to be enemies.”

This will be a recurring motif not just in The Grace of Kings, but throughout the series. It is derived from Daoist philosophy, where binary oppositions—the first and the last, the high and the low, the choleric and the phlegmatic, the altruistic and the selfish—are mutually generative as well as destructive. It recurs in much Chinese culture, including traditional medicine (which inspired Jia’s little lecture here) and wuxia literature, which Jin Yong elevated into the highest echelon of storytelling forms by skillfully melding Western and Chinese narrative techniques. A particular type of story that has always fascinated me: two companions become the best of friends as they suffer and struggle and build, enduring trials and tribulations, striving toward a shared dream; but, just as they begin to achieve success, divisions and jealousies and differences, both grand and petty, sunder their bond, plunging them into bitter recrimination and strife. We see this all the time in life: startup founders who sic lawyers on each other days after the IPO; struggling band members who turn against one another once they finally get the recognition they crave; revolutionaries who launch purges and counter purges as soon as the ancien régime has been overthrown. People who can endure adversity together cannot always enjoy fame and happiness together. I have my theories for why this is so … what are your theories? In the end, I don’t think there’s a simple explanation for this constant pattern in human affairs. Like unhappy families, every broken friendship has its own saga.

Sir, a reformed man is worth ten men virtuous from birth, for he understands temptation and will strive the harder to not stray.”

One of my favorite things about Kuni is that he’s always ready with some almost-plausible, self-serving, delicious re-interpretation of the classics. (I suppose he’s a bit of a silkpunk himself!) But no matter how outrageous these interpretations are, there is always a kernel of sincerity in him. I think Kuni would get along very well with Oscar Wilde, Catullus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mark Twain, Zhuangzi, and Zora Neale Hurston. Anyone else you want to nominate for his dinner party?

If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.”

Unjust laws have no claim to obedience. Oppressive governments throughout history have piled law upon law, punishment upon punishment, blithely sailing along as the waves of popular resentment grew ever stormier, until they were wrecked on the shoals of rebellion. Starting revolutions, however, is easy compared to building the new political order that comes after. All too often, we celebrate the act of rebellion, the destruction of what was, without giving the same attention to the arduous, often unglamorous work of building what will be: the compromises, the hard decisions to prioritize this over that, to demand sacrifices of some and to reward others, to delay justice in the name of expediency, to not only honor the commonweal and the republic, but to also define the very meaning of these terms. In real life, most revolutions fail not because they can’t overthrow the unjust past, but because they can’t build a better future. I wrote this saga to correct that bias, at least a little bit.

The best followers are those who think it was their own idea to follow you.

This is from Laozi’s Dao De Jing: “The best leaders are carefree and at ease, for they rarely issue orders. Their task accomplished, the people simply say, ‘Hasn’t it always been so?’” Our models of leadership tend to emphasize the active, the interventionist, even the coercive. But my own experience is that the best leaders really are those who do little explicit “leading.” They tend to facilitate rather than direct, empower rather than command, let go rather than seize the reins. Kuni’s style of leadership will be challenged in a world of warfare and plots, intrigue and betrayal, but there is a through line of empowering those who follow him. Jia’s approach to leadership is rather different. However, I can’t say either is definitely more effective than the other, not when measured by their respective political goals.

Mere coincidences. What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?

This echoes something I said in the introduction to my collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories: “For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors—which is the logic of narratives in general—over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.” I don’t believe in fate, but I also don’t think the best way to understand life is as a sequence of random events, one after another. To make sense of lived experience, to give shape to our own character arc, we construct a self-narrative that, in the end, is the only measure of our soul, the only authoritative account of our journey through Dante’s dark wood, complete with wanderings off the straight path, replete with digressions that ultimately redeem our fortunate errors and lucky falls. The gods of Dara know more than they let on.

“When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.”

