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Ken Liu

Ken Liu (born 1976) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novel translations and original short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.[2]

Liu has also written an epic fantasy novel series, The Dandelion Dynasty, which he describes as silkpunk. The series is published by Simon & Schuster.[3]

Childhood and career

Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou, China.[4] He spent his childhood with his grandparents.[5] His mother, who received her Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States, is a pharmaceutical chemist, while his father is a computer engineer.[6] The family immigrated to the United States when Liu was 11 years old.[4] 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.[7] At Harvard College, he studied English Literature and Computer Science, receiving his A. B. in 1998.[7][8]

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.[7][8]

Liu began publishing fiction in 2002. His first published work was "Carthaginian Rose", a short story on mind uploading, which was published alongside nine other authors in The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology Volume 1.[9]

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”.[10]

After a long career writing and publishing short fiction, Liu turned to epic fantasy novels, starting with The Grace of Kings (2015).[11] He has also written for the Star Wars universe, with The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017).[12]

Along with his original work, Liu has translated the works of multiple Chinese authors into English, including Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang, Chen Qiufan, and Xia Jia.[13] His translation of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin helped the book become a best seller to English readers.[14] He has also worked as an editor. While editing the anthology Invisible Planets, Ken Liu translated the stories contained within it from Chinese into English.[15]

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.[16] His short story "Real Artists" was adapted into the short film Real Artists (2017) by Cameo Wood.[17] His short story "Good Hunting" was adapted into an animated short as part of Netflix's Love, Death & Robots series (2019).[18] Several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories were adapted for the animated Pantheon.[19]

Liu's short story collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020) explores ideas such as tradition and progress, the fallibility of memory, and the essence of what it means to be human.[10]

Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.[20]

Awards

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.[1] In addition, his short story, "Mono no aware" won the 2013 Hugo Award,[21][22] and his novella "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" was also nominated for a Hugo.[23] The first novel in his The Dandelion Dynasty series, The Grace of Kings, was a 2016 Nebula Award finalist.[24] The novel was the 2016 Locus Award Best First Novel winner.[25]

Besides his original work, Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's Chinese language novel The Three-Body Problem (the first in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy) won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, making it the first translated novel to have won the award.[26] Liu also translated the third volume of the Remembrance of Earth's Past series, Death's End, in 2016, which was a 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist.

One of Liu's short stories, "Thoughts and Prayers", is a part of Jonathan Strahan's The Year's Best Science Fiction (2020), Vol 1.

Winner

Nominated or finalist

Bibliography

Novels

  1. The Grace of Kings. Saga Press. 2015. ISBN 9781481424271.
  2. The Wall of Storms. Saga Press. 2016. ISBN 9781481424301.
  3. The Veiled Throne. Saga Press. 2021. ISBN 9781481424332.
  4. Speaking Bones. Saga Press. 2022. ISBN 9781982148973.

Short fiction

Collections

Anthologies (edited)

Short stories

Translations

Remembrance of Earth's Past Series

Liu's works in translation

Many of Liu's short stories have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and multiple other languages and published in short stories collections:[42]

Chinese
Japanese
French
Spanish

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.[43][44]

