Tieryas, Peter
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Working name of South Korean-born author Peter Tieryas Liu (1979- ), in the USA from infancy, who used his full name in earlier work, beginning with the concisely Equipoisal tales assembled as Watering Heaven (coll 2012), some of which seem nonsequitural until they lodge themselves within expected parameters of Fantastika. Though authors like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges seem directly or indirectly to tint Tieryas's work, he is in general notable for his sophisticated drawing upon a wide range of story.
His first novel, Bald New World (2016), combines spoof and Satire, as its title makes clear, describing with some comic intensity the consequences of a planetary baldness plague, but drawing Dystopian conclusions from universal follicle loss. He is now best known for the United States of Japan Alternate History sequence, comprising United States of Japan (2016) and Mecha Samurai Empire (2018), in which an explicit and extensive homage of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) is knowingly subverted by a move in the second volume into Military SF regions, with the titular Mecha complicatedly in evidence. In terms of the sorting language used in this encyclopedia, the series would need to be placed under the Hitler Wins rubric, but in fact the focus here is almost entirely on the consequences upon the lives of Asian-Americans in the United States of Japan, which occupies western America, and whose transfiguration is treated as both comic and tragic. [JC]
Peter Tieryas Liu
born Seoul, South Korea: 20 December 1979
works
series
United States of Japan
- United States of Japan (New York: Angry Robot, 2016) [United States of Japan: pb/John Liberto]
- Mecha Samurai Empire (New York: Ace Books, 2018) [United States of Japan: pb/John Liberto]
- Cyber Shogun Revolution (New York: Ace Books, 2020) [United States of Japan: pb/John Liberto]
individual titles
- Watering Heaven (Hong Kong: Typhoon Media/Signal 8 Press, 2012) as Peter Tieryas Liu [pb/]
collections and stories
- Bald New World (Perfect Edge Books, 2014) as Peter Tieryas Liu [coll: pb/Shutterstock]
links
previous versions of this entry