Raphael Bob-Waksberg digs into his favorite short story collections and influences - The A.V. Club

Raphael Bob-Waksberg digs into his favorite short story collections and influences - The A.V. Club

Raphael Bob-Waksberg digs into his favorite short story collections and influences - The A.V. Club

Posted: 17 Jun 2019 08:00 AM PDT

With Reading List, The A.V. Club asks one of our favorite pop-culture creators to describe a list of reading materials that are tied together by a singular theme.

The reader: Raphael Bob-Waksberg already appeared to have mastered short-form storytelling as the creator and writer of BoJack Horseman, one of the best TV series of the last decade, well before the release of his own short story collection, Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory. But in speaking with Bob-Waksberg about stories that make up this collection, which is equal parts tearjerker and laugh riot, it became clear this was more a return for the author than a debut. Along with his favorite collections, Bob-Waksberg shared with The A.V. Club the books that inspired him to make his own literary "mixtape."

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: I first learned about Katherine Heiny when I was in high school. I took a creative writing class with Mr. Paul Dunlap at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California. And one of the stories we read was the story called "How To Give The Wrong Impression" by Katherine Heiny, and I loved it. And I've been fascinated by it now for, you know, over 15 years. And then just a couple years ago, she put out her debut collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow, including that story, which was over 20 years old, and I devoured the whole book. That story, "How To Give The Wrong Impression," I think she—she just—how do I talk about her? It was the first story I ever read that was told in the second person, which I thought was utterly fascinating. And I do that a lot in my book. I have a lot of stories told in the second person.

You know, I think it was described to me by Mr. Dunlap, in some ways, that the second-person narrator is even more personal than the first-person narrator, and that's definitely true of that story. What I love about her book is there's thematic resonance between the stories. They all feel of a type, you know? It doesn't feel like a greatest hits album or like a "best of" collection. It feels like these stories all belong in the same book. And that's something I thought about a lot when I was writing my book. I have ideas for stories or little story-like things, but it doesn't belong in this book. And what is the overarching thread or the spine of this book? I think Single, Carefree, Mellow does that very well. That you kind of read through the stories, and even though they're not related by plot or character—although a couple of them do have recurring characters—it feels like you're following a thread through all of them.

Some of these books I read a long time ago—I don't remember them as specifically, I just remember loving them.

The A.V. Club: But it's clear that they've made lasting impressions, if you're talking them up so long after first picking them up.

RBW: This book came [out before Single, Carefree, Mellow] but I read it much later. And when I read it, I remember thinking, oh, I wondered if Katherine Heiny had read this book. I wonder if this had an influence on her, because Lorrie Moore also has a number of second-person stories that are kind of modeled like how-to guides, which I have one or two in my book, as well. I think it's a really fun way into her story. It's a good format that allows you to go richer and deeper as you go, but start very light and playful. Lorrie Moore does that very well, and I think Katherine Heiny does as well.

What I also love about Lorrie Moore stories is they take me a long time to read. They're not easy for me because each sentence, I feel like, is so rich and dense, it just sends me off in a thousand directions. I think about my life, I think about stories I want to write... it feels like there's so many off-ramps that I have to then kind of go back and go, oh wait, I just read a paragraph and was thinking about other stuff. [Laughs.] I have to go back and read it again, which I mean as a compliment, because I feel like there's so much richness in her prose that it can't help but inspire me. It makes me want to write, which I think is very good in a short story collection if you are a writer. I pick up her book and I go, okay, yeah, I want to do this. I want to do this about the things that I feel the way she's doing them.

AVC: I know it's been a while, but do you have a favorite story from Self-Help, or maybe just one that still sticks out all these years later?

RBW: I just looked up the table of contents. [Laughs.] I'm looking at it now. I think "How To Be Another Woman" certainly is more influential on my work, and it is a story in the style of a how-to guide that then becomes a story. But I think actually my favorite story in the collection is "Go Like This," which is about a woman deciding that she is going to kill herself. [Laughs.] You know, light stuff. A fun, playful story about a woman who is killing herself. But I also love, now that I'm looking at it, "How To Talk To Your Mother" is a great, little story. I'd say those three are probably my picks from that book.

AVC: I'm maybe cheating a bit by asking you for even more recommendations, but it's always good to have an entry point. Still, I am aware that this is becoming a bigger ask as we go on.

RBW: Oh, it's fine. [Laughs.]

AVC: As we talk about these collections, they feel thematically relevant to to your book as far as looking at love and loss and how they're intertwined, and how sadness isn't just relegated to breakups.

RBW: Yeah, I mean, I would say all these books are somewhat related to my collection—certainly, I would say all these books are influences on me. And I think of myself as a writer who wears his influences very transparently. I think, maybe, they might be more opaque to other people looking in. To me, I feel like, oh, this is bordering on plagiarism now. I'm really such a fan of these pieces, and a lot of times, I will think, well, what would be my version of this? Usually, not so consciously. Usually, it's after the fact. I look back and go, oh, this is very much influenced by that. Like I said, I think Single, Carefree, Mellow has a really interesting thread of relationships, or more infidelity, in that book. And Self-Help, I would say, its interest in interiority—maybe that goes without saying, because that's kind of a point of prose fiction as opposed to TV or the other stuff that I've written—but I certainly think my book is more interior than my other work, and probably that's because of the stories that I love.

AVC: How does the experience of writing your book compare to working on something like BoJack Horseman?

RBW: Well, it's like, when I think about it, I also think, in some ways, my stories are less interior than a lot of my influences, maybe because of my TV experience, and that I think I am somewhat more incident-focused and dialogue-focused and event-focused than some of these stories. Like Lorrie Moore, a lot of her stories are very kind of slice-of-life and kind of like, okay, we're going to spend some time with these characters kind of figuring themselves out. And I think my stories might have a little more action than that, mostly because the way I really learned storytelling was through writing television, which has different demands. But I think compared to my television work, my stories are absolutely very interior and slice-of-life-y, if that make sense.

RBW: I brought this book on my honeymoon to Australia. I was reading this book on the beach, and the ending of the first story in the book made me gasp. Literally, I gasped. I physically went [gasp] as I was reading. And I loved that this book made my body do a thing. [Laughs.] I thought that was so cool. I was so invested, and it just surprised me. And I think that's something that I certainly aspire to is I want that kind of control over a reader. I want to made their body move. You know, certainly laughter is a form of that, but I want my book to physically affect people. I think that is a goal I didn't realize I had until I read this book. I think another thing that I really enjoyed in a few of her stories is the the unself-conscious magic of the world. It's kind of like, oh yeah, magical things happen, and that's not what it's about, though. You know, like yeah, that's part of it. And that certainly was an influence in how I thought about some of the magic or sci-fi elements that predate some of the stories in my book.

RBW: Now, the fourth book is maybe a cheat, but it's A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which I believe she calls a novel, although I believe she has been coy with it. I think she's referred to it as both a novel and a collection of story stories. I feel, myself, as a big fan of short stories and the short story form—I feel like it is almost an insult to refer to this book as a novel, because I think of it as a marvelous example of what a collection of short stories can be, despite the fact that they're all interconnected, I think each story stands on its own beautifully, and as you read through it, you gain a larger understanding of the world in which these stories inhabit, and again, the thread that links them together. But I think that's just an example of a good collection of short stories. I think we all should aspire to be that cohesive. You know, not necessarily in terms of plot, but in terms of feeling and emotional rhythm. And I also love that she's able to do that even though formatically so many of the stories are different—you have third-person stories, first-person stories, second-person stories. One story that's a PowerPoint presentation, another feels like a celebrity profile written by David Foster Wallace, but each of them have their own power.

