Interview with Ken Liu, Author Of Silkpunk Epic Fantasy Series The Dandelion Dynasty

Over two-and-a-half weeks this fall, I blew through Ken Liu’s science fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty. The four book-series weaves an epic story about people who rise to power, then learn the horrible truth of what it means to rule.

Off Colour sat down with author Ken Liu to chat about The Dandelion Dynasty, how he stayed grounded while writing about historical atrocities, and what’s next for him.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Keshav Kant
The Dandelion Dynasty is truly one of the best fantasy series I have ever read. How would you describe the story in your own words?

Ken Liu
Oh, my God, I’m so grateful! Thank you so much. Let me tell you a little bit about the story behind the story. Before writing The Dandelion Dynasty, I was mostly a short fiction writer. I got to travel quite a bit and meet readers and writers from around the world. One thing that came up and stayed with me was how readers described their sense of modernity being translated for them. They spoke their mother tongue at home, but then went off to college, and their classes were in English, or German or French; basically not in their native tongue. So when we talk about science, economics, or any of the things that one associates with modernity and the world we live in today, they wouldn’t have the words for those things in their native tongue.

I started thinking about what other aspects of modernity feel translated, and realized that when we’re talking about a modern country like the United States, we seem to have a lot of our own narratives wrapped up in translations. We model ourselves as some sort of modern incarnation of ancient Rome.

There’s a Senate. We have our federal buildings modelled after Roman buildings. We describe our democracy in ways by evoking Roman models. It’s fascinating to me that we constantly harken ourselves back to Rome as a model and translate our experience from that. So I wanted to write a story about the invention of modernity and having a modern, multi-ethnic state that has a shared national narrative, which I think of as its core constitution.

How would we imagine such a universe? If instead of using ancient Rome, what if we used, say, Han Dynasty China as the model? What if we can reimagine the invention of modern America or a similar country by using those classical East Asian references as the model? What would that be like? And how would that reveal our own biases and blind spots in using Rome as the model? Would that give us any new ideas about what constitutionalism means? How would modernity translate to all of us as North American English speakers?

So that’s the abstract version of what this story was about. But the concrete version was I wanted to build these cool silkmotic machines, and invent engines. I wanted to imagine stories of love, hate, loyalty, and of faith. I wanted to live in this world for a while, and I didn’t realize I would end up spending more than a decade on it. But it was a fun experience, a wonderful journey.

Keshav Kant
You spent a good amount of The Dandelion Dynasty not just talking about the difficulties of being a person in a position of power, but also of having to wield that power. You don’t pull any punches. When Kuni Garu takes over, he basically allows the imperial forces to commit any atrocity, except for killing people, for a week. This was one of the first books I’ve seen where an author has just shown the whole truth like that. What led you to make that decision? What was that writing process like for you?

Ken Liu
Hard, incredibly hard. I very much wanted to study how the emergence of modernity is a story of power. It’s all the terrible things that leaders in positions of power do and the decisions they had to make.

It’s hard to look back on the emergence of modernity and understand how these decisions were made and to understand the complexities and subtleties and nuances in their thinking. A lot of times, when we go back and look at these leaders, we think of them as hypocrites because they would say one thing and then yet their actions would seem to completely contradict their ideals. But then, when you really go into empathy, you can understand why this is. Understanding, by the way, is not the same thing as forgiveness. Understanding how these leaders work is not the same thing as forgiving them and accepting them as who they are.

We empathize with 100% human frailty and the complexities of what it means to be human and to make decisions. I wanted to capture all of that — how difficult it is to have a modern state emerge and how you still have to live with a legacy of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and enslavement. These are all real things, and you can’t just forget.

What does it mean to have a multi-ethnic society that is founded on the descendants of both the oppressors and the oppressed? How do you construct a shared national narrative out of that? And, who are the leaders whose stories would then become the template, the models that generations after would then reinterpret and make meaningful? This is very much the story of America and any other modern nation. And I wanted to get all of that in there, and it was hard.

It was emotionally extremely draining to think about these things. Margaret Atwood said that when she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, everything in there was real because somebody had done something like that to somebody else throughout history. Every atrocity, every horrible thing described [in The Dandelion Dynasty] was actually done by somebody to somebody in history. I didn’t make any of that up. And that was what made it particularly powerful because I had to face the reality of our terrible history to get to modernity.

Keshav Kant
I can, unfortunately, relate to that experience myself, having worked on a project about colonization, cultural misogyny and religious oppression in colonial India. There’s just times you have to walk away from the screen. But even when working on these projects you have to take care of yourself. How did you protect your own mental health while you were working through such concepts?

Ken Liu
I’m no expert on this, so I can’t claim that I can speak in a way that is proven. But what really helped me personally was to stay grounded in the life that I was living. I found it very helpful to reach out and help people as much as I could and to participate in community events. Offer to mentor other writers, to help work on publications, to teach. Participating in festivals and conventions, and do all the things that allow me to feel like I’m putting something out there and helping people and making them feel better.

I think there’s nothing that helps you stay grounded and hopeful than to just do things that bring joy to other people and participate in actions that make a difference in the community. Allow others to feel like you’re making their lives better. I think that it really ends up being of great benefit to you as the person doing the giving because it allows you to feel hope. To feel a sense that things really are better and things can be better. And there’s no substitute for that.

