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Paper Animals: Ken Liu on Writing and Translating Science Fiction

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Ken Liu is a lawyer, programmer, science fiction translator, and author. In 2012, his short story “The Paper Menagerie” became the first work of fiction to win all three of the major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy Award. As a translator, he’s brought some of China’s most provocative, pioneering science fiction into the English-speaking world, including Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. As a Chinese-American translator, Liu is embedded within both American and Chinese science fiction writing communities. His background offers a prismatic lens into speculative Chinese futures, contemporary Chinese writing, and the popular imagination of present-day China. This interview was conducted by Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Yale, in early 2019. Let me start by asking about you: how did you come to write science fiction? I didn't set out to write sci-fi. I still don't know if I'm writing sci-fi, a

Paper Animals: Ken Liu on Writing and Translating Science Fiction Ken Liu is a lawyer, programmer, science fiction translator, and author. In 2012, his short story “The Paper Menagerie” became the first work of fiction to win all three of the major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy Award. As a translator, he’s brought some of China’s most provocative, pioneering science fiction into the English-speaking world, including Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem . As a Chinese-American translator, Liu is embedded within both American and Chinese science fiction writin

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