>> Here we go!

[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow

♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around.

Dr. Regina: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity and today we are talking with world renowned author Ken Liu who is the winner of The Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Awards for Short Stories, Novellas, and Novels. And I want to welcome you to our show.

Ken Liu: Thank you for having me Regina. [Inaudible.]

Regina: I want to say that I started listening to Levar Burton Reads, a podcast, because my friend was like, “You’re a geek, you love Levar, you should check out this podcast.” Are you a, before I go into why I’m bringing that up, did you ever watch Star Trek: Next Generation or Reading Rainbow?

Ken Liu: Oh yeah. Levar is amazing. Geordi was such a great hero of mine.

Regina: So when you found out he was actually going to read one of your short stories, like, how did you react?

Ken Liu: I was totally just in disbelief. It was awesome.

Regina: So basically, I’m sitting there, and I’m listening to one of his episodes. And they’re very good short stories he picks but your short story, The Paper Menagerie, it really shook me to my core. And I actually tweeted that out and you were so nice and responded. You were like, “thank you.” Has that reaction been common? Have you heard that from people, that it was just such a powerful story?

Ken Liu: Yeah. I’ve heard from a lot of readers on Twitter or by email or on Facebook who really found the story resonating with them. It makes me very happy just hearing that the story worked.

Regina: I just want to kind of get into that. Because this is a science show, we’re going to eventually talk about your new Star Wars book and how science is integrated into a lot of your stories, but I kind of first want to talk about this story because that’s how I got to know you as an author. It was so moving to me because it’s that relationship with the mother and such a complicated relationship, which I honestly have to say I also have with my Chinese mother. So, it was just so incredible. Where, like what was the origin of that? I also read your other story, the short story About the Memories of my Mother, also a very very complicated story about mothers and relationships between children and their mothers. And so, where did this all come from? I guess that’s a long conversation, but let’s do it.

Ken Liu: So, The Paper Menagerie started out as a response to a specific anthology called, there was an anthology themed around wizards or magic users. And so, I wanted to write a story about a special kind of magic user, a kind of wizard, that was very different from the pointy hats, the robes, the wands, you know, that image of a fantasy wizard. So I said, “what can I do to create a kind of magic user that will be very different from that traditional vision?”

And then, at the same time, I remember reading these accounts of so-called mail-order brides, women basically from developing countries who seek marriage in developed nations in order to find a better life. These women are often ridiculed in Western accounts and made the butt of jokes. These women, if you read their accounts, they’re incredibly brave. It takes a great deal of personal courage to give up everything that you know, to leave your homeland, to go to make a new life for yourself and your children, and to try to find love in the most unlikely of circumstances.

And these stories are really moving about how they try to, how they struggle to establish connections with their new husbands and how they hold on to their own identity while trying to adapt to a drastically different way of life. I just found all these stories incredibly moving. And so, I wanted to write a story that centered their experience and try to portray them in a sympathetic way.

And then finally, the third little seed for the story, was the fact that when I was little my grandmother would teach me how to make origami and I have a lot of very fond memories of doing that with my grandmother. And so, I wanted to make paper animals the fantastical element. So, put all of those together and that’s how I ended up starting the story.

Regina: And I want to say that, I really loved the few things that you touched on, this idea of mail-order brides. As an Asian American growing up there is that just horrible stereotype and butt of jokes, and you just really embraced it and you just turned it around. Me personally as an astrophysicist, as a science nerd, I kind of only read stories, I joke, if there’s a wizard or there’s a robot I’ll read it. Otherwise I’m not interested. So, when you wrote this story, it was just perfect. It just spoke to everything I really care about because it was very moving and it also had you know, this identity, this idea of being half between two worlds.

I love that part of the story where it talks about the women in the neighborhood talking about this half-white, half-Asian boy, and they’re like, “There’s something off about him” and, “Do you think he even understands us.” I really, really loved that scene because it was so true to, like, being, I think, a mixed kid, an ambiguously ethnic kid in America. It was just so perfect, so many things.

