Ken Liu

Review: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu – Making battle kites cool

/ Simon / Leave a comment

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is many things: a retelling of the fall of the Qin dynasty and the Chu-Han Contention which followed (an incredibly exciting historical period often overshadowed by the Three Kingdoms period which, together with the Chu-Han Contention bookended the Han dynasty); a thoughtful exploration of morality and governance; and a ripping good secondary world fantasy with strange innovations (battle kites) and interesting characters.

I’m excited to see that this is book one of a planned series and am VERY curious as to whether Liu will follow the story of Kuni Garu or whether he’ll jump forward to some of the other notable periods of excitement that peppered this time period.

This story focuses mostly on the lives of two men born after the rise of the first imperial dynasty of the former Tiro states – a confederation of island nations centered around one very large island which share a common culture and history.

An emperor, Mapidéré overthrew the squabbling kingdoms and established a dynasty largely out of a sense of grievance at how his nation was treated compared to the others. He quickly begins pushing forward grand engineering schemes, standardizes the alphabet, weights and measures and then begins questing for immortality, ignoring how his empire is crumbling around him.

While on tour he falls ill and dies and his ministers conspire to have his heir killed and replaced with his younger son, a child who is easily distracted by the power hungry prime minister and the scheming chatelaine. Rebellions arise quickly, and two people: the capricious but sincere Kuni Garu and the noble absolutist Mata Zyndu come to the fore-front of the rebellion. As they fight against imperial authority they begin to see each other as brothers. But Zyndu is uncomfortable with Garu’s often dishonorable tactics, while Garu is disturbed by Zyndu’s brutality.

As the old empire crumbles, so to does their friendship.

Before I get any farther a warning, things will get a bit obliquely spoilery. So, if you know about the history of early Imperial China, or if you read the wikipedia links I posted at the top please consider yourself warned.

The Grace of Kings as historical fiction

It’s very easy to identify the historical counterparts to many of the key players in the novel very early on. Kuni Garu is identifiable as Liu Bang the moment he joins the rebellion, as one of the most enduring establishing myths of the Han is played out on the page. With Garu marked as a stand in for the Han founder, it becomes clear that Mata Zyndu is playing the role of Xiang Yu.

This lends a certain air of inevitability to the story. If Ken Liu had decided to unambiguously set the story in China as opposed to the Tiro States, if he’d removed the Crubens and the airships from the story (and all of these things are delightful, but the story could exist without them) this book would be a straight-up historical fiction, and an exceptional one. Garu as Liu Bang does an exemplary job bringing life to an incredibly complex figure: a commoner who became emperor, a man who reformed many of the excesses of his predecessors but who betrayed his friends, a king who is celebrated historically despite an acknowledged streak of low cunning that would have, in another time, made him not much more than a bandit. Likewise the tragedy of Xiang Yu, who was peerless in battle, but who always made the wrong decision off the field, is rendered beautifully through Zyndu.

Most of the key historical moments of the Chu-Han Contention are explored and dramatized throughout the story, while the blank spaces of historic lives: the loves, fears, hopes and frustrations are filled in with deft skill.

This makes it even more interesting that Liu chose to make a fantasy story instead of writing a history.

The Grace of Kings as morality tale

The issue of ethics is what divides Zyndu and Garu throughout the story. They have vastly divergent opinions on the right way to govern a state, the right way to act in  a war, the right way to deal with enemies, the right way to reward followers, they even differ on what constitutes loyalty, and under what circumstances loyalty is owed.

Zyndu is generally brutal to prisoners, but late in the book, when a general with substantial personal valor opposes him, he treats the general and his followers with a surprising level of respect, because they faced him in a straightforward test of arms. Even though the general fell to him, he still respected him.

On the other hand, Zyndu cannot seem to forgive Garu for having succeeded in taking the imperial city without substantial loss of life or harm to civilians because he did so through trickery.

Kuni Garu spends the entire book worrying about whether or not he is being a good person as well as a good ruler. It’s made very clear that he wants to protect the populace. Garu is horrified by the human cost both of bad rulership and of war. It’s likewise very clear that he’s an ambitious man who wants to forward his own rise from street rat to emperor. In order to achieve his objective he’s willing to betray friends, use spies, lie, kill, and put his own family’s life on the line repeatedly.

