About

Peter Tieryas is the award-winning internationally best-selling writer of the Mecha Samurai Empire series (Penguin Random House), which has received praise from places like the Financial Times, Amazon, Verge, Gizmodo, Wired, and more. The series has been translated into multiple foreign languages, won two Seiun Awards, and the Mandarin version was one of the Douban’s Top 10 Science Fiction Books of 2018. He’s had hundreds of publications from places like New Letters, Subaru, ZYZZYVA, Indiana Review, and more. His game essays have been published at sites like IGN, Kotaku, and Entropy. He was also a technical writer for Lucasfilm where he wrote several game manuals. Outside of writing, he also has worked in VFX and character art at studios like Pixar and Sony Imageworks.

OK, that was my third person bio. =)

As for information about this blog, The Whimsy of Creation gets its name from one of my favorite stories that I published at the Evergreen Review. I’ve worked in films, games, and writing, so this blog will focus on all three areas. (That means you’ll see book reviews, movie reviews, musings on games, quotes from books I’m reading, links to stories, and photographs Angela (my wife) and I take as we travel to various places in the world). *Actually, I haven’t been doing that as much as this site becomes more a place where I just share some of the things I’ve been up to! Do people still read blogs? I have no idea, but I’ve gotten to the point where I try to share some thing here every few months.

Also, there’s a lot of stuff about myself I’ve seen online about myself that’s inaccurate including birthplace, date, etc. Some of it’s even on wiki. Unless you read it here, please take it with a grain of salt! 

Here’s some of the nice things people have said about my writing:

“Readers of alternate history will enjoy the details of the Japanese culture enfolded into the US and the ongoing tensions with the Nazis, while the plot itself packs a punch.” –Amazon, in listing Mecha Samurai Empire as one of the top SFF Books of September 2018

“Action-packed and rousing!” –Financial Times, in listing Mecha Samurai Empire as one of the best books of 2018

And the one that nearly brought me to tears with joy when I first heard it.

Hideo Kojima, one of my biggest inspirations and someone who greatly influenced my work, called Mecha Samurai Empire an “experience of cinema, literature, anime, comics, and gaming” that “is the new generation of Science Fiction we’ve been waiting for!” Here’s his tweet about it! https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/981028376969269248

Still blown away!

“Gorgeous language choices combine with Nick’s philosophical journey of personal discovery to create a deceptively deep story.” –Publishers Weekly

“Highlighted by Kollaboration in March as one of three Asian American authors on the rise, Tieryas’s debut novel “Bald New World” deals with a global epidemic of follicular proportions.” –Yahoo!

“If you took the world building of Philip K. Dick, and added in the gritty reality and humor of Haruki Murakami, with a touch of Aldous Huxley (of course), you would get Bald New World.” –BuzzFeed

“Bald New World has it all: a sci-fi setting that is both probable and mesmerizing, an intriguing plot, an engaging character surrounded by others with complicated motivations, and a powerful voice unafraid to discuss the shallow obsessions that feed our fears.” –SF Signal

“Bald New World builds a dystopian future that is terrifying, clever with a sometimes beautiful exterior that is gritty in its truths. It is captivating in its visuals and storytelling of a world in chaos after everyone loses their hair.” –Observation Deck at io9

“Bald New World is sort of like a Haruki Murakami novel set in a future reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash… where everyone is bald. At the same time, it’s really nothing like that. The debut novel… is a complete original, and always fun to read. It’s a very strange book with a lot of heart, with a strong eye for both character and narrative, and overflowing with great ideas.” —Electric Literature

“Bald New World is gripping and frightening. It is filled with wonderfully speculative and exotic elements. Dystopia has been done a lot, but no one has done it quite like Peter Tieryas.” –HTMLGiant

“Neon lit, vividly iridescent, yet never feeling heavier than a perfect slice of parfait, this book is one amazing balancing act between gritty drama, astonishing audacity, mesmerising supposition and tenderly observed characterisations.” –Future Fire

“It is the rare and noble book that strikes a nerve raw, gets me thinking and lights a fire in my heart and mind.” –Fanboy Comics

“Bald New World is an entertaining read and a book you definitely want to add to your wish list if you like your science fiction tales believable.”  –Forces of Geek

“There is a Vietnamese proverb or maxim that states something along the line that “hair and teeth are the corners of a person’s soul.” Rang va toc la goc con nguoi! In Peter Tieryas Liu’s world, what does the soul of human existence look like when half of such a corner has gone missing or has been demolished or has to be artificially regrown? And what happens when both corners evaporate? Bald New World seems to beg this moral question: What will it take to regrow or manufacture a soul? Tieryas Liu has more than flirted with this senescent, futuristic plague; he has incubated 10 chapters comprising synthetic nefarious characters, filmmakers, researchers, religious fanatics and cricket fighters, and martial-art-efficient chopstick-assassins germinating out of literary concubines, and named such a glabrous world the obvious: Bald New World.” –Fanzine

“If there was ever literary proof that the need for love and validation drives all human actions, then Peter Tieryas’s haunting collection of short stories would provide it.” -Joyce Chen at Hyphen Magazine.

“Peter Tieryas’s provocative collection is bold, daring, and abnormally beautiful.” – Nancy Terry at JMWW Magazine.

“In Peter Tieryas’s hands they are nothing short of miraculous as he weaves in elements of the postmodern with magic realism to create an ultra contemporary take on the age old question of love, life and meaning.” -Martyn Coppack at Kafka’s Cage.

“Just like life, the stories in this collection are full of unexpected twists, unpleasant surprises, missed connections, broken hearts, profound questions, and loneliness. However, the prose is so beautiful that even the darkest passages are a pleasure to read.” -Gabino Iglesias at Verbicide Magazine.

“Watering Heaven is brilliant and one of the best collections I’ve recently read.” -Eddy Rathke at Monkeybicycle.

“It isn’t often (at least in my experience) that you find a writer such as Peter Tieryas; a writer who conjures up a world that has a definite sense of reality, but is mixed with a beautiful and bizarre sense of magic and pathos.” -Shane Rooney at Black Heart Magazine.

“Expertly attuned to the zeitgeist-the tangle of our social networks, our cubicle culture, the language of science-the brilliant, haunting stories in Watering Heaven are always leading us somewhere deeper yet: that fathomless reservoir of human need and longing.” -Tim Horvath, Understories

“A surreal menagerie of short stories that sometimes veer into the realm of magic realism. There is something both slightly haunting yet inviting in these tales of love and loss that are both sensitive and intelligent. He’s a writer to look out for.” -Sang Pak, Wait Until Twilight

Finally:

My IMDB Page

And if you want to connect via social media, you can either follow this wordpress, follow on @TieryasXu Twitter:, or Goodreads me. 

I also have twitter accounts for my various works, though they’re older and I originally had a vision of having different content for each, but that didn’t happen for time reasons, haha. I mostly keep them from being completely abandoned by populating them with retweets from main. These are @noirscope for an older Asian noir mystery project I was working on, @baldnewworld for Bald New World, and @dr2comic for the graphic novel I was working on artist James Chiang (there’s also a FB page for Dr 2 though we’ve entirely given up on that).

Thanks again for stopping by!