Ken Liu: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you know, one of the motivations, you know, behind that story also, is I wanted to do two things. One was to highlight the kind of pervasive white supremacy and racism directed against children of mixed heritage, especially in parts of the country that are sometimes considered very liberal and tolerant. In fact, that’s not the case at all the kind of white supremacy and racism is very pervasive and a lot of us end up internalizing that kind of racism if we’re not part of the white, Anglo-Saxon mainstream.

Regina: Oh, I know.

Ken Liu: And the funny thing also is I wrote this story as a response to a kind of idealized immigrant narrative that I find very troubling. Especially if you’re a writer of Chinese descent, a lot of times in the US you’re expected to perform and to create ideal immigration narratives of assimilation, of stories about how you’re just as white in a performative sense, and quote-unquote “American”, as anybody else and the whole story is about how you come to assimilate and become this Idealized vision of a non-threatening Asian American. And I found that whole thing extremely damaging as a narrative. And so, I wanted to create a story that challenged that and created a different vision of what it means to be American.

One of the interesting things about this story is that some readers seem to not understand that the mother is as American as anyone else. You don’t have to learn English and you don’t have to cook typical, so-called, white American dishes, and you don’t have to do things like TV white mothers in order to be American. She is as American as any other US citizen and she has decided to live out her life this way. And her part, her life, is also part of the American experience. I wanted to make it clear that that was the case, to center her narrative and her son’s inability to accept her for that, due to internalized racism, is the core of the tension here.

But, that’s not the only level at which the story works. I think the idea of trying to understand our own parents and trying to figure out how our life fits or doesn’t fit with their lives, is a universal experience. All of us go through this experience of not being able to understand our parents and coming slowly to accept them for who they are and to understand who they are as we grow up in our teenage and college years. And it is part of the human experience. And I wanted to portray one specific instance of thing. But it is part of the much more universal experience.

Regina: I want to touch on a couple things you mentioned. You mentioned this kind of idealized version of Asian Americans, and I totally agree with you. I don’t know if you’ve read any of Gene Yang’s work. He was on the show and we were talking about this new, well new-ish, comic he wrote, The Green Turtle?

Ken Liu: Absolutely.

Regina: And so, his mom and the hero, they don’t have the best relationship and she’s not perfect, she’s not this perfect Asian American mom. And you know, American-born Chinese, all of these things, are these flawed characters that actually do have a lot of internalized racism inside of them. I mean, you know, internalized racism in their lives as well. And I really, really like that. I love showing, be it Asian Americans, any kind of underrepresented group, as flawed because we are flawed and that is, just like everyone else, like any other human, but that has consequences too, of those flaws, and actually it has consequences if you think we aren’t. So.

Ken Liu: Right. That’s one of the tricky things about doing representation work, or at least if you position or view your work as part of that. Because the problem of diversity is in fact that diversity is an emergent, collective quality. It’s not a single shot thing. So, if all you is a single instance of something then of course it is impossible to portray the complexity, the internal complexity, or the diversity of the community, or the experience that the single instance is a reflection of. So, what has to happen is there must be many instances of representation from many different creators coming into it and trying to normalize the experience of marginalized group. That is, in fact, part of the American chorus.

But that requires not one single individual but rather a collective effort and I think that is also missing from the conversation when we sort of play to specific examples and criticize the way they’re inadequate or flawed or whatever. But a lot of times these are reflections of the complexity and diversity of the community as a whole, which can only be seen when there are many representations and many pieces of artwork that engage with the experience.

Regina: And, as we know, that’s the overall issue. That’s the institutional issue.

Ken Liu: Right.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Early late at night
♪ I wander off into a land
♪ You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
♪ There’s a world inside
♪ Where dreamers meet each other

Regina: I’m going to bring us back to the other short story that has gotten a lot of fandom and a lot of people love it. It’s The Memories of my Mother, and I just read it last night, and we were talking about this many representations from many different authors, but if you, in that story, and it’s not even that long, you have many representations of one person because you have them growing throughout their whole life. And I found it very interesting how even in that short two pages, I don’t know, I read it on the internet, but in the short writing you can portray the complexities of getting older. And I think, but having that mother, spoiler alert you should read it, but that difficult relationship with that mother who’s not dealing with the same kind of issues. And I felt a parallel between The Paper Menagerie and The Memories of my Mother of having this experience, this life experience, that’s different from your mother.

