John Chu

@johnchu.bsky.social

8483 Followers 1158 Following

The writer who won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Not the movie director. (He/him/his) Mastodon: @john_chu@wandering.shop

adorable little 3D printed bao
imagined portrait of Bodhidharma looking upward at the text 見性成佛
The cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space. A stack of bamboo steamer baskets. Their contents get progressively weird going from top to bottom.
outstanding drawing of panelists, in order from L to R: Alexandra Oliva, me, Elizabeth Bear, Jamie Lackey.
Join JOHN CHU on tour! APRIL 8 - ODYSSEY BOOKS WITH JEDEDIAH BERRY South Hadley, MA APRIL 9 - PRINT: A BOOKSTORE WITH LIBERTY HARDY Portland, ME APRIL 10 - PORTER SQUARE BOOKS WITH MAX GLADSTONE Cambridge, MA
Join JOHN CHU on tour! APRIL 8 - ODYSSEY BOOKS WITH JEDEDIAH BERRY South Hadley, MA APRIL 9 - PRINT: A BOOKSTORE WITH LIBERTY HARDY Portland, ME APRIL 10 - PORTER SQUARE BOOKS WITH MAX GLADSTONE Cambridge, MA
Cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space A series of bamboo steamer baskets in a column. The contents of each weirder than the one above it. Max Gladstone blurb: A work of crystalline vision and meticulous humanity.
Join JOHN CHU on tour! APRIL 8 - ODYSSEY BOOKS WITH JEDEDIAH BERRY South Hadley, MA APRIL 9 - PRINT: A BOOKSTORE WITH LIBERTY HARDY Portland, ME APRIL 10 - PORTER SQUARE BOOKS WITH MAX GLADSTONE Cambridge, MA
Cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space Three bamboo steamer baskets whose contents get progressively weirder as we descend the page. Blurb from Max Gladstone: A work of crystalline vision and meticulous humanity.
Cover art for The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu. Has a blurb from Max Gladstone "A work of crystalline vision and meticulous humanity"
Join JOHN CHU on tour! APRIL 8 - ODYSSEY BOOKS WITH JEDEDIAH BERRY South Hadley, MA APRIL 9 - PRINT: A BOOKSTORE WITH LIBERTY HARDY Portland, ME APRIL 10 - PORTER SQUARE BOOKS WITH MAX GLADSTONE
Join JOHN CHU on tour! APRIL 8 - ODYSSEY BOOKS WITH JEDEDIAH BERRY South Hadley, MA APRIL 9 - PRINT: A BOOKSTORE WITH LIBERTY HARDY Portland, ME APRIL 10 - PORTER SQUARE BOOKS WITH MAX GLADSTONE Cambridge, MA
John Chu's The Subtle Art of Folding Space is the third notable first novel I've read this year. Unlike Jasmin Kirkbride's The Forest on the Edge of Time (reviewed in February) or Albertine Clarke's The Body Builders (reviewed in March), I went into it with expectations - Chu has published a couple of dozen good short stories over the last decade, picking up a Hugo and a Nebula along the way, and indeed the opening chapters of this novel are a lightly reworked version of "Hold-Time Violations" from 2015 - and they were satisfyingly met. The Subtle Art of Folding Space is a novel of surface charm and inner steel, of witty images and sharp ideas, of multidimensional cosmologv and equallv complex familv dvnamics.
Cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space A tier of bamboo steamers run down the cover. The further down we get, the weirder the contents of the steam. It starts with bao on top to stars and planets on the bottom.
Join JOHN CHU on tour! APRIL 8 - ODYSSEY BOOKS WITH JEDEDIAH BERRY South Hadley, MA APRIL 9 - PRINT: A BOOKSTORE WITH LIBERTY HARDY Portland, ME APRIL 10 - PORTER SQUARE BOOKS WITH MAX GLADSTONE Cambridge, MA
Now that you've got your eggs, milk, and bread, shop our online sale for the necessities that won't expire. Enter coupon code SNOWDAY at checkout on Harvard.com today only for 15% off your eligible web purchases. The sale includes new books, pre-orders, tote bags, merch,
Screenshot of Apple Books page of Spring's Most Anticipated Books. There are three rows of book covers. The middle row is Debuts and The Subtle Art of Folding Space is in that row.
Cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, along with the Publishers Weekly review: In Hugo and Nebula award winner Chu’s smart, funny, and intricate debut, a Gaia-like presence lies comatose, and it’s up to her daughter Ellie to rescue her. Complicating this quest are physics student Ellie’s fears that saving her mom will mean tampering with the “skunkworks,” the liminal plane that underpins the multiverse, and her vicious older sister, Chris, who, since childhood, has been staging daily attacks against Ellie with the pretext of honing her survival skills. Meanwhile, their cousin Daniel serves as a fact-checker for the skunkworks. Whenever a glitch in the laws of physics is reported—such as a beach ball going through a wall instead of bouncing off it—he manifests repair plans. When Daniel and Ellie are summoned to a meeting with the multiverse’s chief architect, Mary, the cleverly unfolding plot gets a new crease. To save their universe and many others, Daniel and Ellie must wrangle with a renegade posse of physicists who are warping the laws of nature to keep Ellie’s mom alive. Chu loads his tale with wordplay and cultural and scientific references that read like inside jokes for an audience of engineers. It’s as rollicking as it is thought-provoking. (Apr.) Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the location where Ellie’s mom lies comatose and misdescribed Mary as Taiwanese. The review has been further updated for clarity.
