The Wall of Storms (The Dandelion Dynasty, #2)

by Ken Liu

Welcome back to Dara! Fiction is a process of collaborative world-conjuring (I owe the phrase to the inimitable Jo Walton) between the writer and the reader, as the reader must bring the bare words on the page to life with an imagination tempered by her life experience, fill in the blanks spaces between the words with her own assumptions and beliefs about human nature, and shape the story to fit into her personal hoard of stories, real as well as imagined, that make up the essence of a mind. But there is another half to that dance, the part the writer plays. I hope that my comments on that part will add to your enjoyment as you bring Dara to life again, having finished The Grace of Kings. The Wall of Storms is about the “Dynasty” in the Dandelion Dynasty. Kuni Garu, now known as Emperor Ragin, frets over the right successor among his children to carry on the revolutionary changes in the Islands. However, his carefully laid plans are ruined by the sudden arrival of an implacable invasion force from beyond the fabled Wall of Storms. As far as plot summaries go, the above is accurate enough. But like most plot summaries, it tells you everything and nothing; it misses the point of the story entirely. (Think about it. When has the plot of a story ever been the reason you found it memorable? “They fought over a city for ten years” is not the reason you still think about Achilles and Hector. “Adam walked out of the Garden” is not why lines from Paradise Lost continue to haunt my brain, decades after I first encountered it. We may not remember all the twists and turns in Emma’s search for love, but we surely remember the brilliance of her character, the music in her author’s prose. There are certainly books written and read purely for plot, but I’m afraid that I don’t remember anything about them. That’s why I don’t think it’s a good idea to give a plot summary when someone asks what a book is “about.” The plot is just there to keep the reader reading; it’s not what makes the book worth your time. How would you describe a book you love to someone without resorting to a plot summary?) As I mentioned in the comments to passages from The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms is what I consider to be the start to the series proper (with TGOK serving as a prequel). In TGOK, I was largely concerned with laying the foundations of the silkpunk aesthetic and setting up a pre-modern society on the cusp of the leap into modernity. Why did I do this? Well, a driving impetus behind this series is my desire to challenge and interrogate the conventional narrative of modernity, which is often modeled on a particular telling of the story of my country, the US of A. The Story of America is most often told using allusions to “Western” models (just think of how many aspects of American politics and national culture evoke images of America as a “New Rome” and how easily we read Thucydides into every modern conflict involving America, with America starring as the “New Athens”). But when you are constrained to one set of allusions, you’re limited in how you can push readers to see something new in a familiar tale or, even bolder, to change the narrative entirely. Something radical had to be done. I decided to depart from the “New Rome” model and instead evoke East Asian models in this fantasy epic recasting of the Story of America — and by extension, the narrative of modernity. Thus, I borrowed much of the plot of TGOK from the Chu-Han Contention, as interpreted by the historian Sima Qian, and built up a vocabulary of non-Western political allusions and precedents that could then be drawn on in the re-imagining of the epic of modernity. The Wall of Storms is where all that effort begins to pay off. With most of the groundwork out of the way, I can get to the meat of this story about the creation of the constitution for a new people (a constitution, in my view, is not a document, but a set of stories that form the core of a people’s self-perception, self-regard, and deepest values). The plot here no longer has a clear, specific historic analog. (Thus, identifying the people of Dara as “fantasy Chinese” or the Lyucu as “fantasy Mongols” or any people in these books as “fantasy [fill in the blank group]” would be very much misguided.) Rather, the central concern of The Wall of Storms and its two sequels is a series of questions: How can a new nation built from a collection of diverse peoples compose a new constitution, agree on a new source of political legitimacy, rally around a new foundational mythology? How do we carry out a political experiment to build a more just society without creating more injustice? What weight should be given to the wisdom of tradition by revolutionaries? Is it a curse or a blessing that a new generation must contend with the weight of history they are born into and live with the decisions made by their forebears? Is a “perpetual revolution” desirable or even possible? … If those themes of The Wall of Storms seem to draw on my experience as a lawyer, then the next set of themes are based on my life as a technologist. TWOS is also a book about science and discovery. The Dandelion Dynasty is epic fantasy with a heavy dose of scifi—I mean, Luan Zya literally proclaims, “the universe is knowable,” a manifesto of the scientific view of the cosmos. I had some of my best writing moments in the discovery of the silkmotic force and the invention of the machines derived from its power. Many of the discoveries and inventions in this book are drawn from antecedents in China’s classical past; some are based on the work of ancient Greeks; some are modeled on the experiments of Ben Franklin; and still others are simply cut by me out of whole cloth. Being a technologist by trade, I love writing about discovery and innovation—and I’m pretty sure my readers enjoy reading about them too. Before we go too far down these philosophical routes, however, I should note that it would be just as accurate to say that TWOS is about young people flirting and partying and being silly and awesome garinafin-vs-airship set pieces and devious battle tactics—derived from history, to be sure, but also from the author’s experience in playing video games and watching football—and legalistic dirty tricks and deconstructionist mis-readings and fantastic engines constructed from silk and bamboo and giant capacitors humming with the power of lightning … I mean, sure, themes are important, but books always need *fun*. I wrote the book because I had things I wanted to say and I wanted to have fun. Those are the only two good reasons to write a novel as far as I’m concerned.