Keshav Kant
In contrast to the heavier side of the books, there are also stories of love. There are so many aspects of the story that talk about love. From familial connections, to romantic love, to platonic relationships, to people building community with each other. How did you walk that fine line between the heavier elements and bringing the human aspect of not just war and violence, but also bonding and finding love?

Ken Liu
It was really great to again stay grounded in history and realize that even in horrible times, in times of invasion, genocide, and enslavement, people have always been able to find joy. That is an essential part of being human. Even in the most horrible circumstances, people retain their humanity by giving each other joy. The victims of great oppression and horror were able to do that.

[There’s a] moment where two restaurants were having a competition to see which was the best restaurant. And this was in the middle of a lot of discussion about genocide and war. Sometimes readers might be kind of shocked that, suddenly, you have these characters engaged in something that seems so low stakes. It’s very critical to remember that even in the most horrible moments, we celebrate joy. We celebrate the fact that we create, that we make things, that we invent; we do, we love. They’re not going to take that away from us. The oppressors will never take away our humanity by denying us joy. We will not give in.

Keshav Kant
One thing that I adored is how you specified that there were accessibility laws put in for veterans and for people with disabilities across the State. You explicitly write that you need to have ramps, you need to have elevators for people who need assistive devices. Awareness of accessibility issues are a fairly relatively new thing in our society, so just to see that in a book was wonderful. And it’s not just the humans who are given that respect.

There are plants that play an active role. There are deities and even a pod of whales playing an active role. The whales are sentient beings with their own histories and their own motivations. They have their own ideas of how to move and navigate life. Whales and plants playing an active role in society isn’t something you see often, even in most fantasies. What was that from?

Ken Liu
It’s an aspect of something I deeply believe in. I think I’m very troubled by the way a lot of modern humanism seems to be so human-focused that we don’t account for all the other creatures who share the planet with us.

Humans are not the masters of this world. We are not here to terraform the place so that it only suits our needs. It’s pretty horrifying when you realize that the majority of the mammalian biomass on this planet consists of humans and creatures we have bred for our use, either as food or for labour. We shape the world and destroy the habitats of most creatures to suit ourselves and our parasites. That is not right; that’s not acceptable. Not only is it dangerous for us, but it’s also just repugnant at a very fundamental level that we do this.

I wanted to insist on the planetary nature of all life and the fact that we’re all related, connected, and part of a whole. And that is why I wanted to have scenes [with] non-human perspectives. There’s this scene in the Concord Islands where an eagle goes down with its own life. And I wanted to write from the eagle’s perspective to show that it’s not only about the humans, and that other animals do have [their own] perspective [which is] going to be different from ours.

They may not care about our conflicts, and that should be humbling to realize that there are other living beings on this planet who also have their own stories. They are the heroes of their own stories too. I wanted to honour that. And of course, that perspective also comes back near the end. That was deliberate. I wanted to make sure that, in the story of grand love, grand accomplishments and grand hopes and grand dreams, not only the human dreams were accommodated. That the animals would have their own voice as well.

Keshav Kant
You did that beautifully. Is there anything you would want someone who hasn’t read The Dandelion Dynasty to know before they jump in?

Ken Liu
The Dandelion Dynasty is a little unusual in that the books in the series are told in very different styles. And the stylistic choice is deliberate. The first book is deliberately toting a very distant, pre-modern style. It’s explicitly written in a way that echoes the style of books like The Iliad or The Odyssey, or something like that. Very old. It’s deliberately meant not to be like a modern novel. There’s something very distant and oral about it.

The second, third, and fourth books are different. They become successfully more modern, if you will, in that they now delve deeper into psychological inferiority, and they are much more focused on characters as opposed to external actions. This is on purpose. It may work for you, or it may not, but just know going in that that’s the case. You do have to expect the stories to have a different style.

Now, having said all of that, what I hope you get out of it really pretty much whatever you want. You just want to enjoy the crazy silkmotic engineering I put in there where I tried to construct computers, for lack of a better term, out of bamboo and silk. I was trying to reimagine the story of America through a silk punk, historical East Asian lens. There are battles, love stories, stories of modernity and violence. They are my attempt to capture reality. And in the same way that everybody will come to reality and emerge with a different interpretation, all I can say is I am grateful for you coming and being part of Daraa. And I hope you found the most interesting path through it.

Keshav Kant
That’s a wonderful note. Do you have any other projects coming down the pipeline that you can share? Is the book being adapted?

Ken Liu
The biggest thing right now is the paperback of Speaking Bones is coming out on January 30th. So I’m doing a mini-book tour to celebrate the completion of the series, which I’ve worked on for more than a decade. I do have a bunch of new projects coming out that I’m super excited for. I’ve gone back to writing short fiction, so I have a whole bunch of new publications coming out.

There’s a story I co-wrote with Caroline M. Yoachim, called ‘Collaboration?’ with Uncanny Magazine that we just published in January. I hope your readers will give it a read. It’s a really wonderful story. Carolyn and I both pushed each other to try interesting things in writing the story together, and I’m super proud of it. I know we both are very pleased with it, so I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Like I said, I do have a bunch of other projects coming out soon, but I can’t say anything until they come out. Just know that I’m having a great time writing. I’m very grateful to everybody who has supported my work. It really makes this job wonderful. I tell people always that I hope you get to tell the story you want to tell. Because that’s a really hard thing, and you get to do a little bit of it. You’re very lucky. And I feel like I got to tell you some of the stories I wanted to tell. I feel very blessed that I’ve been able to do that.