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.