I wonder if the idea of calling it a novel is to kind of read it in the order that it's presented, because I know a lot of times when I read short story books, I kind of, you know, peck around and see, oh, you know, what's the shortest one first? Or I pick something just to get a taste. But [A Visit From The Goon Squad] is a novel, so no, you've got to start at the beginning. But I think it's a wonderful book of short stories. I love it on those terms, and I would love to celebrate it on those terms.

AVC: Maybe it's because school habits die hard, but I usually go cover to cover. I don't think I've ever "grazed" that way before. Is that something you took into consideration when planning the order of your own collection?

RBW: Well, I do it less now. I used to be more of a pecker. And I think, maybe recently, I've decided if I read a book of short stories, I'm going to commit to the whole thing, so I may as well start at the beginning. But I used to get a book of short stories and look at the first story, and it's like 35 pages. Then I'd look at the table of contents and see one with that's eight pages, so I'm trying the eight-page one. Let's just see how I do. So when I was designing my own book, I put a couple of real short ones right at the beginning just to kind of ease people in. That way, if you are a hunter and pecker, you can go, "Oh! There's a couple of real short ones. I'll start there." And that kind of lulls you into it. And you have the first, more substantial piece, which is the third piece.

I kind of designed the book with that in mind, that people might peck around a little bit. But also, now having written my book of short stories, I am more respectful of the order in other collections. I think about the thought I put into the order of the stories, and how I did want to create that thread and that momentum of them and how they build off each other, you know, like a good CD. [Laughs.] I don't know why I said CD. When was the last time anyone listened to a CD? Or even album or a mixtape? But you know, I really thought about my book like a mixtape, and I thought about, you know, what follows what, and what is the momentum that is built. After a long one, you want a little short one to catch your breath, then you'll dive into another the long one. I thought about the momentum and what are we starting with, what are we ending with. I was very thoughtful about that.

RBW: So my last book is maybe also a cheat, but I guess you could say it's 300 very short stories. [There's a story in my book] at the beginning called "Short Stories," which is 10 very short little fictions, and it is very much influenced by Sarah Manguso. They are, in some ways, my tribute to her and her writing, because I've been a fan of hers for a while.

I think 300 Arguments is a real tiny wallop of a book. It looks very slim, and at first, each little two-sentence or one-sentence thing kind of stands on its own, but again, as you read it, you get sucked into the momentum of it, and the whole of it is much larger than the sum of its parts in a really beautiful way. And there's a precision to her writing and an exactness that I am I wildly envious of. You know, I'm sure you deal with this too as a writer, but a lot of times, it's easier to write a very long thing than it is to write a very short thing, and the challenges of, like how do I pare this down to the most essential elements? And I think Sarah Manguso does that beautifully, where it just goes like, "Oh my God, you packed 30 pages worth of incident into two sentences, and it floors me every time. She has a piece she wrote a long time ago called "Things I Realized In 2002" that my friend Chioke Nassor made into a short film, which I think is on Vimeo. You can probably post a link to it. But that was my first introduction to her. After I saw that little short, which I think Chioke did a beautiful job with it, I immediately looked for other stuff I could read by her. So I'm a big fan. And that's my list.

AVC: I have just one more question about your recommendations, given how they may have influenced your own collection that looks at the whole cycle of love—the infatuation, the relationship, the break-up and, sometimes, the heartbreak. Of the collections you recommended, which one do you think might be the most appropriate reading for someone who is going through a breakup?

RBW: [Laughs.] That's a good one. I think... well, in some ways, I'm inclined to say What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky, because I feel like it's the most escapist. If you don't want to dwell, What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky kind of takes you to a different world, and lets you kind of think about people other than yourself, which I think is helpful when you're going through a breakup. But it depends who you are—for me, there are a lot of stories about people other than myself, which is why it feels escapist for me. But I'm sure there are a lot of people who would read that book and recognize themselves more than I would as a white American man.

But if you want to dwell, then I'd say Single, Carefree, Mellow or Self-Help would be better for that, although Single, Carefree, Mellow I think is slightly more optimistic. I think Self-Help is good if you want to really get in your feelings, and Single, Carefree, Mellow is a pep talk from an old friend being like, "It's rough, but it's going to be okay," you know? Single, Carefree, Mellow might be the best for that.

Bridges: Porter cast long shadow of influence on Texas writers - LubbockOnline.com

Posted: 22 Jun 2019 09:01 AM PDT

Katherine Anne Porter was one of the most noted of Texas novelists. Her career spanned decades, and though her output was limited, it had a profound impact on many aspiring writers from the 1930s through the 1970s.

She was born Callie Russel Porter in May 1890 in Indian Creek, a small, unincorporated community in Brown County in Central Texas. Her father was a cousin to Texas writer William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry. Brown County also happened to be the home of noted western and horror novelist Robert E. Howard. Porter was the fourth of five children, but tragedy followed her for much of her early life. An older brother had died while still an infant. When she was two, her mother died shortly after giving birth to her youngest sister.

Distraught and left with four young children to raise, Harrison Porter took his children and moved in with his mother, Catherine Anne Porter. The family spent the next few years living in the modest house in Kyle, a small community just south of Austin. From a young age in Kyle, she began writing stories. The future writer became very close to her grandmother in those years. But in 1901, her grandmother died while taking her on a trip to see relatives in West Texas. Afterward, her father moved the family sporadically across Texas and Louisiana. Porter's education became increasingly sporadic, and she never attended high school.

In 1906, she married John Henry Koontz, a Lufkin-area rancher. It would be the first of five marriages for Porter. The marriage was a disaster from the beginning, wrecked by Koontz's alcoholism. Porter reported later that he flew into horrible rages fueled by his drinking. She alleged at one point that he threw her down a flight of stairs, resulting in a broken ankle.

She left for Chicago in 1914 and filed for divorce, asking that her name be legally changed to Katherine Anne Porter in the process. She also picked up a writing job at the Chicago Tribune. She even began appearing a few silent film roles as extras while writing a story for Chicago film companies, with one company paying her $12 per day. After her divorce was finalized, she married Otto Taskett, a marriage that fell apart within months.

At that same time in 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium. While hospitalized, she began writing stories full time. Her fortune changed when she learned she had been misdiagnosed, and she returned to Texas in 1917 as a society writer for the Fort Worth Critic.

The next year, she moved to Denver to write for the Rocky Mountain News. But 1918 was also the year of the Spanish Flu Epidemic. More than 500,000 Americans died from the flu that year. Porter nearly died herself but survived. After her recovery, she spent most of the next decade traveling, living mostly in Mexico and New York City. Her first published short story, "Maria Concepcion," (1922) was inspired by her experiences in Mexico.

She married three and divorced three more times between 1926 and 1942. As talented as she was, she found writing very frustrating. She once said, "I have written and destroyed manuscripts quite literally by the trunkful. I spent fifteen years wandering about, weighted horribly by masses of paper and little else." She published a widely acclaimed and influential collection of short stories in 1930, "Flowering Judas and Other Stories."

Among her most famous story was the award-winning "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" (1939). This was a collection of three novellas which took place during the 1918 flu pandemic, inspired by her own illness. The story was adapted into several television movies in the 1950s and 1960s. This was followed up by another short story collection, "The Leaning Tower" (1944).

She spent many of her years from the 1930s onward traveling the world, writing essays for The Nation and The New Republic and writing short stories. She met prominent writers, celebrities, and world leaders in her travels. However, she only wrote one novel. Ship of Fools (1962) took twenty years to write. The tale of misfits sailing to Europe in the early 1930s became instantly famous and was adapted into a movie in 1965.