Because you have in The Paper Menagerie a woman that is very brave, came from another country and is living in a place where she is very unfamiliar with and then you have a kid who is mixed race having that different experience. And then, you have this other story where, again, they’re having these different experiences and they’re trying to reconcile that relationship. It’s super complex, and it has some physics in it. So, did you see that parallel as you were like writing them or was that just coincidence?

Ken Liu: I mean, I can’t say that when I was writing The Memories of My Mother I had The Paper Menagerie in my head. I actually try to forget stuff I’ve written as soon as possible. I think one of the problems with having written a lot of stories and a lot of novels is that, if, you know, I’ve learned over the years that it’s completely unpredictable why some stories will receive a lot of attention and others don’t. And so, the dangerous tendency is to try to extrapolate from these examples as those they’re meaningful.

Regina: As I’m doing.

Ken Liu: No, no no no no. Let me go on. This ties back to your point. The danger is to extrapolate and to not recognize that there’s a huge amount of luck and unpredictability in the way, why some works get a huge amount of attention and some don’t. And so, the tendency is to think that there is a magic about that particular story which is why it got so much attention, so I need to recreate that magic. I need to write something else that follows, that recaptures that magic. And I just don’t believe that. I think it is extremely important to forget about what happened in the past and focus on the next story and to always treat the next story as the most exciting story you’ll ever right and the next story as the best story you’ll ever write. That’s always my attitude. So, I try to forget about everything I’ve done the past and try to do something new with every new story.

That said, I do think you’re absolutely right. There are some themes that are particularly interesting to me. Thematically, the kind of stories that I like to dwell around. And the complicated relationship we have with our parents and the way we try to separate ourselves from their experience and the inability we have to both comprehend their experience and to have them understand the ways in which our lives are different, is a very core part of the human experience. When we’re very small children we have a sense in which our lives and our parents lives are merged. We are one entity. And that sense of separation, of defining your own separate space can’t really happen until you actually understand the ways in which your parents are also individuals with their own separate ideals and their own separate experiences that are as valuable as yours. You know, it’s a growth moment as you finally come to understand that. And both The Memories of My Mother and The Paper Menagerie deal with the fact that in that process of separation and growth, what’s important is actually to empathize and come to understand how your parents are in fact neither ideal, awesome gods nor terrible people, which are sort of the poles we swing between as we grow up.

Regina: And it’s so hard. I was reading your stories, and also Gene Yang’s stories, and I think to myself, “If I had read these when I was 20,” and I have a child now, “when I wasn’t a mother, it just would have been totally different.” It is so crazy, I’m listening to you talk about this idea of empathizing with your parents and it resonates with me so much because it is so hard. It is so hard to do that. But, once you kind of have children or have a similar experience, it is very difficult.

Ken Liu: Yeah, no. You’re definitely right. I think I ended up writing a lot more about parent-child relationships after having children of my own.

Regina: Right.

Ken Liu: It’s similar to what you were explaining. Having your own children and getting a sense of that responsibility of someone dependent on you and how you are responsible for shaping and laying out the beginning of theirs lives that, it really does, change your perspective and allows you to come to understand the kind of hardships and the kind of doubt that your parents faced in a way, in a visceral way, that I couldn’t have understood before.

Regina: Yeah, and just this idea of perspective. I loved the way you said that. As a tiny little kid, you imagine that your lives are linked. I remember as a kid, again complicated relationship with my mother, but as a kid I was like, we will never separate. the idea of moving out was just, as a 7 year-old or 8 year-old, moving out when I grew up was just terrifying. My daughter, right now, is eight or nine, and she says that to me. She’s like, “You know I want to live with you for most of my life. I’ll go off to college and then we’ll live next to each other.” And then, shifting for the parent, like this kid looks to me like this. How can they look to me like this? I’m not as perfect as they see. You know, you can see it in their eyes. And that brings me to the idea of your new book, The Legend of Luke Skywalker, the Star Wars book, and this idea of one person being so different.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants

♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland

Basically this new book is stories about Luke Skywalker told by various people on this ship and they’re all very, very different. Some people see him as a hero, some people see him as just a guy, some people see him as, you know, not even real, mythical. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit for our nerdy fan-base ‒ myself included ‒

Ken Liu: Of course.