History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.

As a species, we seem incapable of understanding the universe except by telling stories. History is our collective effort at telling stories about the past. Like all stories, history imposes a shape and pattern on what is essentially random. So, some things are left out; some things are emphasized; causes are attributed to effects; plots are invented to explain away the fortuitous and coincidental. Even without deliberate efforts to mislead, stories about the same set of events in the past will differ depending on the teller and the audience. All histories are simplifications, sketches, shadows cast on the cave wall by the moth of reality flittering around a flickering flame, the details lost. Yet we cannot stop justifying our actions in the light cone of past precedents, to find emanations and penumbras that revise or reinforce the injustices we find in the present, to interpret and read history as a prologue to the future. This is both to be lamented and to be celebrated. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this, it’s the complexity of history, no less so than the present reality you know so well. We do the past an injustice when we think we can reduce it down to one story (or even a thousand stories). Even a thousand shadows cannot add up to one living reality; our ancestors were no less multidimensional than we, and we can’t fully honor our own humanity until we recognize theirs.

Never underestimate the power of the need to appear better than their peers to motivate people, a tendency that I’m happy to indulge.

Doru and Noda are speaking the language of scammers from time immemorial—and status-anxiety continues to drive much of the economy today. Concerning status-anxiety, Marcus Aurelius writes: “As to living in the best way, this power is in the soul, if it be indifferent to things which are indifferent.” (As rendered by George Long from the Greek original). And Laozi, in the Dao De Jing, writes (translation from the Classical Chinese mine): Heaven abides; earth endures. Without struggling to preserve themselves, they last. The Dao-aware put themselves last and so transcend competition, disregard the ego and so preserve their person. By acting selflessly, do they not therefore realize the self? It’s easy to know that we should transcend status-anxiety, but much harder to put the knowledge into practice. What are your tips for reaching that state of being indifferent to thing that make no difference? What are some techniques for disregarding self-harming competition that have worked for you?

“Great lords—whether mortal or immortal—do what they do because their concerns are not ours. We suffer because we are the grass upon which giants tread.”

