Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 148 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Ken Lou, one of science fiction's most popular short story writers.

He's also translated many works of Chinese science fiction into English,

including the best-selling novel The Three Body Problem by Lou Sikshin.

Ken's first novel, The Grace of Kings, is an epic fantasy inspired by Chinese history.

And now here's our interview with Ken O'Loo.

All right, so we're here with Ken Loo.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Okay, so let you tell us a bit about how you first got interested in reading fantasy and science fiction?

I remember the first science fiction work I read was the Chinese translation for Do Android stream of electric sheep by Philip Kate Dick was turning to

Blade Runner later and I felt that was just such a fascinating great story so

maybe that's can be considered the. I like Arthur C. Clark, I like

Rislequin, just pretty much everybody.

And so when did you actually start writing your own fiction?

I started submitting for publication, I guess, in college and didn't really have much success until much later. And were you submitting to the science fiction magazines at that time?

I submitted to all sorts of places, but yeah including the science fiction

magazines I knew at the time and I didn't really know the industry very well. So I was just submitting to the magazines I've heard of like Asmoms and

FMSF and analog. And so then you actually first got published in the Fobos fiction contest, right?

You want to tell us about that?

Sure. Fobos was a fiction.

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