The Dandelion Dynasty Boxset

The Dandelion Dynasty #1-4

by Ken Liu

Science and destiny collide against the will of the gods in this epic silkpunk fantasy series from Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winning author Ken Liu. Read the entire series, collected together for the first time, in this volume. In THE GRACE OF KINGS , two men, Kuni Garu and Mata Zyndu, rebel together against tyranny – and then become rivals. THE WALL OF STORMS sees Kuni Garu, now known as Emperor Ragin, struggling to meet the demands of the archipelago kingdoms of Dara. In THE VEILED THRONE , the Lyucu leadership in Dara bristles with rivalries, as former Empress of Dara, Princess Théra, prepares to go to war with the Lyucu. The final novel, SPEAKING BONES , sees the people of Dara continue to struggle against the genocidal Lyucu as both nations vacillate between starkly contrasting visions for their futures. 'Poetry on every page' HUGH HOWEY
'Ken Liu is a genius' ELIZABETH BEAR
'A triumph in storytelling' STARBURST MAGAZINE

Genres: Fantasy, High Fantasy, Science Fiction

4000 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 24, 2022

About the author

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he has also won top genre honors abroad in Japan, Spain, and France.

Liu’s most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity. His debut collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. His latest book is All That We See or Seem, a techno-thriller starring an AI-whispering hacker who saves the world.

He’s often involved in media adaptations of his work. Recent projects include “The Regular,” under development as a TV series; “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, with Craig Silverstein as executive producer, adapted from an interconnected series of Liu’s short stories.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

In addition to his original fiction, Liu also occasionally publishes literary translations. His most recent work of translation is a new rendition of Laozi’s Dao De Jing.

Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Olga Yolgina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series… My gosh, it was hard to read sometimes and I’m so happy it’s finally ended. But what a journey it was! Full of pain, hope, love, destruction, treachery, ingenuity, atrocity, beauty, bravery, sacrifice, friendship, conquest, rebellion… did I mention pain?

In a way, a book is supposed to invoke feelings in the readers, and these books had me feeling all the feelings. Some of them I don’t want to feel ever again.

It’s truly epic on so many levels. The world is vibrant and alive. I could almost see, feel, touch, smell it. And because of that, the brutal parts hit me so hard, I needed to remind myself to breathe.

A love-hate relationship with a book? Yes, it’s possible. I have it with this one. And it’s intense.

[Varenya]

Over the years I have read, listened to, and seen a lot of stories.



After having consumed so many stories, I can see through the plots. I take pride in being able to discover the mystery. Most tropes are familiar to me. Most twists and red herrings are obvious to me. Over time I realised that I was not living these stories. I was able to keep myself separated and predict what was going to happen. I was objective. I had lost my ability to be swept up by the story.

That changed with the Dandelion Dynasty. After reading through the books I realized that with this I had stopped calculating, predicting, and trying to get ahead of the author. I became consumed. I became the character in the story. My heart soared and wept with the story.

Is there a greater compliment that one can give to an author?

This story will stay with me for a while. It has given me a lot to think about. It has wisdom beyond the obvious. It reifies great storytelling. It is as complex as some of the greatest structures and software created. As a programmer, I admire the simplicity and the complexity of it at the same time.

[Steen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed Liu’s 4 book Dandelion series. While sometimes meandering and moralizing, he packs epic world-spanning plots in a fresh East Asian manner. While based on Han dynasty, frequently I was thinking how this would play out if mapped to other world conflicts and philosophy in terms of resolution and doing the right thing. There was enough “otherness” (wrt typical western fare) of betrayals and stresses to keep me engaged with the many characters and varying contexts. Key points were the drive (and blessing) to live out an interesting interesting life, sometimes leaving teeth on the table is needed, need to serve mutage (faith-mercy / loyalty-benefaction). Parables such as swords Courage of Brutes, Ambition of Nobles and Grace of Kings (which drives to “embrace doubt before acting, but then to be free of doubt once committed to action.”) are good points to consider. Engineering expands in the last two books and it is nice to see how discoveries are made and applied relative to the real world. Engineering is defined as” …the art of solving problems by combining existing machines into new machines, and harnessing the effects of the sub-machines to accomplish a novel effect”. One who “... marshals components and devices and effects for the purpose of changing the world.” Philosophy schools were interesting to try to map to Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very mixed feelings about this series. On the one hand, I think the story was good and the prose was well structured. On the other hand, there wasn't a single character that I could get truly invested in. To be clear, just as I started to care about a character, the story jumps to someone else and I needed to reorient myself. The "cast of characters" was quite large and I frequently needed to flip to the listing at the start of the book to be sure of who was connected to whom and how were they connected. This series follows multiple generations, but it is not like each book follows a particular generation or subset of characters, so people come in and out of the narrative halfway through a book that you may not have seen in this book but read about in the prior book. I usually enjoy a story told from a couple or even several points of view, but for me this story was a few too many to be fluid. I won't say that it was a struggle to finish reading the series, but I am sure that this is one that I would never consider re-reading. (3.5/5)