Cover art for Uncanny Magazine Issue 65 | art by Nilah Magruder with a quote from "The Diner at the Intersection of Duty and Despair" by John Chu "The crystal cliff loomed over Justin. It glinted like a giant chunk of clear, flawless diamond under the harsh winter sun. An ever-shifting rock field lay behind him. Every few seconds, except on the trail he had just blazed, dust coalesced into rock, and boulders disintegrated into dust."
DEBUT Ellie visits her comatose mother every weekend. That is not enough for her older sister, Chris, who reminds Ellie constantly she will never live up to Chris's own filial piety, which seems to include using random people to harangue Ellie and repeated assassination attempts. When Chris sends Ellie into the skunkworks-the physics-defying apparatus that creates and maintains universes—for a minor issue, it turns into a cascade of discovered problems, which include her cousin Daniel finding a device that is keeping Ellie's mother alive but creating destabilizing errors that jeopardize the universe. As Ellie and Daniel investigate the source of the illicit device, they find that their family's past is much more convoluted than known, and Ellie may need to choose between saving her family or the universe itself. Intricate worldbuilding, generational trauma, and reports relayed as food are woven into a story that has great action and engaging characters. VERDICT Chu finds a delightful and poignant intersection between the multiverse, family dysfunction, and dim sum in his debut novel. Reviewed by Kristi Chadwick, Dec 01, 2025
Story tile with this quote from my story "The crystal cliff loomed over Justin. It glinted like a giant chunk of clear, flawless diamond under the harsh winter sun. An ever-shifting rock field lay behind him. Every few seconds, except on the trail he had just blazed, dust coalesced into rock, and boulders disintegrated into dust."
Cover of ARC of The Subtle Art of Folding Space
Animated cover for The Subtle Art of Folding Space
Animated version of the cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space
Friday, July 18, 2025 13:00 Why the Fantastical is Fantastic for Musicals Salon F, Duration: 60 mins 15:00 Writers Who Translate, Translators Who Write Salon I/J, Duration: 60 mins Saturday, July 19, 2025 10:00 Reading: John Chu Empower / Embrace, Duration: 30 mins 14:00 Let's Do the Time Loop Again Salon G/H, Duration: 60 mins
Cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, coming April 7, 2026 Four sets of bamboo steamers going from the top of the cover to the bottom. The top one holds steamed bao. The contents of each steamer below it get progressively more surreal. One has bao with the universe as a filling. The next steamer below it has planets. The last steamer is filled with gear works. Two hands holding red chopsticks reach for the first and third steamer.
The show curtain for the Encores! production of Love Life.
Show curtain for Maybe Happy Ending, which is a black background with the show title in white inside a white box.
the "shoe curtain" a bunch of light bulbs arranged to form the word "SMASH"
Story tile for my novelette "Wonderland Is a Parking Lot in Revere" with the excerpt "I'm slightly drunk, too, but not drunk enough to walk into that conference room. You don't have to be sloshed to karaoke, of course. It's just that going to the icebreaker feels like slamming the door on a part of my life that that's not actually over yet."
Negative COVID test taken the morning of July 16th
Ignyte Award medallion and card
Friday, July 14, 2023 2:00 PM Do Short Stories Still Matter? Salon 4, Duration: 60 mins 4:00 PM Nontoxic Masculinity in SFF Salon A, Duration: 60 mins Sunday, July 16, 2023 10:00 AM Reading: John Chu Blue Hills, Duration: 30 mins 12:00 PM Word Processors Designed for Authors Salon A, Duration: 60 mins
Friday, July 14, 2023 2:00 PM Do Short Stories Still Matter? Salon 4, Duration: 60 mins 4:00 PM Nontoxic Masculinity in SFF Salon A, Duration: 60 mins Sunday, July 16, 2023 10:00 AM Reading: John Chu Blue Hills, Duration: 30 mins 12:00 PM Word Processors Designed for Authors Salon A, Duration: 60 mins
✦ Best Novelette · “The Difference Between Love and Time”, by Catherynne M. Valente (Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance, Solaris) · “A Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi (Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Tordotcom) · “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You”, by John Chu (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2022) · “Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness”, by S.L. Huang (Clarkesworld, December 2022) · “The Space-Time Painter”, by Hai Ya (Galaxy’s Edge, April 2022) · “We Built This City”, by Marie Vibbert (Clarkesworld, June 2022)
My Nebula Award for the novelette "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You" and a brown dust cloth.