Regina: Yeah. So, how did that story come up? And then I want to talk to you about how this story reminds me of an episode of Batman the animated series.

Ken Liu: Ha. So, Lucas Film Publishing, they were reaching out to writers, some of them who had written for Star Wars extensively, some who were new, to create a series of books in the lead up to the episode 8, journey to the last Jedi. I was one of the writers topped to contribute something. I have been a life-long Star Wars fan, and I can tell you about that later, let me tell you about the book first.

Regina: Alright, we’ll talk about that too.

Ken Liu: So, they wanted, the idea around the book is a little unusual. I don’t think that there have been many, or any, canon books that are done this way. Essentially, this is a collection of in-universe legends and tall-tales about Luke Skywalker. In terms of fans who are really into the canon versus non-canon business, these stories are complicated. The fact that there is this, you know, it’s structured a little bit like The Canterbury Tales. The fact that there is this little voyage and there are these crew members telling stories, that is definitively canon but what is the status of the story that they’re all telling?

Regina: Right. Is there an ounce of truth, is it all true, is none of it true? You know.

Ken Liu: That’s right. So, it has this unreliable canon quality to it. I like that. I always like to play with this. Because, the fact is, if you talk about epistemology, a lot of the things we know about our world, live in that unreliable canon.

Regina: Right, they’re like third party, right?

Ken Liu: Right. For example, you know, what is the history of Thanksgiving? Is the whole original pilgrim story true? Is that actually factually true? Is that just a retroactively reconstructed story? Who is the real historical George Washington? What did he acutely do? Did he have the cherry tree episode that we read in children’s books? Is that actually true? How did he cross the Delaware? Was he actually standing there as the portrait portrays, or was the picture different? With any historical figure, or even contemporary celebrity, that’s the status of what we know about them. You know, half of the stuff we know about them are maybe true and the other half are tall-tales. And we have a very hard time separating out which is which.

Regina: Right. And I mean, to bring us back to the other stories too, there’s very, on both my sides, my Mexican and my Chinese side, they have these very fantasy-like historical stories about our families too. It’s very Joy Luck Club.

Ken Liu: Yes! Yes!

Regina: And . . .

Ken Liu: We have a lot of personal family lore.

Regina: Right. So, this is like you said, there’s not a lot of novels that are written this way but our society is written in this way.

Ken Liu: That’s right. That’s right. You know, somebody like Luke is essentially a perfect figure for this because he is someone who is famous. Everyone knows stories about what he did in the galaxy. And then he disappeared. He faded out of public life for decades. And so, that creates the perfect set up for him to become the canvas on which people project their fears and hopes. That’s how legends are born. And so, as you said, in some of the stories his exploits are clearly exaggerated to the point of myth creation and in other stories he is the vehicle by which the tellers aggrandize themselves and in yet other stories he is the villain, you know from the imperial perspective he is a terrifying war criminal who brings death and destruction whoever he goes.

Regina: Like . . .

Ken Liu: All of these stories are stories about him. And, you know, I wanted to use these stories to fill in a fuller portrayal of how the galaxy reacts to Luke and to the events of the original trilogy.

Regina: Have you heard the fan theories about Jar Jar being an evil villain in the first three Star Wars movies?

Ken Liu: I do remember reading about that, which is awesome. In fact, there is one story in the book that is similar in spirit to that story. It is a conspiracy theory by one of those Death Star troopers who has a whole explanation for what actually happened.

Regina: Right, cause he’s like, “You don’t know, I got the inside dirt.”

Ken Liu: Right. “You’re too gullible, you trust all these propaganda from the government, but I’ve got the truth.” Right.

Regina: So, I’m reading about your new book that just came out in November, and I was a giant fan. Not only am I giant fan of Star Trek but I was a giant fan of Batman: The Animated Series in the nineties. I don’t know if you watched that show.

Ken Liu: I don’t, I didn’t actually, no.

Regina: It was like the first kind of dark portrayal, but for kids still, of Batman. Because you had the campy, 60s/70s version, and then you had the comics, and you had some dark versions of comics, but this was an animated series in the early nineties. And there is one episode called, “The Legend of the Dark Knight.” All the other episodes of Batman is like Batman, he’s fighting the Joker, he’s fight all these people, it’s very obvious. But this is the only episode in which you see batman for maybe a few seconds, and he’s at the very, very end of the episode. But, the beginning of the episode are three kids, and they’re hanging out in an alley, and they’re talking about who they think Batman is, and stories they’ve heard about Batman.