One thing that the sorry state of pandemic-inflected global politics has brought to the forefront for me is the degree to which this sentiment remains true. As great lords brandish their submarines and missiles and strut around the world stage, proclaiming to be champions of this ideal or that truth, drawing lines around this body of water or that mountain, asserting one group to be “good” and denouncing another to be “evil,” there’s almost nothing that the ordinary people whose lives are actually in the balance can do to alter their fate. Even moving away from a homeland under threat is a privilege that few can afford, and most can only pray that missiles don’t start to fly and bombs don't start to drop. This was true in the time of Thucydides and Sima Qian, and it was lived reality for all my grandparents. Despite the various narratives we’ve spun of “progress” and “advancement,” the essential powerlessness of the vast majority of the planet’s population has remained a constant, their fate at the mercy of a few ambitious lords (or at most, an elite of the educated but ignorant and unwise) who wish to see themselves live on in song and story, to be praised as heroes who stand against darkness but who in fact bring about that very darkness. This is a core concern of the Dandelion Dynasty: how do you build a political system that not only constrains the power of the elite against those within the body politic, but also limits their power against those outside it? In other words, how do you create a republic that is just not only to citizens, but also those outside its walls? Can you have a powerful, constitutional state that doesn’t oppress those who don’t get to vote in its elections, that doesn’t wage perpetual war on distant shores, that doesn’t pursue dreams of empire, that doesn’t project its own way of life as the ideal for everyone else? Thucydides struggled with these questions. Thomas Jefferson struggled with these questions. Kuni Garu and Zomi Kidosu and Jia Matiza and many others in Dara have struggled with it and will struggle with these questions in the rest of the saga. I can tell a grand story of hope in fiction, but fiction is much easier than reality

“True courage is to insist on seeing when all around you is darkness.”

An opportune passage to follow the (rather depressing) sentiment of the previous one. How do you go on? How do you keep at it when life keeps on throwing your powerlessness in your face? A book I’ve really admired recently is Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller. This is a hard book to describe. It has elements of biography, autobiography, history of science, science, memoir, journalism … and doesn’t sit comfortably within any one category. The best way I’ve found to tell people about the book is to say that it is an attempt to answer the questions in the previous paragraph. Another book that, to me, tries to answer the same questions is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Miller, Laozi, Marcus Aurelius, Dillard – all were trying to find the answer to how to go on when death looms around every corner, when heaven and earth aren’t benevolent, when powerlessness is the essence of the human condition. The answers they give are similar in some ways, different in others. But I admire their courage in trying to answer the question at all, in trying to *see*. May you also find your own answers. I want to see with you.

The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.”

After contemplating Confucius’s original writings on 孝 (pronounced xiào, a core concept in Chinese culture on the duty owed by children to parents with no English equivalent but often mistranslated as “filial piety”), this is the most accurate and succinct way for me to explain what he meant. I’ll wait a bit until all the angry shouting has died down. Still at it? I’ll wait a little more. Yes, typically when 孝 is brought up, one sees references to obedience and honor and deference and more extreme ideas—most of them elaborations by later commentators (and often entangled with ideas about compliance with political authority). But when you prune all that away and go back to what Confucius actually wrote, what emerges is an abiding concern with finding one’s proper place in the world, with defining the individual self through a set of relationships and connections, with kindness and respect welling forth from a proper understanding of the interwoven character of identities at all levels—add all that up, and what you have is an exhortation to discover one’s true nature in order to express it fully through the community of relationships, which is also the only proper way to honor our ancestors. Those steeped in conventional (mis)interpretations of 孝 are free to continue to shout angrily at me; I don’t really care. I think Kuni Garu would approve of my re-interpretation of Confucius, and that is all the authority I need.

Not every mind learns the same way. A knife needs to be sharpened against stone, but a pearl needs to be polished with soft cloth.