In 1965, she published The Collected Stories, her latest anthology. This earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 as well as the National Book Award. She would continue to write for many more years. Porter died at her home in Maryland at the age of 90 in 1980.

Her birthplace in Brown County was recognized by the state as a state historic landmark in 1990. In Kyle, the family home continued to stand years after Porter's death. In 1997, the city, along with several local charities and benefactors, bought the old homestead and began renovating it. In 2000, it was declared a national landmark and the city established the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center at the home. Operating today through a partnership with Texas State University in San Marcos, the organization invites noted writers to speak at symposiums and offers programs to help aspiring writers.

Dr. Ken Bridges is a writer, historian and native Texan. He holds a doctorate from the University of North Texas. Dr. Bridges can be reached by email at drkenbridges@gmail.com.

Things to Do Denver: Ebony Flowers Debuts Graphic Novel "Hot Comb" - Westword

Posted: 18 Jun 2019 10:00 AM PDT

Award-winning author Ebony Flowers's first book, Hot Comb, which she brings to the Tattered Cover LoDo on June 20, is a graphic novel. But Flowers isn't just a cartoonist — not that there's anything wrong with that. She's a storyteller, a writer and artist, an educator. She holds a B.A. in biological anthropology and a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction. She just happened to write her dissertation as a comic. Mostly, she says. Mostly a comic.

Hot Comb is all comic, but it's also all story. It's memoir. It's cultural commentary. It's American history through the lens of African-American experience. It is, as legendary cartoonist and Flowers role model Lynda Barry says, "fresh and absolutely groundbreaking." We caught up with Flowers, now a Denverite, and talked about her work, her life, her art, and all the stories that encompass them.

Westword: Start us off by telling us what to expect at the Tattered Cover this week. You're going to be there in conversation with educator and librarian Julia Torres, yes?

Ebony Flowers: My conversation with Julia at Tattered Cover LoDo on Thursday will be a celebration of creative and visual storytelling. It'll be a great event for fans of indie comics, for people who read graphic novels, for readers who appreciate diverse narratives, and for anyone who enjoys a good story.

I'm a former public school educator — I taught high school biology on the Southside of Chicago, and I was also a middle school science and math teacher in Luanda, Angola — and have always appreciated the wisdom and perspective of librarians. I first learned about Julia Torres through her work with Educolor, a movement among public school educators of color who advocate for equity and justice, as well as her work leading #DisruptTexts, an initiative among educators to challenge the literary canon and create a more inclusive and diverse literacy curriculum. I'm really inspired by Julia and both of these efforts! When my publisher, Drawn and Quarterly, suggested that I do a local event for my book launch, I immediately thought of Julia. I'm thankful that Drawn and Quarterly reached out to Julia and worked with Tattered Cover to organize the event. I'm very happy this all worked out.

So how does one go about doing a reading from a graphic novel?

When I publicly read my comics, I want people to experience an immersive form of storytelling. I'm introducing people to a new world, to words and images paired together, to a life that may be different from their prior experience. When I read comics, I'm helping people to appreciate the power of pictures with words, and of words with pictures. Reading a comic, or a graphic novel, is different from reading a novel or describing a picture book. I care about pace, setting, tension, and the lives of my characters. I need to let my drawings speak for themselves while also narrating a story that benefits from this interplay of picture and verse. Sometimes I read my story panel by panel, sometimes page by page. It depends what I think works best for the story.

How did Hot Comb come about? There's clearly a lot of family connection working as the root of the inspiration for this book, yes?

I started creating fiction comics while completing my Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had an amazing set of mentors at UW-Madison, including leading researchers in early childhood education, literacy studies, the learning sciences, and also Lynda Barry, the first-ever Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art, my former boss, and then-director of the Image Lab. These mentors taught me about the power of storytelling — whether for academic or popular audiences. Nonetheless, I spent years drawing and writing a dissertation, and I needed another outlet for my energy and ideas. While I was trained as an ethnographer and was telling stories based upon research data, I needed to also tell stories based upon my life, my curiosities and my own imagination. My first drafts of stories included in Hot Comb were drawn while I was finishing my dissertation. The short story "Hot Comb" came from watching black women YouTubers talk about their first perm and their "big chop," or the moment when they cut off their perm and started growing their hair without any permanent chemical manipulation. My first perm experience was a little different from how these YouTubers reflected on their own experiences. I decided to make a comic about it.

Is it all autobiographical, or are things fictionalized so that you can tell the stories with the characters you want?

My book is a mix of fiction and creative nonfiction. Some of the stories are autobiographical, like "Hot Comb," "The Lady on the Train" and "Fieldwork Follies." Others — such as "Big Ma," "Sisters and Daughters" and "Last Angolan Saturday" — draw from my life and my friends and my family experiences while also adding elements of fiction to emphasize particular hopes, fears, dreams and questions. These intentional changes help me confront and address standards of beauty, racism, classism, as well as notions of community and belonging.

The use of interstitial mock-up advertisements is one of my favorite parts of the book. They work not only as separations for each story, but also to reinforce the cultural reinforcement of some of the ideas of beauty and image brought up in the stories themselves. How did you come up with those, and with the idea to use those ads in that way?

I'm glad you liked the parody ads! These fake ads were recently featured as an excerpt in the New Yorker in which I explained my personal history reading magazines like Ebony, Essence and Jet as a young girl while getting my hair done. Reading these magazines, years ago, I never questioned what the many hair-product ads were really trying to sell to me. Now I'm much more critical of the messages, beauty standards and corporate appeasements to whiteness that were (and continue to be) entrenched in these advertisements. You likely noticed that my parody ads play upon various pop-culture tropes and topics, like Black Panther and Game of Thrones, as well as Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. I consider these fantasy and futuristic visions as absurd as me acquiescing to someone else's ideas about what counts as acceptable, attractive and beautiful. These parody ads are my attempt to envision a different future, in which black women inquire and inspire while loving their hair.

There's a lot of Lynda Barry that comes through in your style and storytelling, which makes sense since you thank her in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. What did you take from Barry's work specifically? What works of hers specifically affected you, and how? How do you see Barry's influence showing up in your own work as a writer and artist?

Lynda taught me how to make comics and how to be a more curious person. I met her in the spring of 2012 when she was the artist-in-residence at UW-Madison. I applied to be in her course "What It Is, Shifting the Manual Image." At the time, I had no idea who she was or what the class would be about. I was looking for alternative ways of representing ethnographic research, and I thought her class sounded interesting. Prior to that time, I had never read any of her work. I didn't know she was a cartoonist until she mentioned it on the first day of class.

Her class was great and transformative! I used a lot of what I learned to get me through my Master's thesis. I kept in touch with her over the summer of 2012. She returned to UW-Madison the following fall and eventually became faculty. When I decided to pursue a Ph.D., I enrolled in every class she taught. Her influence trickled into my Ph.D. work in curriculum and instruction. When the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery opened, the co-director hired Lynda to run a research space that operated at the intersection of science, education and art. She called it the Image Lab and hired me as a project assistant. I worked there until I graduated in 2017. We did a lot of amazing work together, both in Madison and around the country.

Lynda has also influenced me as a teacher. Anyone who has taken a class or workshop with her has experienced the distinctive energy, rigor and genuine curiosity that grounds all of her courses. Whenever I facilitate workshops or teach as a visiting scholar, as I recently did at the University of Toronto, where I taught "Making Comics for Research," I emphasize the importance of timing, spontaneity, materials and sharing — all of which I learned from Lynda and our work together at the Image Lab.