Eventually the book decides that the ethics of a ruler must be, due to the very nature of ruling a state, different from the ethics of a single person. The book is ambivalent about whether Kuni Garu is really a good man. It is more clear that he is a good ruler; and suggests that in the span of history that is what will be remembered.

I suspect one of the reasons Liu chose to make this story into a fantasy was so that he could have the freedom to explore these issues without being entirely bound both to historical record and to the extensive body of commentary on the rule of the Han founder that has arisen over the last two thousand years.

The Grace of Kings as fantasy

But there’s another thing that sets The Grace of Kings apart from historical fiction. I’ve previously argued that Sanguo Yanyi was a fantasy novel, or at least the precursor to one, because of the introduction of supernatural elements such as the omens that foretell the death of Dian Wei and the deification of Guan Yu.

And this is another arena that Liu is having a lot of fun with. The pantheon of gods that preside over the Tiro states are a living, breathing and vibrant part of the world. They are constantly meddling with the lives of the mortals, and the book explores an important question: if there’s a god on every side of a conflict, do they cancel out?

Much like Kuni Garu’s goodness the answer is ambivalent. What is made clear is that humans will always be free to interpret design manifestations to benefit themselves, and that ultimately people are the guides of their own fates, even if they can be tempted or pushed by gods. Luan Zya’s divine book won’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know, and Mata Zyndu’s decision to sacrifice soldiers en-masse to one capricious god is something he must own, along with the consequences of that act.

The pantheon of gods that occupy this story are not the deities of Chinese myth. They aren’t the Buddhist kings of hell, nor do they bear much resemblance to the vast panoply of gods that occupy the Taoist cosmology. But they are also some of Liu’s best inventions. I enjoyed the battle kites, airships and mechanical crubens, but the story could have progressed just the same without them.

But without the gods of the Tiro states it would be a very different story, and the ideas they inject play beautifully off the exploration of ethics that occupies The Grace of Kings as a morality tale. By taking the bare events of the Chu-Han Contention and then weaving a story around them in a secondary fantasy world, Liu has managed to make a historical fiction into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Even though the fate of Mata Zyndu will be evident to an informed reader very early on, the question of how he gets there, within himself is open to question. As the story explores both the question of whether this noble, honorable, brutal, vulnerable man is good or not, and as it explores whether he is the captain of his fate or a victim of divine intervention it manages to make that doom into more than a clever retelling of history.

Final Thought

I rarely review a book if I don’t think it’s worth reading, and this is no exception. Though somewhat weighty at around 620 pages, this is definitely one worth reading.

Ken Liu has a deft command of language, history and the humanity that underpins all of his characters. I admit, I’m biased, secondary fantasy stories derived from Chinese sources are literally my favorite things to read, and they’re damn rare. But beyond my personal preferences, this is just a good book.

Furthermore, it’s a book that shows the value of fantasy. Because this didn’t have to be a fantasy, it’s so grounded in a deep appreciation of history that it could have easily been a historical fiction instead. But it is improved for being one.

Review: The Three Body Problem

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The-Three-Body-Problem-Liu-CixinIf you read one Science Fiction book this year, make it the Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu. It is the first book in the Three Body trilogy, and an exceptional starting point for people interested in reading Chinese genre translations.

I really want to get into a thorough exploration of the work, but that’s going to tread into some spoilery territory, so what I’ll do is start with a brief review up top and then include the longer spoiler review at the bottom. I’ll provide ample warning, so if you haven’t read the Three Body Problem and want to be surprised you’ll get plenty of warning.

The non-spoiler review

The Three Body Problem starts with a gut-punch and never lets up from there. And that’s part of what makes this book so exceptional. Chinese fiction, especially, has a different pace and structure from western fiction. As a result, translations of Chinese novels often have issues with pace.

This is not the case here. Ken Liu has tread a very masterful line between preserving the cadence of speech and the structure of the story on one hand, while providing a book that flows correctly in English. If you’re familiar with works translated from Chinese it will still feel like a translation – but it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, easily on a par with the Shapiro translation of Outlaw of the Marsh, which has long been my gold standard. In fact, Liu’s translation likely exceeds even that one.

The impeccably paced story starts in the throes of one of the most tumultuous periods of the Cultural Revolution, before jumping to the near future. It introduces us to a world populated by scientists an soldiers, plutocrats and police. One scientist, Wang Miao, is recruited to investigate an unusual rash of suicides among theoretical physicists. The extra-governmental cabal that recruits him hints darkly that these deaths are part of an ongoing secret war.