This is a rephrasing of a common sentiment in wuxia fantasy dating back to the Tang Dynasty and earlier (with ultimate roots in, again, Daoist philosophy). Master swordsmen don’t rely on precious steel blades; they can do more damage with a sword made from bamboo. Greater still are the swordsmen who don’t even wield bamboo swords but can slay with a flower petal or a blade of grass. Greatest of all are masters who don’t need any weapons at all: they triumph through the strength of their spirit, overcome by not contending, win by not fighting. It’s not exactly a spoiler to say that it’s worth paying attention to who says this in the book. The payoff will not come for thousands of pages.

While scrolls filled with wax logograms were used for poetry and song, books like this one, dense codices made from thin sheets of paper bound together, were packed with zyndari letters and numbers, suitable for note taking and the passing on of practical knowledge.

Throughout the Dandelion Dynasty series, I play with writing and bookmaking. Coming up with fantastical forms of writing and bookmaking was one of the most fun parts of working on this series, as writing systems happen to be a topic of great interest. Indeed, in some ways one could argue that the Dandelion Dynasty is the epic fantasy version of my flash story, “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species.” While the zyndari letters are directly inspired by Korean hangul, there is no real-world analogue to the wax logograms used to write Classical Ano. While the wax logograms may superficially remind some of Chinese writing, hanzi-users can see right away that the wax logograms don’t function at all like Chinese characters. For one thing, the logograms are a true three-dimensional script, with each logogram sculpted in layers – not just two-dimensional writing raised up from the page; for another, the logograms are far more committed to representing the concept (as opposed to the sound) of words in comparison to hanzi. The various customs and cultural practices around logograms, such as riddles, visual puns, emphasis on calligraphy, etc, may again remind some readers of hanzi-culture, but the Classical Ano versions of these cultural practices serve different purposes, being rooted in a fantasy world that rhymes with the real world and yet isn’t bound by it. (I could go on and on … in fact, I have done so in a paper on the features of Classical Ano. Yes, I write fanfic for my own world. I told you this is the most fun I’ve ever had.)

A lord who knows how to wield men is ten times more fearsome than one who knows only how to wield a sword.”

This entire episode is just another reflection of how Mata and Kuni have very different views on leadership, the meaning of courage, the definition of justice, the worth of a life lived and of lives lost. How do they come to have these differences? I think people come to possess different soul-hues because of divergent journeys they take through that dark wood of life and the distinct stories that define the values at the cores of their identities. When I see the word “love,” I think about my grandmother staying up late when I was a child, knitting a sweater slowly with her arthritic hands so that I wouldn’t be cold; when I see the word “mentor,” I think about the judge I clerked for comforting me after an error, telling me that she didn’t hire me because she thought I knew everything, but because she believed I could learn; when I see the word “courage,” I think about my grade school friends shielding me from a fierce dog, not backing away one step. We love others as we were loved. We fight for our children as our ancestors had fought for us. What are the stories you think of when you see these words? Or “faith,” “hope,” “charity,” “grace,” “patience” …? It is these stories, far more than abstract philosophy or self-referential dictionary definitions, that define who someone is. When people shout at one another, each utterly convinced that they have “justice,” “equality,” “freedom,” “love,” “compassion,” “privacy,” “democracy,” or similar values on their side, it is largely because they have different stories that give content to these abstractions. They may think they’re using the same words, but they are speaking completely different languages. When you know someone, it means you know (at least some of) the core stories behind the words they use. So long as Mata and Kuni were willing to know each other’s stories, they would remain friends.

Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could no longer see himself.

There is a lot of psychology research showing that we respond to the aura of confidence that some people can project. It matters little whether they’re indeed wise or knowledgeable, prudent or thoughtful – so long as they come across as confident, we think they’re all of these things and more, that they make good leaders. Having doubt is somehow seen as a bad thing. The more our leaders say they’re unmoved by evidence to change course, the more we call that “integrity.” The more our leaders claim that they have no doubts or regrets, the more we call that “virtue.” I don’t know. Personally, I can’t see my way to trusting anyone who has no regrets or doubts, who claims they already know everything and can’t have their minds changed. My instinct is to inch away from such people and desperately seek a way out of the very bad conversation I’m trapped in—they’re bound to be boors as well as bores. But too much doubt can also be a bad thing. Too many of us end up regretting the chance not taken, the résumé not handed in, the hand not raised. We let the “confident” jackasses get all the best perks. How to find the balance between no-doubt and doubt is a tough one, probably the toughest conundrum there is.