Forgive the question about definitions: Hot Comb is a graphic novel, but you also describe them as short stories. Do you differentiate between the two terms? Are graphic novel stories just another type of short fiction?

I'm not too keen on defining terms like "graphic novel" or "short story." I make comics — short, long, full of images, full of words. Certainly there is overlap among these forms, genres and experiences — for both authors and readers. In my current work, I don't differentiate much between these terms, as my storytelling includes both narrative and image in multiple arrangements and juxtapositions.

So what short fiction authors — in the traditional sense — have influenced your work?

I like the work of Octavia Butler, Alice Munro, Dan Chaon, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Adrian Tomine, Vanessa Davis, Jillian Tamaki and Ivan Brunetti.

Of what other graphic novels or even comic books are you a fan? What's your opinion of "mainstream" comic books in the graphic medium?

I'll be honest: "Mainstream" comics aren't really my thing. I make fun of my husband for reading them. I like reading comics that are about the everyday, the lived experiences of people who seldom have the privilege of telling stories or having their stories told in graphic form. While I appreciate and read a lot of Afrofuturistic-themed stories, I am trained as an ethnographer. I know how to study, draw and tell stories about the everyday. The beauty, complexity and pain of my comics is in the nuances of the everyday. There's a need to look closely at what can too easily be missed. There's a need to listen, with care, to what can too easily be misheard or ignored. My hope in making comics is to tell stories that others would never notice or perhaps disregard, and also to allow those who feel that they have been overlooked to be seen.

You grew up in Maryland but call Denver home now. What brought you to the Mile High City? Any favorite places in town?

About five years ago I began bouncing back and forth between Denver, where my husband relocated for a job, and Madison, Wisconsin, where I was finishing my Ph.D. We're now settled here in Denver. I enjoy spending time at Kilgore Books and Comics, eating at places like The Plimouth and Beet Box, and looking for antiques at the Annex. My husband and I also spend a lot of time in City Park walking around with our newborn. We certainly appreciate the sun and the winter snow that melts in a matter of days and not in months. (Sorry, Wisconsin!)

Ebony Flowers will discuss Hot Comb with Julia Torres at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 20, at the Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th Street; find more information at tatteredcover.com.

Teague Bohlen is a writer, novelist and professor at the University of Colorado Denver. His first novel, The Pull of the Earth, won the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction in 2007; his textbook The Snarktastic Guide to College Success came out in 2014. His new collection of flash fiction, Flatland, is available now.

A Popular Social Studies Curriculum Got an Internal Review. The Findings Weren't Pretty - Education Week

Posted: 14 Jun 2019 10:39 AM PDT

A parent in Rutherford county, Tenn., refused to let her daughter complete this assignment in a Studies Weekly publication, which asked students to write from the perspective of a plantation owner.
A parent in Rutherford county, Tenn., refused to let her daughter complete this assignment in a Studies Weekly publication, which asked students to write from the perspective of a plantation owner.
—Image from Facebook post

Hundreds of issues flagged in Studies Weekly lessons

When Nikita Walker, a parent in Rutherford County, Tenn., saw that her daughter's homework asked the then-5th grader to write a few sentences in support of slavery, she was confused—and angry.

Walker's daughter was given the assignment last year in an issue of Studies Weekly, a national social studies publication that presents lessons on history, government, and society in a newspaper format, designed to be consumed week-by-week. The activity instructed her to write from the point of view of several Civil War-era actors, including a southern cotton plantation owner. Walker told the teacher that her daughter, who is black, would not be completing the assignment. "You're teaching them the horrors of slavery, and then you're asking them to give three pros for slavery?" she said in an interview with Education Week.

Walker was angry with the teacher, but also with Studies Weekly. "What editor was like, this is a good idea?" she asked.

Her concern comes at a time when there is a growing call for schools to acknowledge the United States' history of racism and oppression, and elevate the voices of groups of people who have been marginalized since this country's founding. Recent campaigns have pushed schools to remove the names of Confederate leaders, and some districts have resurfaced debates about how to describe well-known historical events and figures.

Problematic Lessons

In an internal review, Studies Weekly flagged the following issues in their state-specific publications. This list is an excerpt from the hundreds of issues identified in internal documents in 2018, which were obtained by Education Week. Some of these materials are no longer available on Studies Weekly's purchasing website. The others have been changed online and will be corrected for the print copies purchased for the 2019-2020 school year, according to the company's statement.

  • Arkansas' 4th grade, Week 10: An article calls indigenous people "troublemakers."
  • Arkansas' 4th grade, Week 16: An article asks students to imagine that they are a plantation owner.
  • Indiana's 3rd grade, Week 9: An article states that Native Americans "agreed" to keep a small part of land in Ohio.
  • Kentucky's 4th grade, Week 7: An article says that Native Americans had "simple clothing, houses and machines."
  • Kentucky's 4th grade, Week 8: An article about the French and Indian War includes the following quote: "After all, colonists probably thought, 'Who exactly owns all that wildland anyway?' When the war was over, though, it was pretty clear: England was the owner! Suddenly, heading west didn't seem like trespassing. Folks came with confidence into this land that had once seemed 'off limits.'" The article does not mention that Native Americans were living on those lands.
  • Michigan's 3rd grade, week 17: An article states that settlers feared Native Americans because they "seemed savage."
  • Nebraska's 4th grade, Week 12: A writing activity asks students to imagine that they are enslaved.
  • Virginia's 4th grade, Week 9: An article describes Africans who were brought to Jamestown to work on tobacco fields without pay. "It wasn't wonderful, but it was better than being a slave!" the article reads.
  • Washington's 4th grade, Week 8: An article states that the Yakama people traded away their lands.

The article Walker identified wasn't an isolated incident. An internal review of Studies Weekly's widely used materials found more than 400 examples of racial or ethnic bias, historical inaccuracies, age-inappropriate content, and other errors in the materials, according to internal documents that were presented to the company's executive board, which were recently provided to Education Week. The staff review team flagged about 100 as high-priority fixes, which included biased language or age-inappropriate content, such as descriptions of graphic violence, according to these documents. The review took place during the 2018 calendar year.

As part of the process, the company convened a diversity board, made up of K-12 administrators and social studies directors, education and history professors, and advocates, all but one of whom did not work for the company. This board reviewed incidents flagged as high-priority and made suggestions as to whether changes needed to be made, according to internal documents.

Many of the issues identified in that review concern Native Americans or enslaved people. Some lessons asked students to espouse the views of plantation owners, or write from the perspectives of slaves. Examples in other lessons include describing Native Americans as "troublemakers," saying that they "seemed savage," and stating that tribes agreed to trade away their lands to white colonists.

"We have a tendency to either erase or whitewash our difficult history, and this seems to be an excellent example of the way that starts," said Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who reviewed examples of flagged issues at Education Week's request. "We start laying down these false narratives in elementary school."

The company says that it has changed and reprinted some of these materials and removed offending articles online. Other articles that included these issues, such as the Arkansas 4th grade and Kentucky 4th grade curricula, were pulled from the online store only after Education Week inquired about the review process.

"All of these issues are a concern for history and social studies publishers because social awareness is an evolving mindset," the company said in a statement emailed to Education Week, attributed to the executive team.

"Many of our products had gone to press while our diversity board was reviewing them," the statement reads. "Since that time, we have made improvements, replaced identified publications, and reprinted revisions of others for the 2019-2020 school year."

Finding Inaccuracies

Studies Weekly, a Utah-based curriculum company founded in 1984, sells social studies curriculum for grades K-8 and science curriculum for grades K-5. More than 13,000 schools across the country, with about 4.3 million students, use Studies Weekly, according to the company's website. Eight states have adopted its materials, including Alabama, California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.

