The Ultimate Guide to Asian American Science Fiction Authors

Even though it was over two decades ago, I remember this day clearly: I’m 4 years old, sitting next to my sister in a shopping cart. My mom is waiting for a toy store to open ahead of the “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” release — she’s one of the only women in line, let alone a woman with kids. Once the doors open, chaos ensues. People are grabbing and arguing over who got this and that action figure first. By the end of it, my mom emerges victorious with a haul that fills the cart. 

That moment paved the way for my love for science fiction. (Yes, I know “Star Wars” is more science fantasy, and no, I didn’t watch the film when it was in theaters in 1999.) But as a genre that has been historically male-dominated, having a mom who loves sci-fi definitely helped smash those stereotypes.

These days, my love for science fiction goes beyond films and TV shows like “Doctor Who,” (which my mom’s mom loved too, so I guess sci-fi runs in our maternal genes). I love reading everything from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” to “The Martian” to “The Three-Body Problem” series by Chinese author Liu Cixin. There’s something so soothing about science fiction: the streamlined neatness of imagined future tech, the way complex plot threads snap perfectly into place, the sense that every impossible problem has a clever solution if you just look at it the right way. When reality is messy and unpredictable, science fiction is an imaginative escape and a pure balm for my anxious, future-worried brain.

While the diversity and number of science fiction novelists has blossomed in America, with writers like Octavia E. Butler reimagining the bounds of the genre and it becoming an increasingly popular outlet for writers across Asia as well, there are still only a handful of Asian American science fiction writers. Even when they aren’t writing explicitly about Asian American characters or experiences, they bring a unique lens shaped by liminality (the feeling of being between spaces) and transience (the knowledge that nothing is fixed or permanent).

What I mean is, writers from our communities carry a lived understanding of what it means to exist between worlds, to navigate to new places and through unfamiliar systems, languages, and expectations while never fully belonging to any one place. For example, it’s impossible to not see the similarities between human space travelers and refugees, being stuck in the in-between, no longer belonging to where you came from, but not yet at home anywhere else.

Here are the Asian American science fiction writers I know of — and honestly, I wish this list were longer:

Ted Chiang

The son of Taiwanese American parents, Ted Chiang is best known for being the author of the short story “Story of Your Life,” which is the basis of the 2016 film “Arrival” starring Amy Adams. That story is part of his first collection, “Stories of Your Life and Others,” which brings together eight mind-bending works of speculative fiction. There’s no single theme that defines Chiang’s writing, but many of his stories wrestle with the boundaries of humanity and knowledge.

For instance, in “Tower of Babylon,” the biblical structure of Babel is a real construction project, conducted over generations and finally reaching into the heavens. What does humanity find up there? You’ll have to read it to find out. Or “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” an underrated gem, in which Chiang writes out scenes from a documentary exploring a world where a procedure has been created to eliminate a person’s ability to perceive human beauty. 

Chiang’s second collection, “Exhalation,” shifts perspectives further. Using points of views from a critically endangered species of parrot native to Puerto Rico to the last of a race of mechanical beings reliant on air movement for energy, he explores questions of consciousness, extinction, and the fragile systems (both biological and mechanical) that keep life going.

The award-winning author (I mean seriously award winning with four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, and six Locus awards) commented to the Asian American Writers Workshop, “I’m hesitant about making my protagonists Asian Americans because I’m wary of readers trying to interpret my stories as being about race when they aren’t.” But English professor Christopher T. Fan argues that “Story of Your Life” has Asian American influences. Even without overt Asian American characters or themes, the story’s structure — nonlinear time, linguistic transformation, and simultaneous consciousness — mirrors the Asian American experience of being both visible and invisible, both inside and outside mainstream narratives.

All of Chiang’s stories are worth rereading again and again — layered, thought-provoking, and fresh every time. He’s also a regular nonfiction contributor to The New Yorker, where he tackles topics perfectly in his wheelhouse: artificial intelligence, computing, and the future of technology.

Yume Kitasei

A rising voice in speculative fiction, Japanese American author Yume Kitasei crafts high-concept plots that grab you from the instant you come upon them. Her 2023 debut “The Deep Sky” starts off with a bang — literally — when a bomb goes off killing three of the crew on a deep space mission. But this ain’t your typical space mission. This one features a crew solely of women of childbearing age who begin reproduction during the flight as part of a last-ditch effort to ensure humanity’s survival. 