Now that I have seen the larger world, I wish to change it, as does Mata. But while he wishes to restore the world to a state that never was, I wish to bring it to a state that has not yet been seen.

Epic fantasy is sometimes described – by those who don’t read much of it – as “conservative” in outlook. These big tomes, so goes the stereotype, yearn for the “return of the king,” for the “chosen one” to ascend to the throne so that all that is wrong with the world can be put in the rightful place, and the chaotic, diseased body politic can be restored to the golden status quo ante. People who think like this clearly have not read much epic fantasy. Certainly not masters of the genre like Kate Elliott or Rebecca Roanhorse. In any event, by claiming that epic fantasy, which often draws from history, is inherently pro-monarchy, this criticism also plays into a false narrative that views modernity as uniquely the invention of the West. In reality, all the theories and technologies enabling modern governments, such as checks-and-balances, government with the consent of the governed, constitutionalism, limits on absolute sovereign power, councils and elections …, have predecessors in antiquity all over the world. The need to balance competing political factions, to ascertain and aggregate the preferences of the public, to check the power of special interests, to constrain ever-expanding bureaucracies and root out corruption, to provide legitimacy to laws, to carry out the will of the majority while protecting the core interests of minorities, to ensure that everyone feels like they have a voice in decisions affecting the fate of all, to construct a foundational national narrative that heals and empowers … these needs were as true in pre-modern England and Venice as they were in Song-Dynasty China, in Joseon Korea, in Haudenosaunee, or pre-statehood Botswana. And so peoples from around the world throughout history have devised institutions and organizational technologies to satisfy these needs, to step ever closer to a perfect form of government—which, by the way, we have not ever achieved anywhere on this earth. That some of us now believe, without irony, that responsive, constitutional, legitimate governments are inventions of the “West” simply shows the absurdity of a world still mired in the false stories left by centuries of colonialism. The Dandelion Dynasty is about re-purposing historical antecedents for a new modernity, to rescue history from the colonial gaze. I find much inspiration in the wisdom of the ancients, much grace to confront the challenges of the modern world. Kuni and those who follow him want no return to some imaginary golden age, to rule under the absolute despotism of philosopher kings. Limited by the social and institutional technologies available to them, the people of Dara will have to engage in experimentation at a massive scale to bring their world to a state no one had ever seen, a state we’d recognize as modernity. That is the true epic journey of the series. The people of Dara do not believe that their nation is perfect, but they do believe that it can be perfected.

The grace of kings is not the same as the morals governing individuals.”

“The Grace of Kings” is an allusion to Shakespeare. “And by their hands this grace of kings must die, If hell and treason hold their promises, Ere he take ship for France, and in Southampton.” -- Henry V, Act 2, Prologue It is also, within the context of this series, an allusion to one of Zhuangzi’s most famous parables (to explain how would … alas, be a spoiler). This phrase will return again and again in the rest of the series, each time acquiring a different meaning, as more and more stories, commentaries, parables are layered on top of one another, with later commentators and historians re-interpretating earlier events, and still later commentators and historians revisioning those re-interpretations to rediscover their “true” meanings, and on and on … Pretty much the way all of us muddle our way through this massive collective storytelling game we call “civilization,” generation after generation. Remember this comment from Luan Zya – it will haunt everything that comes after.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In some ways, The Grace of Kings could be considered the prequel to the series proper, as it introduces the reader to a world already passing, a world on the verge of a cataclysmic transformation. While this book is about the pre-modern world, a world of myths and legends, and the rebellion that tears it all down, the hard task of building something new is saved for the next one, The Wall of Storms. I hope you’ve enjoyed your time in Dara, and I’ll see you there again soon. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18952381-the-wall-of-storms https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18952403-the-veiled-throne