The review process focused on the company's social studies materials, which include "newspapers" with articles, activities, and writing prompts.

In February 2018, the company came under fire for an article included in a 5th grade publication. The short fiction, titled "Cotton-Pickin' Singing," told the story of a white girl, Alana, and a black boy, Jackson, who were magically transported back to Georgia in the 1700s. Alana explains the history of slavery to the boy in a passage that includes several historical inaccuracies­—including the false statement that white colonists didn't also enslave Native Americans. As she talks, Alana directs Jackson to pick cotton to appease the overseer. Parents in the Monroe County, Ind., school district voiced concerns about the lesson, and, as a result, the school board ended its contract with the company.

That year, the company started an internal review process of their content—and assembled the external diversity board to assist in the work.

In discussing the need for the board, Studies Weekly CEO John McCurdy said that what is considered acceptable language is different today than it was in the 1980s and 90s, when Studies Weekly was a new company. Now, he said, "You don't call people slaves, you say they were enslaved. It's political correctness, and it's sensitivity monitoring, and those kind of things."

As a result of the review process, some articles have been changed and will be reprinted with updates, he said. The company also decided to discontinue some articles and write entirely new publications for those states. If teachers call in asking for these publications, they will be able to purchase online-only versions—with the offending articles removed, McCurdy said.

"You've got teachers out there that are like, 'If you guys don't have something for me, I don't have the time to go create new stuff myself,' " he said. "Teachers are swamped. And so they wanted it."

Time constraints stalled the updating process, which will pick up again in July, said McCurdy. The company had to divert time to creating new publications for several state adoptions, and as a result not all of the flagged issues were addressed, he said in an email to Education Week.

Education publishers do periodically update textbooks and other materials. But because of adoption timelines and purchasing cycles, these changes in the publications often don't reach schools right away. And it can be a logistical challenge to quickly correct a problem or error.

In 2015, for example, a Texas high school student found a caption in a McGraw-Hill textbook that described enslaved Africans as "workers." At the time, there were 100,000 copies of the book in the state, NPR reported. In this case, McGraw-Hill decided to ship corrected copies to schools for free or provide additional materials—a sticker to cover the caption in the book, and a lesson plan about the language.

In their emailed statement, the Studies Weekly executive team noted that a revised weekly unit would be mailed to all of the customers who ordered the Florida 4th grade curriculum, which includes an activity that asks students to argue for or against secession.

The diversity board's work had also halted. The company's chief product officer told the board in an April 10 email it was disbanded, and the members received no further assignments. However, they received a second email recently from McCurdy stating that the board's work would continue. That email was sent after he spoke with Education Week on June 7.

Framing Historical Narratives

Several patterns emerge among the articles that the company flagged as problematic during the review process.

Many articles, as described in documents created by the review team, which were obtained by Education Week, include historically inaccurate or misleading information about the relationship between white colonists and indigenous people.

Some of these materials are no longer available on Studies Weekly's purchasing website. The rest have been changed online and will be corrected for the print copies purchased for the 2019-2020 school year, according to the company's statement.

A lesson in one of the company’s Florida publications gives students the option to argue for secession. A 2018 review conducted by Studies Weekly found hundreds of issues of bias and inaccuracies in their publications.
A lesson in one of the company's Florida publications gives students the option to argue for secession. A 2018 review conducted by Studies Weekly found hundreds of issues of bias and inaccuracies in their publications.
—Excerpted from Studies Weekly's Florida 4th grade curriculum

Articles in Indiana's 3rd grade curriculum and Washington's 4th grade curriculum state that Native Americans agreed to trade away their lands. That framing obscures the contentious history of land rights in these areas, said Costello of Teaching Tolerance. "War was often made on tribes," she said. "The treaties were also problematic, because they often were coerced. False promises were made [by the U.S. government]."

The trends in Studies Weekly materials reflect the broader erasure of Native people in U.S. history curriculum writ large, she said. "We don't really ever grapple with the fact that we invaded this land, and then we proceeded to enslave and exploit an entire group of people."

Other articles about Native Americans describe tribes as aggressive and primitive. An article in the Arkansas 4th grade curriculum calls indigenous people "troublemakers," while an article in the Kentucky 4th grade publication states that Native people had "simple clothing, houses and machines."

"Statements that describe indigenous cultures as 'simple' reflect Eurocentric views that are woefully out of step with current historical knowledge," said Sam Wineburg, a professor of history at Stanford University, in an email.

Other flagged articles concern slavery. Some ask that students take on the perspective of slavery advocates. Florida's 4th grade publication includes an activity that gives students the option to argue in favor of seceding from the Union to protect slavery. Others, like Nebraska's 4th and South Carolina's 3rd grade curricula, ask students to imagine that they are enslaved.

Simply asking students to imagine the perspective of a slaveholder doesn't give them the tools to understand the past, said Stephanie P. Jones, an assistant professor of education at Grinnell College in Iowa. Instead, she said, teachers can ask students to interrogate primary sources.

And activities that ask students to pretend they're enslaved can be harmful for students of color—including students who are descended from enslaved people, said Jones. "Why do we always have to emulate ourselves at the worst part of our lives?" she asked.

Acknowledging a Problem

Walker, the Tennessee parent, also raised concerns about this kind of perspective-taking. After calling and emailing Studies Weekly about the writing exercise in her 5th grader's work with no response, Walker posted on Studies Weekly's Facebook page in August 2018. A reply from the company on its page noted that it was working with the diversity board to remove "dated and offensive content." The section had been removed online, the comment read.

The incident made her worry about what her son, who will be starting 5th grade soon, might see in the publication. "It just kind of strengthened why it's so important for me to teach my kid history at home, and especially black history," said Walker. "There's no way that I trust this company to tell them anything about it."

Lavora "Gayle" Gadison, a member of the diversity board that had been assembled to review flagged issues and propose changes, said that the Studies Weekly materials that she saw shared many of the same problems she sees in social studies curricula nationwide. Gadison is the social studies curriculum manager at Cleveland city public schools.

In general, she said, lessons objectify enslaved people and teach slavery in isolation without showing how American racism stems from justification of the institution. Materials don't explain that slavery was perpetuated because it was profitable for white people—including the founding fathers. "The stories [in Studies Weekly] were no more objectionable than the stories that we find in other U.S. history textbooks," said Gadison, whose district uses Studies Weekly. Gadison said the company was progressive for even looking at these issues. "At least there was a start there, and at least there was an acknowledgment—it was acknowledged that there was a problem."

Costello of Teaching Tolerance noted that the issues identified by Studies Weekly in their review are not specific to elementary social studies and history curricular materials. Misrepresentations of Native American history and reenactments of slavery can be found in K-12 classrooms across the country, she said. "The fact that they're reinforced in a textbook series is awful. But they're handed down as the air we breathe," Costello said.

But a review like this should be an opportunity to set the record straight, said Costello. "It's a lesson in historiography. The way we interpret history changes as we learn more."

Jones, the Grinnell professor, said that some of the onus is on districts, schools, and teachers to critically examine the materials they're handed. Teachers need to be shown how to be "interrupters" of bias or racism in materials, she said.

"There are very few elementary school teachers who have much background in social studies," said Costello. Most are either reading or math specialists. "Very, very, very few of them either majored or minored in history," she said. "They tend to replicate what they were taught."