Ken Liu: Oh, that’s awesome.

Regina: And it’s like exactly, I shouldn’t say exactly, but very, very similar to your book that came out. And each of the versions of Batman that these three kids talk about, it’s like the 1960s campy Batman, it’s like a Batman version from the eighties comic books, where there’s a female robin and it’s like a post-apocalyptic world. And it’s super interesting. And the more we talk, the more we realize this is such a common thing, this way of telling these stories. Having a story of people kind of sharing their ideas of who these famous people are is genius. But it has been around, right? So it’s nice to actually put in.

Ken Liu: It is how we . . .

Regina: It’s how we do it.

Ken Liu: I’m sure this is basically how people were swapping stories of Achilles and Odysseus. This is how it’s done. And, it’s an ancient, ancient device and it’s true to our experience. Because you know, as a species, we’re obsessed with stories and this is how we understand the world. And you know, tautologically a lot of what we think we know are stories and ultimately unreliable, and yet they reflect some facet of the truth.

Regina: Which is why our tagline is “sharing stories of human curiosity.” What we try to do here on the show is to make science digestible, and fun, and accessible, so people don’t get bored and are not intimidated. So, I want to bring us now to this idea of stories. Because a lot of your stories, a lot of it has to actually, it deals with science in a way that I think is approachable. And you, yourself, are a computer scientist. Does that effect you actually putting in these nuggets of science, technology, engineering, math, you know STEM, into your stories?

Ken Liu: I think so. I mean, you know, this is like a very big and complicated topic.

Regina: I know; I have a whole show about it.

Ken Liu: But, here’s my aesthetic. I think we’re living in one of these really extraordinary historical moments. Never in the history of human kind has the average person had access to so much cutting edge research, especially for free. You don’t even need to be a university professor or student to be able to log onto the internet and access the latest papers. The beauty of science and math is more accessible to the average person than ever before. And it’s really [inaudible] moment. We can find great beauty by reading science or math papers and truly find out something new about the world that we live in.

And so, a lot of my stories try to bring a little bit of that beauty to readers who don’t otherwise read papers. I find it very interesting the way it’s researched in different fields and I try to find nuggets that intrigue me and seem to suggest a story around them of some kind. A lot of my stories really come from dragging papers and interesting discoveries.

Regina: I will stick up for the general public just slightly. Because as a scientist I’ve read many papers as well, and sometimes they are not easily digestible.

[Laughter.]

And I think that we as scientists, and a lot of people are already doing this. There are a lot of good science communicators out there, you know, people that are taking those scientific papers and kind of morphing them into, I would say, less jargony language. Maybe making videos, making podcasts, stuff like that. There are many people doing that. But, I think that, the movement to make that beautiful subject, like you talk about, into a way where we can really connect it with the public that don’t have that kind of background of, “I know what this jargon-y word means” or “I’m even comfortable opening up a link that will take me to a, you know, a journal paper.”

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ The grass grows inside
♪ The music floats you gently on your toes
♪ Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
♪ Don’t freak and hide
♪ I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
♪ Don’t resist
♪ The fairygods will have a fit
♪ We should dance
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
Regina: There is this giant wall of intimidation that exists in our society when it comes to STEM, you know science, technology, engineering, and math.

Ken Liu: Yeah. That is true.

Regina: Even that word.

So, I think when somebody is more likely to go to that YouTube channel, like the react channel or something that my daughter spends too much time on, it’s accessible because it’s fun. It grabs their emotions and makes them feel good. And if we as scientists can’t do a little bit of that, then that’s on us. You know? And so, I think that’s why . . .

Ken Liu: That’s a very . . .

Regina: Sorry, go ahead.

Ken Liu: That’s a very charitable view, I won’t say, of the public lack of interest in science. No, I get your point. I think also, one of the interesting things about it, is we as a species have evolved to understand the world through narrative. We actually have a very hard time understanding the world as it is without translation through story.

Regina: Oh, absolutely.

