The 'Grace of Kings' begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices - among them the oppressed position of women - but gradually transforms into something better through a series of revolutions. But since real social change takes a long time, even by the end of the book, only the seeds of deep change have been planted.
In general, writers who talk to their colleagues and neighbors constantly about their own writing seem to me pretty insufferable. I try not to be that guy.
It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.
For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.
My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.
My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.
Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.
Translation is an act of recreation.
I certainly have been writing stories that are hard science fiction, that are very reminiscent of 'Golden Age tales' from the '40s and '50s. I've also written stories that are very high fantasy that are the direct opposite of that style.
There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.
People who are ambitious - politicians who crave power - think that they're in control of it, but at some point, the movement that they started overtakes them, and they lose the ability to direct things anymore, and they become essentially riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to go along.
I don't have a specific message for 'The Grace of Kings' and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy.
Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge 'facts' 'everybody' knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.
The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn't conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that's going to save the world, so there's a different tone that comes out in the way speculative fiction is done. That's refreshing to read.
I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.
Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.
When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.