Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series, as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. His latest book is All that We See or Seem, a techno-thriller starring an AI-whispering hacker who saves the world.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

ACWP sits down with our Visiting Writer Ken Liu to pick his brains on A.I, translation and his hope for the future.

By Annabel Lee

“Ideas are cheap; execution is everything.”

“To make good art, an artist must study and practice craft.”

Without the process of acquiring craft, is it possible to fully realize your vision? I think many writers would find the idea of instructing someone else, a machine or a human assistant, to write a story for which they only have the “idea” repugnant. Writers know that ideas are cheap; execution is everything. I certainly would never want to “write” by telling someone else to write: practicing the craft is the most fun part of writing, and no writer is worth reading if they don’t invent their own language, the only language capable of realizing their unique vision.

But sentiment is not universal. Some writers already “write” with assistants, human or machine, and they’re very successful in the market (obviously, “success” in the market has nothing to do with artistic merit, the quality I’m concerned with here). Some writers already believe that they don’t need craft in the sense that Inman and I mean the term. Maybe the market will be happy to purchase works created via AI shortcuts.

Regardless, I believe craft is foundational to art, and I think no self-respecting artist can be without craft. However, the form of craft will change over time. Historically, the invention of machines that seemed to make craft “irrelevant” has always pushed human craft in a different direction (viz., the invention of photography led both to the development of craft in photography itself as an art form and the move of visual art away from representation). Artists will either choose to move away from the realms of art dominated by AI or to develop craft in the use of AI (today’s generative AI offers few fine-grained controls, but that doesn’t have to be the case)—or both. On the whole, I’m optimistic that in the long run, AI will not lead to the death of human craft but will lead to a flourishing of new forms of art by human artists that would not be possible in the absence of the technology, much as the camera, another “artistic machine,” eventually led to the invention of the art of cinema.

This is, incidentally, the premise of my latest novel, All That We See Or Seem. When so many stories about AI seem to see nothing but a dystopia, I prefer to dream of a world in which AI is just another technology, capable of making us both more and less human.

Finally, there’s also the possibility of AI developing consciousness and developing its own craft, but that’s for another story.

I want to talk a bit about your short story “Simulacrum”. It explores the profound ethical violation Anna feels when her father digitally captures her 7-year-old self without her adult consent. Considering the rise of ‘sharenting’ and parent-influencers who monetise their children’s lives on social media, do you see the Anna’s violation as a real-life future inevitability that births a generational trauma where these children, as adults, will have to confront an invasive, commodified archive of their childhood created without their agency?

“Simulacrum” is concerned with memory and how technology mediates and transforms our relationship to it. Instead of specific technologies, it focuses on the complicated relationship we have with the illusory objectivity of recordings done by machines.

As for the story’s relevance to social media, I don’t think in terms of inevitability, and I’m not qualified to make broad pronouncements about psychology. It’s up to the reader to interpret my stories to discern their own truths in relation to what they see around them.

As a general rule, I don’t write stories that serve as social commentary, which implies a sort of message limited to the here and now. Instead, “Simulacrum,” like most of my fiction, works at the level of metaphor and myth. Just as Frankenstein remains relevant despite its technology not being anything close to real, I hope my story speaks to all time, not merely this moment.

“I prefer to dream of a world in which AI is just another technology, capable of making us both more and less human.”

I’m shifting gears to touch slightly on translation. In Paper Menagerie, there was a line that struck me “If I say ‘love’, I feel here.” She pointed to her lips. “If I say ‘ai,’ I feel here.” She put her hand over her heart.” because I read it as translation is a rewiring of how we feel, where we feel. Do you think that core affective experiences are fundamentally untranslatable, or that they exist in an asymptotic relationship where the translated word can only ever approach the original word’s whole meaning?

I want to offer another way to look at this question. Are core affective experiences fundamentally articulable? And if they are, can they be conveyed via words between minds without alteration? Words in any language are slippery and elusive, for in addition to the meanings that are universally understood by the linguistic community, each individual has idiosyncratic associations with those words.

When you look at it that way, the question of translation between languages feels almost beside the point. Every experience of a piece of art involving language necessarily involves translation between words and feelings, between general meanings and specific associations. It’s a miracle that anyone ever understands the feelings of anyone else.

And yet, as Le Guin has said, we artists who work with words must strive to say with words what cannot be said in words. That is the deepest paradox about art.

In your opinion, what’s the best Chinese translation for the word “wordsmith”?

Ha, that is a great question, and I would love to hear what readers think. However, as for me, I think the Internet already has far too many unnecessary opinions, and I won’t add another.

The aesthetic of the Silkpunk subgenre seen in the Dandelion Dynasty series achieves a rare harmony where form is inseparable from function. Engineers are artists melding both nature and technology together. Was this deep-seated sense of elegance (the seamless fusion of natural materials and technology, as seen in the whale-like submarines) an a priori philosophical mandate you wanted for the world you’re building, or did that specific aesthetic elegance emerge organically as a necessary by-product driven by the resource constraints and material science of the Dara civilisation?

What an interesting observation! Silkpunk is a technology aesthetic I invented to explore alternative modernities. As such, I wanted to weave in W. Brian Arthur’s observation that technology should be understood as a kind of language, and technological inventions, no less than linguistic utterances, are expressions of the values of the speakers.

So, the qualities you observe about silkpunk derive from the values of its practitioners. The people of Dara wove their dreams into their machines, institutions, philosophies, and customs as they strode into modernity.

Chinese art, particularly landscape painting, is known for its emphasis on negative space, the importance of what is not drawn. You’ve mentioned that this concept influenced the Dandelion Dynasty Can you share more about this technique, and how that “negative space” changed the story’s meaning?

Readers who would like to understand this concept better may find the Dao De Jing enlightening. In brief, it’s just as important to listen for what isn’t being said as what is said, to observe what isn’t being shown as what is being shown, to pay attention to what isn’t on the page as to what is on the page.

The concept isn’t unique to Chinese art. It’s a human universal. The meaning of a word, gesture, or scene depends as much on what it is as on what it isn’t. This is intuitive to any teenager who knows that the absence of a “like” on an Instagram post can speak volumes.

“The meaning of a word, gesture, or scene depends as much on what it is as on what it isn’t. This is intuitive to any teenager who knows that the absence of a “like” on an Instagram post can speak volumes.”

Across your oeuvre of work, what is the one line or quote, that felt least written and most discovered?

Since I view writing through the lens of craft, I don’t view shaping and discovery as distinct practices. The myths, gods, and monsters we bring back from the collective unconscious must be evoked with words, and language is inherently a technology, a product of the human mind.

When integrating a speculative element into a story, what do you think is the crucial factor that writers should bear in mind to maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief?

Technologies and magic systems are ultimately not interesting in themselves, but as expressions of the values of the characters. Readers, above all, are interested in who the characters are and why they do what they do.

“Technologies and magic systems are ultimately not interesting in themselves, but as expressions of the values of the characters.”

What’s one specific human quality or technological innovation that gives you the most hope for the future?

Despite the fact that we’re all brains locked in dark skulls, we yearn to connect. Everything we do springs from that desire to transcend the prison of our existence, to feel the presence of other minds. We cannot find salvation alone; only together.

Robocop vs Terminator, who do you think will win and why?

I’m an optimist, so I see them sitting down together and bonding over art.