Ken Liu: We as a species like to imagine the world has meaning, a deeper meaning, a kind of plot to it. And so, a lot of my stories do end up having this hopeful note about human nature because I do think we’re pretty special that way. We seem to be unable to understand the world, except through stories, but the stories also allow us to do extraordinary things.

Regina: Right. And so, that, which brings us to your books that I want to bring up: The Dandelion Dynasty books. I have not read these books, I am very sorry. But, I’ve read a lot of reviews and I’ve read a lot about them. And a lot of people are saying that they, it reminds them of Game of Thrones. When you say, “hope” is there a lot of hope in those books? That is my question.

Ken Liu: I think so. I think so. I mean, I’m. What’s extraordinary about my books, I think, is these are books in which magic doesn’t really play a huge role. The role played historically by wizards or magic users or great magicians is played by engineers. These are essentially stories about the beauty of engineering. So, rather than coming up with some spell or some extraordinary act of fate, by praying to a god to resolve some issue, the hero in my books are engineers. They essentially find their way out of problems. They invent new machines or they discover principles about the world which can then be turned to some advantage against their enemies and these are not discoveries limited to the natural world. So, probing to social engineering in the sense that politics really is a history of the technology of collective decision making.

And my heroes are engineers who think about how to socially organize in better ways to facilitate better ways of collective decision making to create a more just world. I mean, of course, it’s a book full of wars and violence and people doing great deeds, and there is a lot of discussion about the role of marginalized groups and [inaudible] groups and how they can achieve more justice. But, overall the story is a celebration of rationality and ways in which fate, and our ability to understand the world and to work out better ways of living in it, it is a hopeful message.

Regina: Right. And so, I like that. I really, really like what you just said because you were using engineering in a way that isn’t just physical but is social. I think about that all the time. Half of my job, I teach physics and astronomy, but half of my job is inclusion and outreach specialist that I do for Western, and I do a lot of inclusion and equity stuff, and I’d never heard it that way. Now I’m going to steal it and just be like, “Ken Liu wrote this” and that’s what I do.

As you’re talking, my mind works in weird ways, and it instantly went to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Have you ever watched that series?

Ken Liu: I have not.

Regina: Aw man.

Ken Liu: I have heard people talk about it, but I have not.

Regina: Basically, there’s a lot of magic, there’s a lot of like, you know water-bending and earth-bending, which just means they can manipulate these elements. But then there’s one character who has no powers, but he becomes their leader. He is one of the oldest people too, but oldest like teenagers. But he’s an engineer and he comes up with all these things that the people with powers don’t think of, right, because they have these powers so they don’t have to think of things in that way. It’s almost like a crutch to them that they can’t figure out these problems in a physical way.

And it’s very interesting that this one character that people make fun of because he doesn’t have the powers, has this intellect and has these problem-solving skills because he’s devoid of those powers. So it’s just very interesting.

Ken Liu: That’s right, that’s right. I have very little patience with superhero stories in general, unless the superheroes are superheroes with no powers at all. I mean, that’s why batman is interesting. He’s a superhero with no powers. Those are much more interesting to me in stories.

Regina: He does have a chip on his shoulder and he’s a bit bitter about it. But, yeah, yeah.

Ken Liu: He also has a lot of money, which I guess is a good superpower.

Regina: Right, that’s the line from the trailer of the Justice League that just came out.

So, all of this interest, like you were just saying, in the technology and the engineering, brings me to your award-winning translation of Three Body Problem. I think some of our listeners might be like, “Well you know, you just translated it, that’s not” but it’s intense. You’ve gotten so much praise for translating this series of books, which were written in Chinese and they are very popular. My question is, what was that process like and did you ever come across terminology that related to orbital dynamics or any kind of physics that you were like, “I don’t know what this means here and I have to do a lot of research?”

Ken Liu: Yeah. So, Liu Cixin, who’s the author of The Three Body Problem and the sequels, he’s an extraordinary individual. He’s an engineer himself who has a passion for science and technology and so these books reflect that. These are, these books are, The Three Body books are very much classical nonfiction in some sense. They focus on technology and development as a solution to humankind’s crises and problems. It is important to think about things like elections, and parliament, and courts, and lobbying groups, and juries, and political parties, and all these as really, technology. Because essentially, what are they? They are forms of social organization tools to channel and to allow people to surface their desires. The Three Body books are actually very extraordinary in how they also consider the evolution of political forms of technology, of the technology of collective decision-making. And I think that’s one aspect of the book that doesn’t really get a lot of attention. But, it’s fascinating and interesting to think about.

