“Silkpunk”, a blending of science fiction and fantasy, is a term Ken Liu invented to describe the style of his debut novel, The Grace of Kings.

“While ‘steampunk’ takes as its inspiration the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, ‘silkpunk’ draws inspiration from classical East Asian antiquity,” he said.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the Chu-Han Contention is the inspiration for The Grace of Kings, but Liu didn’t want to just retell the story. Rather, he re-imagined this very old and important foundational narrative of the Chinese literary tradition in a brand new literary framework, “that I constructed myself out of my status as inheritor of both Western and Chinese literary traditions”.

The novel is filled with technologies like soaring battle kites that lift duelists into the air, bamboo-and-silk airships propelled by giant feathered oars, underwater boats that swim like whales and tunnel-digging machines enhanced with herbal lore.

Add in fantasy elements like gods who bicker and connive, magical books that tell you what’s in your heart, giant water beasts that bring storms and guide sailors safely to shore and illusionists who manipulate smoke to peer into opponents' minds.

“I added the "-punk" suffix because this is a story about revolutions and change,” he said. “It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent and only lurches toward more justice. It questions and subverts both the source as well as the new cultural framework into which it has been transposed.”

Although the book is marketed as an "epic fantasy”, he said it's probably more informative to call it “epic poetry in novel form”.

“Stylistically, the novel is much closer to a pre-modern narrative like The Iliad and Romance of the Three Kingdoms rather than a contemporary genre novel, and it takes as its inspiration both foundational Western epic poems like The Aeneid, Beowulf and Paradise Lost, as well as Chinese historical romances and wuxia (martial arts) fantasies.”

He just doesn't like writing within some well-defined notion of genre.