As Wang digs deeper into the mystery his whole world begins to fall apart. And then there is that tantalizing video game…

Themes

Exploring topics including cycles of history, chaos and order, the lasting impact of violence on the psyche of survivors, string theory and first contact, it would be an understatement to say that the Three Body Problem is an ambitious book. However it is not a book in which ambition outstrips ability, and Liu Cixin manages to keep several thematic balls in the air with apparent ease, deftly tying the suggestion  that, “other than Stable Eras, all times are Chaotic Eras,” both to mathematical problems in chaotic systems and to politics.

Madeline Ashby recently discussed how she would like to do away with the idea that there is a binary division between hard and soft SF. I think The Three Body Problem provides a valuable example for why she’s right. This story is a scientifically rigorous story about scientists. And that’s effectively the operating definition for the hardest of the hard SF. And yet this is also a story which is entirely driven by the internal lives of its protagonists (and antagonists), and one which is much more interested in the impact of a cultural movement on the world than the direct impact on technology. These are both hallmarks of soft SF. And being constrained by neither of these binary positions it’s a better novel.

Characters

A few characters stand out: Wang Miao is an interesting protagonist – at times sharp witted and incisive, at other times retreating and confused. We’re invited to empathize with his sense of awe with the circumstances he’s thrust into, his vulnerability in the face of something much bigger than himself, while still being able to understand why he is the central figure for much of the story.

Ye Wenjie is another example of a beautifully complex character. Sometimes a kindly grandmother, other times a stubborn intellectual, always somebody struggling with the remnants of post-traumatic stress that was never allowed to heal, she is the thread that connects the disparate times and themes of the book most closely and is wonderfully rendered.

Shi (Da Shi) Qiang would have been the hero of a lesser work. This morally suspect disgraced soldier and failing cop is a man whose main failing seems to be a total inability to keep his mouth shut. And yet his bluff charm, easy humour and impish ingenuity make him lovable, even when it becomes clear he’s pretty much a total psychopath. Positioning him as a foil to the cerebral Wang Miao helps to establish this story as happening in the world – and gives the story enough dirt under its nails to remove it from what might otherwise seem an ivory tower parlour mystery.

This is about all I can say without venturing into spoiler territory.

So be forewarned.

If you haven’t read the book and want to avoid spoilers turn back now.

The spoiler review

Chaotic systems and cyclical systems

Compare the Trisolarian statement that, “other than Stable Eras, all times are Chaotic Eras” with the thesis of the first Chinese novel, “a kingdom long united must divide, a kingdom long divided must unite,” and we can see a through-line in the idea of history as a cyclical process.

And yet, where Luo Guanzhong saw destiny and inevitability, Liu Cixin instead invites chaos and unpredictability. While it is true that history cycles between periods of relative stability and harmony, and periods of conflict, he proposes, we cannot know when such a period will end, or even the form the conflict will take.

The factional divides within the ETO mirror the previous factional divides in the Red Guard so closely. Both are born of idealism. Both invite the disaffected. Both fall first into fanaticism and then into nihilism and both are ultimately most vulnerable to internal divisions brought about by their own fanaticism.

What lends an air of cyclicality to this is the way in which Ye Wenjie is so effectively demonstrated as a victim of the Cultural Revolution. She watches her father be murdered for refusing to compromise his principles. She watches her mother morph into something she can barely recognize in order to survive. This is a relationship she is never able (or even particularly motivated) to recover. She learns second-hand of her sister’s death but we, as the audience, are given the opportunity to witness this otherwise disconnected event in almost lurid detail: the passion of the believer and the ultimate futility of her death presented in language more poetic than the rest of the book.

She suffers betrayal at the hands of a would-be friend because he is in a position to avoid punishment for daring to have a differing opinion by casting the blame on her. Her refuge is effective a prison overseen by the military – and by the time she arrives there, almost dead, she is more than willing to sign away any vestige of freedom in exchange for nothing more than security.

And so her decision that humanity is incapable of governing itself, and the extreme action she takes to ensure that the Trisolarians are able to discover the location of the earth are understandable as a person in the depths of powerful post-traumatic stress. The world stabilizes around her, but she doesn’t even notice because she’s so wrapped in her own pain.

And yet, the organization that grows out of her actions, the one she becomes the titular commander of (even if not so much in actual function) rapidly falls into the same factional in-fighting and extremism that informed the cultural revolution.