Vol. 38, Issue 36, Pages 1, 14

Published in Print: June 19, 2019, as Review Finds Errors, Bias in History Materials

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Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds - The New Yorker

Posted: 17 Jun 2019 02:03 AM PDT

Two rival civilizations are battling for supremacy. Civilization A is stronger than Civilization B and is perceived by Civilization B as a grave threat; its position, however, is more fragile than it seems. Neither side hesitates to employ espionage, subterfuge, and surveillance, because the rules of conduct—to the extent that they exist—are ill-defined and frequently contested. But the battle lines are clear: whoever controls the technological frontier controls the future.

In Liu Cixin's science-fiction trilogy, "Remembrance of Earth's Past"—also known by the title of its first volume, "The Three-Body Problem"—Civilization A is a distant planet named Trisolaris and Civilization B is Earth. Life on Trisolaris has become increasingly difficult to sustain, so its inhabitants prepare to colonize Earth, a project made possible by their vast technological superiority. Using higher-dimensional geometry, they deploy supercomputers the size of a proton to spy on every terrestrial activity and utterance; Earth's entire fleet of starships proves no match for one small, droplet-shaped Trisolaran probe. Yet Trisolaris's dominance is far from assured, given the ingenuity of the underdogs. Seeking out the vulnerabilities of its adversary, Earth establishes a deterrence based on mutually assured destruction and forces the Trisolarans to share their technology.

When the first volume of the series was published in the United States, in 2014, the models for Trisolaris and Earth were immediately apparent. For the Chinese, achieving parity with the West is a long-cherished goal, envisaged as a restoration of greatness after the humiliation of Western occupations and the self-inflicted wounds of the Mao era. As Liu told the Times, "China is on the path of rapid modernization and progress, kind of like the U.S. during the golden age of science fiction." The future, he went on, would be "full of threats and challenges," and "very fertile soil" for speculative fiction.

In the past few years, those threats and challenges have escalated, as China's global ambitions, especially in the field of technology, have begun to impinge upon America's preëminence. Disputes about tariffs, intellectual property, and tech infrastructure have become urgent matters of national security. The U.S. has blocked China's access to certain technologies and has cracked down on cyber espionage. In January, the Justice Department filed charges against the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, for alleged offenses (denied by the company) including fraud, theft of intellectual property, and violations of sanctions against Iran; the company's C.F.O., who is the daughter of its director and founder, was arrested in Canada, and faces possible extradition to the U.S. In May, Donald Trump signed an executive order that warned of foreign tech companies committing "malicious cyber-enabled actions" at the behest of their governments. The next day, Huawei was added to a list of organizations prohibited from doing business with American companies without explicit government approval, and, not long afterward, Google discontinued Huawei's access to the Android operating system. In response, the president of Huawei told the Chinese media, "I've sacrificed myself and my family for the sake of a goal that we will stand on top of the world. To achieve this goal, a conflict with the U.S. is inevitable."

As the standoff has intensified, Liu has become wary of touting the geopolitical underpinnings of his work. In November, when I accompanied him on a trip to Washington, D.C.—he was picking up the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation's Award for Imagination in Service to Society—he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. "The whole point is to escape the real world!" he said. Still, the kind of reader he attracts suggests otherwise: Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu's international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China's then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.

Liu's tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China's highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize. In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the "meaning" and the "central themes" of his story, he didn't get a single one right. "I'm a writer," he told me, with a shrug. "I don't begin with some conceit in mind. I'm just trying to tell a good story."

The trilogy's success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration. The trilogy commands a huge following among aerospace engineers and cosmologists; one scientist wrote an explanatory guide, "The Physics of Three Body." Some years ago, China's aerospace agency asked Liu, whose first career was as a computer engineer in the hydropower industry, to address technicians and engineers about ways that "sci-fi thinking" could be harnessed to produce more imaginative approaches to scientific problems. More recently, he was invited to inspect a colossal new radio dish, one of whose purposes is to detect extraterrestrial communications. Its engineers had been sending Liu updates on the project and effusive expressions of admiration.

Earlier this year, soon after a Chinese lunar rover achieved the unprecedented feat of landing on the dark side of the moon, an adaptation of Liu's short story "The Wandering Earth" earned nearly half a billion dollars in its first ten days of release, eventually becoming China's second-highest-grossing film ever. A headline in the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, jubilantly summed up the mood: "Only the Chinese Can Save the Planet!"

Liu, who is fifty-five, first travelled to the U.S. in the eighties, on work trips he made as an engineer, but before his November visit he had never been to Washington. In an Uber to his hotel—we'd come from New York by train—he peered through square-rimmed glasses at the city gliding by, which reminded him of the kind of development zone one sees on the edge of China's ever-expanding cities. "Sparsely populated, with everything neat, orderly, and symmetrical," he observed. "As if the city were built yesterday." When he saw the gilded letters of the Trump hotel, he gave a gleeful chuckle. "Out of all the American Presidents, he is the only one whose speeches I can understand directly, without translation," he remarked. "There are no big words or complicated grammar. Everything he says is reduced to the simplest possible formulation."

Liu's fellow sci-fi writers in China call him Da Liu—Big Liu—but he is small, with an unusually round head, which seems too large for his slight, wiry physique. He has the unassuming presence, belying an unflappable intelligence, of an operative posing as an accountant. Rarely making eye contact, he maintains an expression at once detached and preoccupied, as if too impatient for the future to commit his full attention to the present. "There's nothing special or memorable about me," he said at one point. "I always blend into any crowd." Sure enough, as we walked around town, I found that it was disconcertingly easy to lose sight of him, and I started consciously trying to keep an eye on his inconspicuous frame and clothes—dark jeans and checked tops—as if I were minding a small child.

Although it was his first time in Washington, the cityscape was already familiar to him, thanks to his predilection for Hollywood blockbusters. As a result, our sightseeing trips yielded disappointments. Things were invariably bigger or smaller than he expected, and in surprising juxtapositions. The Reflecting Pool was farther from the Washington Monument than "Forrest Gump" suggested, and it looked strange without Vietnam War protesters thronging its perimeter. When we climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Liu expressed dismay that the seated statue featured Lincoln's pensive face, rather than a simian one. "I think I prefer the 'Planet of the Apes' version," he said.

When we passed a block-long brutalist building, Liu immediately recognized it as the headquarters of the F.B.I. It turned out that he had pored over its floor plan online while researching his early novel "Supernova Era," which was published in 2003 and will appear in English later this year. It took him twelve years to get the book published, with several rounds of revision, in part because prospective publishers worried about the likely reaction of the state censors. Liu, unlike many Chinese writers popular in the West, is no dissident, but he had conceived the novel in the nervous aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. He told me that during the protests, in 1989, he happened to be in Beijing for an engineering conference. In an afterword to the forthcoming English translation, he writes:

On the night of June 4 I listened in my hotel to the chaotic noise outside, and the muffled sounds of gunfire. That night I dreamed of a limitless expanse of snow, whipped up by the wind into a ground blizzard, and an object—perhaps the sun or a star—glowing with a blinding blue light that painted the sky an eerie color between purple and green. And beneath that dim glow, a formation of children advanced across the snowy ground, white scarves wrapped around their heads, rifles fitted with gleaming bayonets, singing some unrecognizable song as they moved forward in unison. . . . I awoke in a cold sweat and couldn't get back to sleep, and that's when the germ of the idea for Supernova Era first took shape.

In the book, a supernova bathes Earth in deadly radiation, killing everyone over the age of thirteen. In the absence of adults, children must figure out how to apportion resources, forge diplomatic relationships, and maintain order. It soon becomes evident that a world run by children is very different from one run by adults. "Fun" is established as an organizing principle of life, and international wars and an event known as the "bloodbath Olympics" are planned, purely for thrills. Liu told me that he intended the novel to express the reactions of Chinese people at a time of utter confusion in the face of change, when old beliefs collapsed before new ones could be enshrined.

