Well, that certainly makes me want to read the Ken Liu.
There is something, isn't there, about reading someone who is using the same foundation stories you have. I got most of the standard "Great-Books-Of-Western-Literature" ones, but if I ever meet another fantasy writer who grew up Baha'i, I think there will be some places we both put our emphases that are not seen elsewhere, and I rather hope it happens someday.
a) Yay for finding other people who work with your stories! :)
b) I have been thinking about the differences between not seeing the stories you heard growing up, and only seeing *some* of them... I grew up around storytellers in the performance art sense, so while I got the King Arthur and "normal" western fairy tales, the characters I subconsciously expect everyone to have heard of also includes Ivan Tsarevich and Anansai and Toyuki (the japanese actor who gets mistaken for the shapeshifting Badger) and Nasredin Hoja and Spider Grandmother and five different versions not only of Cinderella, but of the man who goes looking for [god/Quanyin/the ogre or griffin who knows everything] to ask why he's poor. And while in the last twenty or thirty years it's got so you trip over Tam Lin everywhere, Saladin Ahmed did a version of the man who goes to look for god and I was all, "Yay! I know that story!" and it was very exciting.
...argh, that totally sounds like I'm trying to say my little annoying thing is just like your major cultural divide thing, which I didn't mean to imply. Just that your talking about this made me think things, which under other circumstances I would have rambled at length about in my own journal, only most of the post got eaten by sick and toddler before making it out of my brain. Sorry.
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This makes me even more excited to read it.
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There is something, isn't there, about reading someone who is using the same foundation stories you have. I got most of the standard "Great-Books-Of-Western-Literature" ones, but if I ever meet another fantasy writer who grew up Baha'i, I think there will be some places we both put our emphases that are not seen elsewhere, and I rather hope it happens someday.
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b) I have been thinking about the differences between not seeing the stories you heard growing up, and only seeing *some* of them... I grew up around storytellers in the performance art sense, so while I got the King Arthur and "normal" western fairy tales, the characters I subconsciously expect everyone to have heard of also includes Ivan Tsarevich and Anansai and Toyuki (the japanese actor who gets mistaken for the shapeshifting Badger) and Nasredin Hoja and Spider Grandmother and five different versions not only of Cinderella, but of the man who goes looking for [god/Quanyin/the ogre or griffin who knows everything] to ask why he's poor. And while in the last twenty or thirty years it's got so you trip over Tam Lin everywhere, Saladin Ahmed did a version of the man who goes to look for god and I was all, "Yay! I know that story!" and it was very exciting.
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