The dark underbelly of internet culture. 

Virtual reality economics. 

Posthuman futures. 

Memory, justice, politics of war revisited through a quantum tunnel. 

Minds uploaded to the cloud that become digital ghosts. Eventually turning into gods who will not be chained.

Enter the wheelhouse of literary powerhouse Ken Liu. A programmer turned tech lawyer turned speculative fiction storyteller. He’s the author of the fan favourite “The Paper Menagerie” – the first ever piece of fiction to win the top three science fiction and fantasy awards (Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy) in one fell swoop. His short story “Good Hunting” was adapted into an animated episode of Tim Miller’s Love, Death + Robots. He’s translated Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, one of the most successful novels to come out of China in the past two decades and recently adapted by Netflix. 

His short stories are quiet. They hum with intelligence. Beat with intimacy. Sear with emotion. Offer his readers playgrounds to exercise their imagination. 

And his plots pivot around technology – to tell human tales. In his stories, technology is no sterile spectacle or sidekick, but mirrors to our selves and societies. Machines become conduits for culture and power, memory and identity. No judgement, only possibilities. What will grief mean in the digital age? What happens when machines know us better than we know ourselves? How do we change with, and through, technology? “The thing I find most compelling about tech,” Liu says, “is how it refracts the human condition – how we dream through it, and sometimes lose ourselves in it.” 

Liu goes further. For him, technology is not external, but part of human nature. Akin to the dams that beavers build or the hives that bees live in. How can you understand human nature without understanding human technologies? But wait – Liu goes further still. If myths like The Iliad and Ramayana have constructed culture, identity, societies in the past, today’s epic poem will be technology itself. As it reshapes our experience, our nature, our communication. 

Which is why Liu isn’t interested in crystal-balling what’s ahead. Instead, he believes science fiction gives us the language and mental frames to think and talk about the future. Like how Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein’s monster has become an enduring metaphor for the human-tech relationship. How George Orwell’s 1984 is a byword for what we must not allow states to become. The fact that Issac Asimov gave us the word “robotics” – and his stories shaped the very industry.   

Enter “silkpunk” – Liu’s invention and contribution to what he calls “hopecrafting” the future. A tech aesthetic that unfolds in his 4-part epic series The Dandelion Dynasty: a vocabulary of materials and engineering from East Asian history – bamboo and kite, silk and sinew. A grammar of biomimetics – airships that rise up like fish, submarines that move like whales through the water. (Ps. Liu is serious about his technology – he’s even prototyped some of the machines he imagined!) And a world where engineers are the heroes, and rebellion, the natural course of action. The intent? To offer another looking glass – a different philosophy, tradition, culture – to excavate solutions. 

As we rush headlong into the machine, press pause and take a step back at SYNAPSE 2025 with Ken Liu. As he shares why stories are humankind’s oldest technology. Why sci-fi isn't about predicting the future as much as making it. How storytelling can avoid tech’s inevitability through building alternate modernities. And why’s he’s excited about AI – and the kind of stories it will tell. 

Previous Next