Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity.
: Ken Liu
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.
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.
It’s kind of cool that I know of all this great science fiction being written in China, and most of it is not really well-known in the West.
As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction – indeed, it’s a key part of a great deal of science fiction.
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.