Ken Liu Quotes

I still tend to read more urban fantasy and romance than science-fiction, but every once in a while, a couple of books will come along and knock my socks off.

I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

I like certain subgenres within science fiction and fantasy, and one of those is urban fantasy, and another is steampunk.

British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson, and Cory Doctorow.

I'm very picky with what I read. It's a specific genre of science fiction.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

As for genre, my adult books are usually filed under science fiction / fantasy, although some stores put them into romance, and few have stuck them into horror. I consider all my books a mix of steampunk and urban fantasy.

Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

I'm a very promiscuous reader. My dad's a big science fiction fan, so I'd read 'Dune,' and 'Watership Down' and 'The Lord Of The Rings.'

Science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on outside.

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

With sci-fi you get these kind of stories in historical drama, and it's just so fabulous.

The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic.

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.

I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another.

In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.

Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.

I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.

There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.

I think that any sort of fantasy or sci fi that is grounded in something that could ostensibly be real - 'Jurassic Park' being my favorite example - is that much more prescient because it means that much more. Maybe one day, what if?

Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time - everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee - and it's an obsession that likely isn't going away any time soon.

I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.