At the heart of the novel is Japanese American Asuka, who struggles with her identity as an alternate candidate who got chosen when someone else dropped out and the quiet ache of her infertility. As suspicion swirls and the investigation into the bombing closes in on her, Asuka is forced to confront questions of belonging, legacy, and who gets to shape the future, both for herself and for humanity.

Kitasai’s follow up “The Stardust Grail” is an interplanetary art heist. With its anti-colonial edge, the novel follows retired art thief turned anthropology graduate student Maya Hoshimoto. Her academic solace is disrupted when she is reunited with her best friend Auncle, thought to be the last of her kind, who pulls Maya back into a high-stakes web of stolen artifacts, cultural survival, and resistance on a solar system scale.

Part space opera, part adventure, Kitasei’s artistry pulls you in fast and keeps the stakes sky-high with big ideas and big hearts. And readers won’t have to wait long for more of Kitasai’s genius: her next two novels, “Saltcrop” in October 2025 and “Envoy” in 2026, promise to continue her momentum as one of science fiction’s brightest new stars. 

Ken Liu

Marketing himself as an American author, Ken Liu is credited with bringing Chinese science fiction to English-reading audiences. The Chinese translator and author is best known for his translations of the first and third volumes of “The Three-Body Problem” series. A prolific writer himself, he is the author of “The Dandelion Dynasty” series, a saga that follows allies-turned-enemies as they work to overthrow a tyrannical empire, and his upcoming novel “All That We See or Seem” (October 2025). The book is the first of the Julia Z series, which promises to be a near-future sci-fi thriller following a hacker as she is drawn into high-stakes adventures involving cybersecurity threats, virtual reality mysteries, and digital puzzles. 

Disliking labels but still needing to describe his work, Liu has coined the term “silkpunk”: a literary and technological aesthetic where tradition is reimagined, rebellion is central (thus, the punk), and the stories blend ancient influences with future possibility.

His brilliance shines in “The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories,” a collection of multiple award-winning stories. For instance, “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species,” Liu cleverly compares and contrasts the ways that five different species capture and transfer language, ideas, and knowledge. My favorite is “Good Hunting,” where the son of a hunter befriends the daughter of a shape-shifting fox spirit, a hulijing, that his father killed. Set during the era of British colonial expansion and the Opium Wars, the story blends folklore with the rise of steam and metal machinery, following how technology, tradition, and anti-colonial resistance collide in unexpected ways. An adaptation of this story appears in the animated Netflix series “Love, Death + Robots.”

Liu’s “The Hidden Girl and Other Stories” features 16 more stories including the “Singularity” stories, which the AMC network used to develop “Pantheon” (2022), an animated drama series for adults. In the collection, six stories come together in a single universe; in the show, they are expanded upon to create the world of Pantheon, where uploaded minds force us to examine our humanity when death is no longer a given. 

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Japanese American author Sequoia Nagamatsu spent over a decade writing “How High We Go in the Dark,” his melancholy, quiet, yet ambitious debut novel told in interconnected vignettes. Released in 2022, the book follows an Earth, set a few years in the future, reeling from a deadly pandemic unleashed by melting permafrost in the Arctic.

Because “How High We Go in the Dark” ended up being completed during a real-life pandemic, Nagamatsu told 5AM StoryTalk that waiting for his editor’s feedback became a way to fill the time — and to sit with the unsettling timing of it all. He continued, “As I saw COVID unfold, I needed to think about what I had predicted by coincidence, what I wanted to diminish in the final draft, and how I wanted to represent Asian and Asian Americans when violent attacks against the Asian community were escalating, stirred by both COVID and Trump’s problematic rhetoric.”

Told across time and space, the novel drops in on different people figuring out how to survive, grieve, and care for each other in the aftermath. In one story, parents bring their terminally ill children to a theme park, specifically made for families to enjoy a final day together and ending the day the children board a final roller coaster ride that sends them into their next life. In another, a man tries to preserve what’s left of his late wife, now stored in the memory of a robot dog. Characters and storylines quietly overlap — you’ll catch a familiar face reappearing when you least expect it, a reminder of how connected life on this planet really is. 