Out of her desire to save humanity from the destruction of its own Chaotic Eras, she sows the seeds for the collapse of the next Stable Era.

Wang Miao, on the other hand, is very much a product of stable times. When we first meet him, he tells a gang of police and generals to get lost, secure that his position of relative wealth and prestige is sufficient to protect him. And it works – they have to plead with him to come to a meeting with them. They can’t just compel cooperation from Wang like previous government forces did from Ye. Furthermore, though he might have been old enough to remember at least the end of the Cultural Revolution, we never learn much at all about what he was doing at that time. It’s the Deng era of opening up and stability that define his experience.

It’s unsurprising he’s reluctant to involve himself in a shadowy conflict when he’s got such a pleasant bourgeois life.

This makes his shock when the world starts twisting into something far weirder all the more intense and poignant.

While Ye, unable to recognize the arrival of peace, and unwilling to accept that the world has stabilized makes a terrible and portentous decision because she can’t accept peace, it is ultimately the idea that the world is descending into chaos that Wang struggles with most.

By the time he’s willingly stringing his monofilament lines across the Panama Canal, watching unflinchingly as it slices a sailor into several pieces, we realize how tenuous our sense of comfort is – how any time the world might descend into chaos.

Shi Qiang presents one final view of how people relate to chaos and stability. He’s not broken by chaos like Ye, nor must he learn to adapt like Wang. Rather he thrives off chaos.

This “demon” laughs, teases and boozes his way through situations that leave the people around him reeling. It’s Shi who sees something fishy in the “miracles” sent to confound Wang, Shi who suggests using Wang’s monofilament to take the Adventist base and  he expresses no remorse either at the deaths of all the Adventists, or of the limited civilian casualties the plan will cause. He even suggests attacking during the day to minimize the risk that sleeping Adventists might survive.

When the Trisolarians send their final message to Earth, declaring everyone there insects, Ye goes to watch the sun set on Humanity in the place where she doomed it. Wang descends into depression. And Qiang leads his allies to a town afflicted by locusts.

He points out that the locusts might be as beneath humans as the humans appear to be beneath Trisolarians. But the locusts still thrive, despite everything humanity does. Even though humans never had to deal with the madness of living on a planet in a trinary star system, adapting is something we’re adept at. Shi Qiang invites chaos. It’s his constant ally.

Science in the Three Body Problem

There are a few interesting branches of science discussed or extrapolated from in the Three Body Problem. Since it is science fiction I figured I should at least touch on them.

 The Three Body Problem

The titular problem is a classical physics dilemma. While two bodies act on each other in a predictable fashion, they move toward each other unless acted upon by an outside force, introducing a third body causes the system to become chaotic.

The near impossibility of the task occupies much of the Three Body game segments of the story – as Wang learns the history of the Trisolarian attempt to chart the behavior of their solar system sufficiently to be able to survive its Chaotic Eras and maximize its Stable Eras.

There’s also multiple instances of factions divided into threes within the book: Battle Command, the ETO and the Trisolarians for example, or within the ETO, the Adventists, Redemptionists and Survivalists. These allow this classical problem to both serve as a metaphor for the conflicts of disparate groups, and to be reflected by the chaotic actions of the various factions.

A solar antenna

I’m not certain how fantastical this is. But Liu’s description of Ye Wenjie using the sun as a supermassive antenna for trans-solar transmission is really cool. It made me want to learn more.

String theory

I’m still not entirely sold on string theory. It remains resistant to experimental verification and isn’t parsimonious. That said, the Trisolarian plot depends on unfolding protons from 11 dimensional string theoretical complexity into 2 dimensions in order to create proton-sized artificial intelligences. This leads to one of the most beautifully abstract areas of the text, which I loved every moment.

Nanotube Monofilament

These things are starting to exist in the real world. How long before we get Wang Miao’s weaponized version?

Wrap-up

The Three Body Problem is a tour de force of speculative fiction. It fluctuates frequently between wonder, humour and despair. Ultimately this is a story about how people break, and it breaks its protagonists beautifully. And yet, for all their brokenness it ends on a bitter note of hope.

This, when you consider the scope of Chinese fiction over the last 500 years, positions the story beautifully in the context of its antecedents.

If you regularly read translated SF you’ve probably already put the Three Body Problem on your to-read list.

If you don’t, this book is a perfect place to start, beautifully written and beautifully translated.