So, in terms of the question you were asking, about terminology, the jargon-y science and technology, orbital mechanics stuff, that stuff was actually trivial. I actually tried to capture the cultural aspects and the different emphasis that the author places on various social concepts in a way that feels honest and true to the original vision, and that is also accessible to an [inaudible] reader without [inaudible] the original. And that was a challenge. I often had to ask the author to figure out what particular words meant or intended and figure out how to guide the translation in a direction that reflected that.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ This is your land
♪ This is my land
♪ We belong here
♪ Stay the night
♪ I am so inspired
♪ You touched my wires
♪ My supernova shining bright

Regina: I want to respect your time, and we’re almost done, so I want to say a couple things. You were talking about the politics that are in these, The Three Body Problem books, and how, you know, not a lot of people are focusing on the politics. But, you have a quote, or you and the original author, have received a quote from President Obama, who’s like, talks about reading this book dealing with everyday political life, which I thought was really awesome and I just wanted to give you props for that.

Ken Liu: Yeah, that was pretty cool.

Regina: I was just like, “Wow!” I would just, like, die.

But the second thing you were talking about, again, we keep on coming back to there isn’t just the hard sciences, the physical sciences that we, as people in STEM, are trained to be objective and all thing, but there is also the social aspects. There is social science and there is validation to that work because there are patterns in, like you said, how elections are done, how leadership is done, how people make decisions. There are patterns, there’s a machine, there’s rules to that machine, or, what do I want to say, instructions to that machine. But, Isaac Asimov, right like, I don’t know if you read any Asimov at any age.

Ken Liu: I did. I did.

Regina: But there’s The Foundation series. So, he really touched into that and in my opinion gave some legitimacy to this idea of social science that a lot of scientists don’t really do.

Ken Liu: Right. I get your point. I think, you know, the crisis about social science is something that we are still struggling with. Because you know, the methods of investigation and experimentation in social science, you just can’t apply the technique in natural science to it. So, it is necessarily the case that the conclusions drawn in social science are going to have a great deal of ambivalence and a great deal of open-to-interpretation.

Regina: Absolutely.

Ken Liu: What’s fascinating about science fiction in general, about this sort of thing is when they try to explore concepts of the technology of collective decision-making the tendency, often, in readers and critics is to try to pin down the writer’s own politics. The way this is written, what is the writer’s own politics in terms of this. Not that that’s unimportant. I think it is very important to reveal unconscious biases and to show off the way in which the dominant political narratives insight visions of the future. But, I think another way to read these stories that I personally find much more satisfying and interesting is to examine the visions of future political decision-making.

If a book proposes a new way to run an election, think about in what ways that this way is an improvement on what we do and in what ways is it worse, and why, under what circumstances, would you propose doing things this way versus another. Or, if a book proposes a new way of collective decisions, of voting to reach consensus, of trying to extract and extrapolate our own desires and our own preferences and to aggregate that in a way that feels sensible, I mean there’s a lot in books trying to imagine ways in which technology can help surface our preferences, and to aggregate in a way that feels more efficient, more true, and gives more weight to the preferences of those who have been excluded from the political process right now.

That aspect of the [inedible], I think doesn’t get enough coverage, I think is very fascinating. And of course, its the think that I’m very interested in. I like to think of the way in which technology can, in fact, improve the politic, the political technology that we have and to facilitate more just and better governing systems.

Regina: That brings us to our last, very last thing, I ask every guest about pop culture. We’ve kind of already talked about, you’ve talked about this idea of you’re a big Star Wars fan, we both like Star Trek, I want to bring us to, what are you most excited about for the future in pop culture and in technology. Or maybe they’re the same thing. Maybe they’re portraying the same thing.

Ken Liu: Well, my answer is going to be a little off the wall perhaps.

Regina: Yes!