Liu was born in 1963 in Beijing, where his father was a manager at the Coal Mine Design Institute and his mother was an elementary-school teacher. His father's family came from the plains of Henan Province, in the Yellow River Basin, a region that suffered particularly dire calamities in the twentieth century. After the Japanese invaded China, in 1937—interrupting a civil war between Nationalists and Communists that had been raging for a decade—Henan became a vital strategic point in the Nationalist government's attempt to prevent them from sweeping south. Chinese forces breached dikes on the Yellow River to halt the Japanese advance, but the resulting flood destroyed thousands of villages and killed hundreds of thousands of people. It also ruined vast areas of farmland; the next harvest was a fraction of the expected yield. In 1942-43, after the government failed to respond to the shortage, some two million people starved to death.

When the civil war resumed, after the Second World War, both sides conscripted men. Liu's paternal grandparents had two sons and no ideological allegiance to either side, and, in the hope of preserving the family line, they took a chilling but pragmatic gamble. One son joined the Nationalists and the other, Liu's father, joined the Communists. He rose to the rank of company commander in the Eighth Route Army, and, after the Communist victory, he began his career in Beijing. To this day, Liu doesn't know what became of his uncle.

Liu was three years old when the Cultural Revolution broke out. His father lost his job—having a brother who had fought against the revolution made him politically suspect—and was sent to work in the coal mines of Yangquan, in Shanxi Province, where Liu still lives. The city was a flash point for the factional violence that accompanied the Cultural Revolution, and Liu remembers hearing gunfire at night and seeing trucks filled with men clutching guns and wearing red armbands. Things became dangerous enough that, when Liu was four, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Henan, and stayed there for several years.

As a child, Liu was mischievous and cheeky. Even today, he retains a fondness for ingenious pranks, and once created a poetry-writing algorithm, whose voluminous output he submitted to a literary magazine. (It didn't publish any of the poems.) He also had a practical bent: after developing a fascination with weapons, in grade school, he taught himself to make gunpowder. When Liu was six, China launched its first satellite and he became obsessed with space. Initially, his ambition was to explore it rather than to write about it, but he came to realize that, for someone of his background, the advanced degrees necessary to work in the nascent space program were out of reach. Meanwhile, his father had turned him on to speculative fiction, giving him a copy of Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth." To the young Liu, reading Verne's book was like walking through a door to another world. "Everything in it was described with such authority and scrupulous attention to detail that I thought it had to be real," Liu told me.

On the cusp of his teens, reading a book on astronomy, Liu had an epiphany about the concept of a light-year—the "terrifying distance" and "bone-chilling vastness" it implied. Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a "druglike euphoria." Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, "the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional." In high school, he started writing his own stories, and continued after enrolling, in 1981, at North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power. After graduation, he was assigned to work at the Niangziguan Power Plant, where he had plenty of time to hone his writing and to absorb all the sci-fi he could get his hands on, sometimes poring over a dictionary to get through untranslated works by Vonnegut, Bradbury, Pynchon, and Orwell. He didn't leave his engineering job until 2012, long after he'd achieved wealth and national fame.

The scale and the speed of China's economic transformation were conducive to a fictive mode that concerns itself with the fate of whole societies, planets, and galaxies, and in which individuals are presented as cogs in larger systems. The fact that state-owned enterprises were increasingly at the mercy of their balance sheets fundamentally changed social expectations in a country where the danwei—or work unit—had rivalled the family as a facet of one's identity. In the nineties, tens of millions of workers found themselves laid off, with no social-security system. In 2000, the same year that Liu's story "The Wandering Earth" was published, he was told to choose which half of his staff to let go and which to keep.

Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum. An episode in the trilogy depicts Earth on the verge of destruction. A scientist named Cheng Xin encounters a gaggle of schoolchildren as she and an assistant prepare to flee the planet. The spaceship can accommodate the weight of only three of the children, and Cheng, who is the trilogy's closest embodiment of Western liberal values, is paralyzed by the choice before her. Her assistant leaps into action, however, and poses three math problems. The three children who are quickest to answer correctly are ushered on board. Cheng stares at her assistant in horror, but the young woman says, "Don't look at me like that. I gave them a chance. Competition is necessary for survival."

No one is more aware than Liu of the connection between the ambitions of sci-fi and the tendency of Chinese history to eclipse the individual. In an afterword to the English edition of "The Three-Body Problem," he recalls a visit to his grandparents in Henan that coincided with the great flood of 1975. In a single day, forty inches of rain fell and more than fifty dams collapsed. In the course of a few days, nearly a quarter of a million people died. Recalling his experience as a twelve-year-old in a landscape teeming with barefoot refugees draped in cloth sacks instead of clothes, he writes, "I thought I was looking at the end of the world."

The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre. As the British Empire expanded and the United States began to assert its power around the world, British and American writers invented tales of space travel as seen through a lens of imperial appropriation, in which technological superiority brought about territorial conquest. Extraterrestrials were often a proxy for human beings of different creeds or races. M. P. Shiel's novel "Yellow Danger" (1898) imagined a fiendish Chinese plan to take over the world, and warned that "the bony visage of the yellow man, in moments of unbridled lust and mad excitement, is a brutal spectacle." The most famous novel of the era, H. G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" (1898), in which Martians attack an unsuspecting Earth, was inspired by the violent struggle in early-nineteenth-century Tasmania between Aboriginal people and white settlers, in which the indigenous population was almost completely obliterated.

Wells's science fiction greatly impressed Lu Xun, a writer who is considered the father of modern Chinese literature, and whose translations of Wells and Verne introduced the genre to China. Lu hoped that incorporating scientific thought into popular fiction could help remedy "intellectual poverty" and provide a means of "leading the Chinese masses on the way to progress." Lu, born in 1881, had witnessed the drama of China's ancient civilization brought low by younger, more technologically advanced European ones; the Chinese might be more populous than the Tasmanians, but could they suffer the same fate?

Early Chinese sci-fi imagined a China that caught up with the West and then outstripped it. Liang Qichao's "The Future of New China" (1902) is set in 1962; in the story, Shanghai hosts the World's Fair, a geopolitically dominant China has developed a multiparty system, and Westerners study the Chinese in the hope of bettering themselves. In "China in Ten Years," a popular story published anonymously in 1923, China develops laser weapons to repel Western imperialists. Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu's trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. "It's not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out," he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China's current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that "the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated."

When the Communists came to power, science fiction presented itself as a handy way of furthering Mao's "Campaign of Marching Toward Science and Technology." Sci-fi would stimulate the interest of children and adolescents, and encourage them to contribute to the country's modernization. But during the Cultural Revolution the genre was banned, along with other nonrevolutionary literature, and even science itself was subjected to ideological-purity tests. In astronomy, discussion of sunspots was forbidden, because the literal meaning of the Chinese term is "solar black spots," and black was the color associated with counter-revolutionaries.

Science fiction made a resurgence in the early years of Deng Xiaoping's reformist regime, when Liu was writing at night while maintaining his engineering day job. It was scrutinized more closely again in the years immediately after the Tiananmen protests, when he was beginning work on "Supernova Era." The genre has now been steadily thriving for a couple of decades, but it's not inconceivable that the political winds could change again, as Xi Jinping's government seeks to establish increasingly rigid cultural control. Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.