Despite its premise, “How High We Go in the Dark” isn’t solely defined by despair. Nagamatsu offers a meditation on loss, memory, and what it means to be human in uncertain times. I can’t wait to see what Nagamatsu comes up with next — even if it takes him another decade to write it.

Charles Yu

A Taiwanese American screenwriter and author, Charles Yu bends genres and expectations across the screen and page. In Hollywood, he is known for his work on the first season of HBO’s “Westworld, and for writing across shows like “Legion” and “American Born Chinese.” Although as an author  he is best known for “Interior Chinatown,” an award-winning satirical novel that was adapted into a Hulu series starring Jimmy O. Yang, Yu’s earlier novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” deserves just as much attention.

That lesser-known novel follows a protagonist also named Charles Yu, navigating a looping, fragmented time-travel narrative inside a world that feels deeply personal. Equipped with a time machine and a prone to depression AI system named TAMMY, the fictional Charles is weighed down by intergenerational expectations, regret, memories, and a father-son relationship that feels less like fiction and more like a cathartic puzzle. Like much of Yu’s work, it blurs the lines between autofiction, the fictionalizing of one’s own life, and speculative fiction.

As an author, Yu has a distinct talent for interrogating race, belonging, and identity using inventive frameworks — from a time travel groundhog day to literally existing within a police procedural show — and in doing so, sheds light on Asian American invisibility, the immigrant experience, and messiness of familial generations fragmented by time and place. 

Gish Jen

Born Lillian Jen to Chinese immigrants in New York, Gish Jen is a prolific fiction and nonfiction author. Her work spans the breadth of American life, and, although often centered around Chinese American characters, the themes of immigration, assimilation, self-determination, and the complex ties that bind us to our families and communities resonate beyond Chinese American or even Asian American audiences. 

“An Asian American writer is an American writer,” she said, reported The Harvard Gazette. “I’ve tried to be someone who really thought about the American project, and what it means, what this nation is. I try to use my vantage point from the margins to kind of illuminate the larger questions.”

Her sci-fi contribution is a baseball themed novel titled “The Resisters,” which is set in a dystopian near-future “AutoAmerica,” called such because most jobs are automated. Like most dystopian novels, the society is segregated into the “Netted,” the privileged fair-skinned people, and the “Surplus,” people who used to do the blue collar jobs. When a Surplus family is found to have a daughter Gwen with a “golden arm,” they build an underground baseball league to resist the status quo; eventually, Gwen is found and recruited by a Netted university to play in an international match, where her loyalty to family, community, and nation is tested. 

Across both fiction and nonfiction, Jen explores the puzzle of having a dual identity, balancing the west’s emphasis on an independent self with the interdependent, communal values from  her heritage and cultural background examining how these different worldviews shape the way we interact with our families, our identities, and our stories.

Worth Keeping on Your Radar

• By Angela Mi Young Hur, “Folklorn” is a haunting blend of Korean folklore, science, and family secrets, following a physicist confronting ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, in icy Antarctica.
• S.L. Huang’s “Zero Sum Game” is the first entry in a fast-paced thrillers series where a mathematically gifted mercenary turns probability into her deadliest weapon. The Cat Russel series is completed by “Null Set” and “Critical Point.”
• By Isabel Yap, “Never Have I Ever” is a short story collection that blends Filipino folklore, speculative horror, and quiet moments of humanity. 
• Cindy Pon’s “Want” is set in a near-future, smog-choked Taipei. This young adult eco-thriller follows a group of teens fighting corporate greed, inequality, and environmental collapse.
• Marie Lu, best known for her blockbuster young adult dystopias, also brings futuristic worlds to life in “Warcross,” a sci-fi duology where a teenage hacker finds herself inside the world’s biggest virtual reality competition, only to uncover conspiracies that stretch far beyond the game.
• Ryka Aoki’s “Light From Uncommon Stars” is a genre-blending gem set in a San Gabriel Valley donut shop, complete with deals with the devil, interstellar refugees, classical music prodigies, and all the heart you’d expect from a novel that mixes sci-fi with the absurd, tender messiness of immigrant life.

If we missed a science-fiction novel or short story collection by an Asian American writer you love, send your recommendation to artsandculture@mochimag.com. We’d love to hear from you!

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