Ken Liu: I’m actually super, super interested to see artificial intelligence create often pop culture. A lot of time we portray the rise of AI and it [inaudible] because we’re all terrified of losing our jobs to AI. You know, not that I want to minimize that issue, but I think the solution to that isn’t to somehow prevent robot uprisings and stop them from stealing our jobs. To be honest, I think most of the jobs that AI is going to steal are not jobs worth keeping.

And what I mean is this: throughout most of human history, most of the jobs we’ve had are terrible jobs. That is, they demand no creativity. I will be perfectly happy with a world in which most of the jobs we have now are “stolen,” quote-unquote, by AI. That is a perfectly fine future for me because most of these jobs, you know one of my first jobs was to be a filing clerk in the bank. Where my job was to go through all the checks and put them into little drawers. That job doesn’t exist anymore because now we have machines do that. I don’t think it is a terrible thing that that happens.

Back to your point, I think it is a [inaudible] where AI can get to the point where they can do things that seem to require what we think of as creativity. I would love to see AI compose stories; compose music. Artificial intelligence is designed intelligence rather than our evolved intelligence. It almost certain that AI is going to approach these problems in a different manner, from a different direction. And, it’s going to give us lots of inspiration and [inaudible] new lens.

For example, Alpha-GO, which is the AI that managed to defeat the world’s top grandmaster in the game of Go, what’s extraordinary about that is if you study the way Alpha-GO plays Go, it’s awesome one. It doesn’t do it in the way that human grandmasters do. You know, for thousands of years humans have studied this game and devised all sorts of interesting strategies. Alpha-GO doesn’t do any of these things. Alpha-GO problem-solves a completely new way of playing the game. And if you were a Go player and you go study what Alpha-GO does, it’s like awesome.

I believe that the future is a world in which humans and AI cooperate to do things that neither of us alone do as well. There are problems that humans can’t solve by our evolved intelligence and AI can’t by artificial intelligence, but together, we would be able to come up with new ways of approaching these problems and new solutions that neither of us would have thought of alone.

Regina: I love your passion and enthusiasm for AI. And since our show is eventually going to be on the internet, the reason that myself and you are probably not afraid of AI killing us all is because I always say, “Thank you” to Alexa and I tell her the future descendants of Regina Barber DeGraaff treat them well. So, there already know that you like them. So, it’ll be fine. It’s already out there in the universe.

Ken Liu: Absolutely.

Regina: We’re already hedging our bets right now, is all I’m saying.

Ken Liu: Oh, absolutely. I often tweet little sarcastic notes about how if the AI eventually wants to come over, I’m leaving notes to prove . . .

Regina: My allegiance.

Ken Liu: My great affection for machines.

Regina: I do that all the time. My brother and sister, they have Alexa. I’m like, “Thank you Alexa.” I always say thank you, that’s all I’m saying.

Ken Liu: [Laughing.]

Regina: With that.

Ken Liu: Great minds think alike.

Regina: I’m only kind of thinking.

So, thank you so much Ken Liu. This has been an awesome interview. I really love your work. I can’t wait to actually start reading the longer books. And, I’m so excited. Congratulations on the Luke Skywalker book. Hopefully, are you going to do anymore?

Ken Liu: I hope so. I mean, the legends of Luke Skywalker comes out on Halloween and I certainly hope to do more. It’s such a struggle to balance all the ideas. I’m right now working on the third book in The Dandelion Dynasty, which I’m super excited about. There’s another sci-fi book I want to get to after this. I’d like to do another Star Wars book. There’s just too many things, too many projects.

Regina: There are so many things I still want to talk to you about. Hopefully we can get you back on the show when another book comes out, promote it more. I just want to say it’s been awesome talking to you.

Ken Liu: That would be awesome. Thank you, it was a pleasure talking to you. So much fun.

Regina: Thank you for joining us. If you missed any of the show, go to our website sparksciencenow.com or KMRE.org and click on the podcast link. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE radio and Western Washington University. We air weekly on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or on KMRE.org streaming on Sundays at 5PM, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3PM. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page: Spark Science.

Today’s episode was recorded in the KMRE studios operated by the Spark Museum in Bellingham, Washington. Our producer is Regina Barbara DeGraff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae.

[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in

♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them
♪ And they hit the ground

[End of podcast.]