In my days with Liu, he repeatedly played down any sense of state interference, but the issue emerged glancingly when we began discussing the great Polish sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem, whom Liu reveres. "What's remarkable is that he lived and wrote in Soviet Poland!" he said. "Yet he managed to be as beloved in the East as he was in the West." I asked how he thought Lem had managed it. "He had a wondrous imagination, truly one of a kind," Liu replied. Still, even Lem did not wholly escape his government's crackdown on free speech. When questioned about stories that seemed to allude to Stalinist conformism and paranoia, Lem said the same thing that Liu says about geopolitical interpretations of his trilogy—that he was not writing a veiled assessment of the present but merely making up stories.

One day, Liu and I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant not far from his hotel. It was half past two and the restaurant was empty, a void of crisp white tablecloths, punctuated by tacky, oversized ceramic vases. Large TV screens burbled to themselves in every corner. As soon as we sat down, Liu called a waiter over and asked for two beers. I said I wouldn't be drinking, but Liu clarified that he was happy to lay claim to both bottles. After the waiter had brought Budweiser—"I don't discriminate: beer is beer"—Liu gingerly pulled a bottle of Southern Comfort from his backpack and poured generously into his drink. He had bought the bottle the day before at a liquor store. "I couldn't make out the labels," he said, explaining that he'd picked whatever was cheap and easy to reach on the shelf. "I chose wrong—this stuff is way too sweet." Several times during our days together, he alluded both to his dependence on alcohol and to the need to abstain from hard liquor for the sake of his health. "At least two of my former colleagues have drunk themselves to death," he said matter-of-factly. "It's not uncommon among engineers. You know the type."

Types are central to the way Liu thinks of people; he has a knack for quickly sketching the various classes that make up Chinese society. A scientist is described as "nothing more than a typical intellectual of the period: cautious, timid, seeking only to protect himself." Another character, "a typical political cadre of the time," had "an extremely keen sense for politics and saw everything through an ideological lens." This characteristic endows his fiction with a sociopolitical specificity that has the texture of reality. At the same time, it doesn't allow for much emotional complexity, and Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. "I did not begin writing for love of literature," he told me. "I did so for love of science."

Liu's stories typically emerge from a speculative idea that has the potential to generate a vivid, evocative fable—more often than not, one about mankind's ability to bring about its own demise. "The Three-Body Problem" takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.

Liu's imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future. One scene is told from the perspective of an ant. The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy "one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written."

Much of the books' resonance, however, comes from the fact that they also offer a faithful portrait of China's stringently hierarchical bureaucracy, that labyrinthine product of Communism. August Cole, a co-author of "Ghost Fleet," a techno-thriller about a war between the U.S. and China, told me that, for him, Liu's work was crucial to understanding contemporary China, "because it synthesizes multiple angles of looking at the country, from the anthropological to the political to the social." Although physics furnishes the novels' premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good. In their pursuit of survival, men and women employ Machiavellian game theory and adopt a bleak consequentialism. In Liu's fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, "In a time of war, we can't afford to be too scrupulous." Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.

Liu's posture slackened slightly as we ate. The drinks had warmed him, and the heat of Sichuanese peppercorns seemed to stir him from his usual reticence. I decided to inch the conversation toward politics, a topic he prefers to avoid. His views turned out to be staunch and unequivocal. The infamous one-child policy, he said, had been vital: "Or else how could the country have combatted its exploding population growth?" He was deaf to the argument that the population growth was itself the result of a previous policy, from the fifties, in which the Party had declared that "a larger population means greater manpower." Liu took a similarly pragmatic view of a controversial funeral-reform law, which mandates cremation, even though the tradition of "returning to the ground" has been part of Chinese culture for thousands of years. (There were reports of elderly people committing suicide in order to be buried before the ban went into effect.) "If there are dead bodies everywhere, where are we supposed to plant crops?" Liu said. "Humans must adjust their habits to accommodate changing circumstances."

When I brought up the mass internment of Muslim Uighurs—around a million are now in reëducation camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang—he trotted out the familiar arguments of government-controlled media: "Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty." The answer duplicated government propaganda so exactly that I couldn't help asking Liu if he ever thought he might have been brainwashed. "I know what you are thinking," he told me with weary clarity. "What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?" He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. "But that's not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it's the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children's education. Not democracy."

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, "If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying." I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:

The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, "This is why I don't like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don't really—I mean, can't truly—understand." He gestured around him. "You've lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?" The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu's mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien.

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today's China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. "If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth," he said. "I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don't know." The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, "Here's the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done."

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of "The Three-Body Problem": "I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains."

When Liu is at his most relaxed, which is usually when he's looking at, or learning about, something, he sounds almost like a child. There's an upward lilt to his voice that suggests a kind of naïve wonder—someone happily lost in his own boundless curiosity. But at the Clarke Foundation award ceremony, at the Harman Center for the Arts, on his final night in Washington, he was in adult, professional mode. Talking to fans, publishing types, and Chinese journalists at a cocktail party before the presentation, he spoke with authority and gravitas, and was more obviously formidable than I'd previously seen. Yet, at the same time, he seemed ill at ease and looked like the person who least belonged at the party, even though it was in his honor. I noticed that he wasn't drinking, despite the open bar. He wasn't here to enjoy himself. He was doing a specific job and enduring the situation with stoic discipline.

His acceptance speech came at the end of the evening, after a dinner, and he made a point of reading it in English. His pronunciation hovered on the boundary of comprehensibility, but the text had been distributed to the audience, which listened attentively. He spoke of how his imagination had been fired by reading Clarke's novels, some of which were published in China in the eighties—a time when, he said, young people like him felt lost. He recalled finishing "2001: A Space Odyssey" and walking outside to gaze into the night sky: "I was able to see the galaxy, thanks to the unpolluted sky of China back then." Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. "China is a futuristic country," he said. "I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up."

The next morning, Liu and I did some more sightseeing, accompanied by a translator his publisher had provided. The sky was cement-colored and heavy and we soon had to duck into a pharmacy to buy umbrellas. As I struggled with the jammed spines of my purchase, I recalled a line from his speech in which he compared the future to "pouring rain" that "reaches us before we have time to even open the umbrella."

Liu's observation was more practical: "The quality of umbrellas that China sells to the U.S. is not good."

We made our way down Constitution Avenue, past the National Archives and the colonnades of the Smithsonian. Liu set a surprisingly brisk pace and remarked that he had not exercised since being on the road, whereas he was used to working out an hour or two a day. Nothing he'd said or done previously suggested a concern with fitness, but it turned out that he had a specific eventuality in mind. "To make it on a spaceship for days or weeks, maybe even months, is not easy," he said. I asked if he was planning to be a space tourist. "You never know when that will happen," he responded. "Opportunity doesn't wait for you to be ready."

We paused by the World War II Memorial, and looked at the names of various countries carved in clusters around the lip of its fountain. Liu squinted, displeased with the peripheral placement of China, which had been put with India and Burma. Like a man unsatisfied with a photograph of himself, Liu balled up his hands and placed them on his hips. Surely, China had contributed to the war far more than Burma had, he muttered.

As we walked on, Liu noticed the sunken sliver of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Up close, the names of veterans emerged, some fifty-eight thousand of them, etched in rows that felt as unending as the grief they evoked. Pale-pink carnations and notes written on cardboard punctuated the black granite. A man in a wheelchair wept openly where the memorial's two walls met.

"Why can't China have something like this?" Liu asked quietly. "The dead deserve to be remembered."

"But China does, doesn't it, in some cities?" his translator asked.

"No," Liu answered emphatically, shaking his head. "We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don't memorialize those, the individuals." He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. "This is how we Chinese have always been," he said. "When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories." ♦
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