How Ken Liu went from engineer to lawyer to SF writer to the foremost translator of Chinese sf into English

Ken Liu went from university to a software engineering job at Microsoft, then to some startups, then to Harvard Law, where he got a JD and went into practice as a litigation consultant on tech cases -- all the while, writing and selling sf stories.

Liu didn't think he would make a living from his fiction, but then he got a cold-call from a Chinese sf publisher asking him if he'd translate Cixin Liu's blockbuster novel The Three Body Problem; Liu's translation and the powerful source material turned the book into a monster English-language bestseller, a Hugo winner, and a calling card for more translation work in the years to come.

Since then, Ken Liu has become a Chinese-to-English powerhouse in the large, vibrant, fraught field of Chinese sf. Ken Liu was born in northwest China and left at the age of 11, moving to Palo Alto, and is fluent in Mandarin and was always a voracious reader.

Ken Liu's success is owed in part to his fluency -- both linguistic and literary -- but also to his own prodigious writing talents, which allow him to be interpreter as much as translator. Ken Liu's translations are often impressionistic, rather than literal, and he sometimes offers editorial advice on the books he translated. His edition of Three Body Problem drastically re-orders the scenes compared to the Chinese edition, which was heavily edited. Ken Liu suggested the re-ordering and was enthusiastically received by Cixin Liu, who revealed that Ken Liu's suggestion would restore the book to its original, pre-edited plot -- today, Cixin Liu recommends that his Chinese readers seek out Ken Liu's English translation over the Chinese edition. Read the rest