There’s a lot of “what works for me must work for everyone” in life. A reader thinks that a book he hates must be hated by every right-thinking individual. A family thinks that the way they go about budgeting must be the way everyone else budgets. A city thinks that their solution to housing should be applicable to every place. A country thinks that its way of life must be desirable for everyone in the world, and if the country is sufficiently powerful, that way of life should be imposed on others at point of sword. The internet also seems to be a medium uniquely suited to the genre of judgmental proclamations of “This Is the One True Way.” Maybe that’s why it feels so exhausting to browse these days. I wish more people in actual positions of power and judgment adopted the attitude of Luan Zya. Early on as a writer, I got a lot of “rules” thrown at me about how you’re supposed to do things. Don’t shift point of view within the same scene. Grab your reader with the first sentence. Show, don’t tell. Eliminate passive constructions. Come up with memorable, punchy titles. Study bestsellers so you can write them… Oh, and my favorite: write in such a way so that you don’t “sound like an amateur,” whatever that means. I tried diligently to follow the advice I was given, but the rules just didn’t work for me. But why should they? Such advice is based on the experience of other people, and you can’t tell your own story by following someone else’s road. Any book worth reading is written in a sui generis idiolect that reflects the mind of the author, that belongs to that author alone. Milton did not write in some nondescript, generic tongue called “Early Modern English.” He had to invent *his* language suited to the task of justifying the ways of God to men: bending the vernacular to fit the syntax of Latin; blending allusions ancient and modern, biblical and scientific; seducing the reader into sin with classical rhetorical tropes before thundering them awake with Puritanical rage. Lu Xun did not write his fiction in some bare grapholect devoid of personality called “Modern Standard Written Chinese.” He had to invent *his* language suited to the task of awakening a nation on the verge of spiritual death, of rejuvenating a classical language of the brush with unfamiliar syntax and vocabulary imported from the West, with neologisms and slang drawn from the revolutionary air. Poe, Austen, Melville, Faulkner, Morrison, Butler, Le Guin … every author who has ever written a book worth remembering has had to invent their own language, dream up their own craft, tell their own story. So I’m going to shift POV in a scene as often as I please; tell instead of show when telling is what’s needed; use passive constructions when they feel right; lean into a rhythm and prosody that suits my voice; double down on allusions and rhetorical ropes and words that speak to me, whether cosmopolitan in source or of my own design … until I’ve crafted a language of my own that *is* suited to telling only the stories I want to tell. What are some “rules” you’ve been told in your life that turned out to be utter nonsense for you? How did you end up inventing your own way? May each of you get to tell the story you want to tell. Always.

Engineering is the art of solving problems by combining existing machines into new machines, and harnessing the effects of the sub-machines to accomplish a novel effect.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this is based on some of the core ideas in W. Brian Arthur’s masterful The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves. Many of the engineering scenes in TWOS are based on my own experience in the tech industry and serve as a fictional realization of my own view of engineering as a species of poetry. I hope that the beauty and joy of working with technology—the grand epic poem of our time—comes through in my words. More recently, I’ve been learning some Minecraft engineering under the tutelage of my daughters. Working with redstone just reminded me again how insightful Arthur’s ideas on engineering are. It really is a lot like learning Chinese characters or Dara logograms or building with Legos or programming: you learn a basic set of components and then combine them into more complex mechanisms that evolve into components for yet grander, more complex machines until you have something utterly dizzying to contemplate. (Some of my daughters’ creations are breathtaking. They built this massive roller coaster with dozens of powerful beams of light illuminating it from below, and riding it was every bit as thrilling as the rides at theme parks.) Besides being a great description of engineering, the quote here is also a great metaphor for writing fiction as well as how we make sense of our own lives as we adapt the ready components of what we learn and acquire into the grander, novel experience of who we are.

What courage it took for the starving and the poor to continue the mere act of existence, of survival, of endurance. Such quiet acts of heroism were not celebrated, and yet they made up the foundation of civilization, far more than all the honorable sentiments of the Ano sages and the pretty words of the nobles.