References

  1. ^ a b Reid, Luc (2013-03-25). "Not Just Vast Armies Clashing on Dark Plains at Night: An Interview with Ken Liu". Strange Horizons. Archived from the original on 2013-05-30. Retrieved 2013-05-15.
  2. ^ "Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy". Clarkesworld Magazine. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  3. ^ "Ken Liu Talks Silkpunk, Old Poems, and Contemporary Chinese SFF in His Reddit AMA". Tor.com. 13 April 2015.
  4. ^ a b "MEET THE MAN BRINGING CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION TO THE WEST". Newsweek. 2016-10-30. Retrieved 2019-01-05.
  5. ^ "Ken Liu Talks Silkpunk, Old Poems, and Contemporary Chinese SFF in His Reddit AMA". Tor.com. 13 April 2015. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  6. ^ "Ken Liu won science fiction awards for best short story". AsiaOne. 2013-09-09. Retrieved 2019-01-05.
  7. ^ a b c "Waterford alum — and award-winning short story writer — Ken Liu releases his debut novel". The Day (New London). 2015-04-14. Retrieved 2019-01-05.
  8. ^ a b "Fusion Fantasy: Ken Liu's sprawling hybrid fiction". Harvard Magazine. November–December 2016. Retrieved 2019-01-05.
  9. ^ Liu, Ken (2002). "Carthaginian Rose". Ken Liu, Writer. Archived from the original on 2019-12-14. Retrieved 2019-12-14.
  10. ^ a b Ouellette, Katherine (2020-02-24). "Modern Mythmaking In Ken Liu's 'The Hidden Girl And Other Stories'". www.wbur.org. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  11. ^ 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)
  12. ^ Floyd, James (2017-11-01). "Interview on The Legends of Luke Skywalker". StarWars.com. Retrieved 2019-03-15.
  13. ^ Sullivan, Colin (2016-08-20). "Chinese SF and the art of translation". Nature.com. Archived from the original on 2019-07-02. Retrieved 2019-03-15.
  14. ^ Doctorow, Cory (2019-12-04). "How Ken Liu went from engineer to lawyer to SF writer to the foremost translator of Chinese sf into English". boingboing.net. Retrieved 2019-12-06.
  15. ^ Carroll, Tobias (2016-11-15). "Ken Liu Will Keep an Open Mind". electricliterature.com. Retrieved 2019-12-06.
  16. ^ "Beautiful Dreamer (2016)". IMDb. Retrieved 2019-03-15.
  17. ^ "Real Artists (2017)". IMDb.
  18. ^ ""Good Hunting" and Netflix's Love, Death & Robots". kenliu.name. 2019-03-15. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  19. ^ "The Hidden Girl and Other Stories". kenliu.name. Archived from the original on December 28, 2022. Retrieved December 28, 2022.
  20. ^ "About". kenliu.name. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
  21. ^ "2013 Hugo Awards". 22 December 2012. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  22. ^ David Barnett (2 September 2013). "The Hugo awards: 'beauty contest' or prize of the people?". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  23. ^ "2012 Hugo Awards". 7 April 2012. Archived from the original on 9 April 2012. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  24. ^ "Nebula Award Winners Announced". 15 May 2016.
  25. ^ "2016 Locus Award Winners". locusmag.com. 25 June 2016. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  26. ^ "2015 Hugo Awards". 31 March 2015. Retrieved 2015-08-23.
  27. ^ "2017 Locus Award Winners". locusmag.com. 24 June 2017. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  28. ^ "2017 Locus Award Winners". locusmag.com. 24 June 2017. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  29. ^ "2016 Locus Award Winners". locusmag.com. 25 June 2016. Retrieved 15 March 2019.
  30. ^ "2015 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. 31 March 2015. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  31. ^ "2012 Winners". sfftawards.org. Retrieved June 1, 2012.
  32. ^ "Announcing the 2020 Locus Awards Finalists". Tor.com. 2020-05-29. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
  33. ^ "2017 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. 31 December 2016. Retrieved 2017-10-11.
  34. ^ "Locus Online News » 2015 Locus Awards Finalists". www.locusmag.com. 4 May 2015. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  35. ^ "Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction News and Events". Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Archived from the original on 2012-06-15. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  36. ^ "2014 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced". SFWA. 20 February 2015. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  37. ^ "2014 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced". SFWA. 20 February 2015. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  38. ^ "2014 Sidewise Award Finalists". Locus. 2014-06-06. Retrieved 2014-06-06.
  39. ^ "Locus Online News » 2014 Locus Awards Finalists". www.locusmag.com. 7 May 2014. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  40. ^ "2012 Nebula Awards Nominees Announced". SFWA. 20 February 2013. Retrieved 2015-10-11.
  41. ^ Andrew Liptak (19 October 2018). "How a fan fiction for Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem became an official novel". The Verge.
  42. ^ "Foreign Language Collections". Archived from the original on 2019-03-30. Retrieved 2015-02-21.
  43. ^ Ramin, Zahed. "Sci-Fi Epic 'Pantheon' Updates AMC+ as a Cool New Animation Destination". Retrieved September 26, 2022.
  44. ^ "The Hidden Girl and Other Stories". kenliu.name. Retrieved 2022-12-28.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ken Liu.