The vast majority of the people who have ever lived on this planet have left no monuments, no story or song, not even a name to remember them by. I think this will be true of most of us living today and most of those who’ll come after us. But that doesn’t mean that they and we haven’t lived or will live lives worthy of celebration and remembrance. We forget how hard it is just to get though the day, to go on in the face of the existential abyss, to have children knowing that we’ll die, to keep on hoping when everything seems hopeless, to work in the face of relentless entropy, to build in the shadow of decline and corruption, to love and care when the voices of hate are so deafening. Generations of our ancestors suffered at the whims of the powerful but also laughed in their faces; they loved and schemed and invented and stole and dreamed and struggled—but they survived, and that is how you and I came to be: merely by existing, we’re triumphs. Dara is too grand for me to be able to tell the story of everyone in it. But I’d like to think that each of you, by imagining how you would live in a place like Dara, brings yet anther soul to life in that world.

Sentiment makes us fools, and yet, without sentiment, we would be little better than dumb instruments wielded by the gods in their incomprehensible games.

This is a recurring theme in the Dandelion Dynasty. After calculation and weighing the benefits and costs, ultimately every decision of moment must come down to a leap of faith, to emotion and sentiment. This is because emotion and sentiment are how we assign meaning to this essentially random universe. All talk of the primacy of rationalism must be, in the final analysis, mere rationalizations. This is the human condition, and my characters can become heroes only after accepting this truth.

Weigh the fish, the universe is knowable. A cruben breaches; the remora detaches. Mewling child, cooing parent, Grand-souled companions, brothers, Wakeful weakness, Empathy that encompasses the world. To imagine new machines, to see unknown lands, To believe the grace of kings belongs to all. Grateful.

One of my favorite parts of TWOS involves the relationship between Luan Zya and Zomi Kidosu. They are, respectively, the best teacher and the best student. Significant turns in my life were catalyzed by teachers and mentors. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college, law school, clerkship, first job, second job, third job—at every stage a teacher stepped forth and said something kind to me that I still remember decades later, made me believe in myself when I had no reason to, showed me a novel way of looking at the universe, modeled for me how to be what I wanted to be … I would not be who I am without them, and to them I am eternally grateful. In classical Chinese culture, respect for one’s teacher is as important as respect to one’s parents. The weight of responsibility on both sides is heavy. To be someone’s teacher is to be responsible for guiding their entry into a new domain of life, and to be someone’s student means you also become a part of their legacy. But unlike parent-child relationships, the bond between teacher and student has the potential to transform into something else. The most celebrated teacher-student relationships evolve into abiding friendships between equals. Great teachers learn from their students. Which teachers were important to you? What did they say to you that you still remember? And how have you, in turn, been the best teacher you could be to those who look up to you? Finally, “empathy that encompasses the world” is my rendering of the classical Chinese concept of 仁, an important word that has no English equivalent but is sometimes mistranslated as “benevolence.” The people of Dara are humanists in the deepest sense of that word, and Luan Zya, even unto death, was true to 仁.

True courage comes not from being certain and unafraid, but from doing what must be done even while being terrified and full of doubts.”

Judging by our politics, this doesn’t seem a popular view of courage in leadership. We seem to prefer our leaders to be utterly convinced of their announced course, to give no quarter to alternative points of view, to leave no room for new information, to never apologize or explain, to display the illusion of strength rather than strength of character, to just be the human version of a locomotive going at full steam down the rails. While I can cite multiple theories explaining why this kind of stay-the-course, doubt-free form of political posturing is actually good for aggregating voter preferences and healthy for democracy, I don’t agree with any of them. Doubt over the path one is on is essential to growth, to gaining wisdom, to becoming a better human being. I can’t really trust leaders who express no doubt whatsoever in what they proclaim—where doubt ends, tyranny begins.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Wall of Storms only begins Dara’s momentous leap into modernity. The next two books, The Veiled Throne and Speaking Bones, will finally fulfill the covenant first set forth in The Grace of Kings to show the winding and arduous journey of a new people fighting for a new constitutive foundational myth. There will, of course, also be new silkmotic-force-powered engines and new myths and new gods and new battle strategies and new mouthwatering dishes and new philosophies and new heartbreaks and new punkish re-interpretations of the classics. May your journey in Dara be as thoughtful as it is joyous.