All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu
416 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: October 14, 2025 by S&S/Saga Press
“One
from the pitless wave?
Is all
we see or seem but a dream within a dream.” -Poe
There are
interesting debates to be had over how this novel will be sold to the reading
public. Techno-thriller? Yes. Science
Fiction? Indeed. I suspect, however, that PR departments will market this as a
straight thriller, and the speculative elements are more tomorrow than Star
Trek or Dune. The speculative elements come from technology we will
have soon. The aspects that make this SF more grounded are connected to the
philosophical questions surrounding the web of technologies that are supposed
to think.
Most
readers will know Ken Liu from his translation of the Chinese blockbuster The
Three-Body Problem. I greatly enjoy all his Chinese SF translations, but,
unfortunately, the massive success of Cixin Liu’s novel has overshadowed the
fact that his novels are quite good. Among other things, he also wrote a unique
Star Wars novel that I enjoyed. All That We See or Seem, however, feels
different from the Silkpunk fantasy he is known for.
At the
heart of ATWSOS is Julia Z, a character who is really a brilliant invention for
a series character. She is a hacker who is uniquely positioned to solve crimes
in the AI-saturated future of this novel. Talos, her personal AI assistant, is
an extension of her, and her space in the internet is very much a part of her
character.
“Unlike
Most People, Julia didn’t subscribe to a single commercial AI to handle
everything in her life. Instead, she relied on open source versions of domain-specific
machine learning systems fiscjinn every fix-it and other AI needs. She didn’t like
the idea of turning her life over to algorithms of cloud giants. Even Talos was
a custom job, something she built herself.”
So in the
case of this novel, she is hired by a lawyer named Piers to find her client Elli,
a famous influencer and dream artist. Elli uses technological interfaces to
weave dreams that she shares with an audience. The missing character is
interesting because her career and personal are a huge part despite her absence.
It is an aspect of the modern technology that Elli lives on as content, a very 21st-century
style of ghost.
The novel
is about technology that feels around the corner. I can see that over many
books, Liu will be able to use Julia Z to ride the technological waves and
comment on it all. This time it is Dream
weavers, Vivid dreaming, Fusion vision glasses, Neuromesh, and as things chance
I suspect we will get new stories that reflect that. The novel is filled with asides that comment
on modern technology.
“Dating
was such a fucked-up game, with women putting up dozens of A/B tested AI-enhanced
profiles guarded by autiejinns designed to filter out men who didn’t meet their
sky-high standards, and desperate men in turn deploying donjuans and darcyjinns
to query thousands of profiles at once, hoping to break through antitiejinn
bridges. And if what his sister told him was true, it wasn’t any better if you
were queer either. It was just bots
talking to datajinns talking to deepfakes talking to digipenians. He read
somewhere that 99 percent of the traffic on the web these days was between AIs.”
You can
see that the novel is filled with made-up technology, which is half the fun.
Much of the Dickian commentary I found came in these passages. I didn’t think
they distracted from the story. The humans at the center of the story are well
drawn, but these novels are about the modern technological world.
Julia and
Talos, her custom computer assistant, work to find Elli, who either disappeared
or died. Solving crimes in the twenty-first century requires a combination of internet
and a real-world investigation. This is of course, a method for the author Ken
Liu to investigate our relationship with technology. That is the aspect of this
novel that knocked my socks off.
Julia has
interesting partners in the investigation. Not just Talos but all Elli herself,
well sorta in the form of her Egolet, who is her online avatar or doppleganger,
that based on her online existence continues to exist as a digital copy of her.
“There
were gaps in Elli’s egolet, Julia explained.
It was
not uncommon for there to be holes – absence of training data for certain periods
or places – in personal AI. While many in Silicon Valley advocated “Total monitoring
for total improvement,” few ordinary individuals were willing to have their
personal AI monitor and record literally every moment of their lives –
bathroom, bedroom, deceit, embarrassment, pride, guilt. Many were the reasons
why someone, anyone might wish to exclude some moments from their second brain.”
I wrote
about online avatars in my recent SF novel, so it is a concept I have thought
about. The idea that this version of her assists in the investigation is, of
course, interesting. Liu is also playing with the idea that the tech in this
future CAN monitor your most intimate moments. That is where the thriller
flirts with horror as much as speculative elements as the novel plays with the
line where technology blurs the lines between human life and something darker.
One
element of our lives not touched by our technology is our dreams, and it should
be no surprise to anyone who knows the Poe quote that the title is from we are
talking about dreams. PKD briefly mentioned dream-circuits in Galactic
Pot-Healer, but Roger Zelazny and Leguin did too. The genre fiction about dreams tends toward
horror like the Elm Street movies, but also Nolan’s Inception.
This novel
being about a dream guide sets up a dynamic and metaphor that the online world
begins to feel like dreamscape and the lines are blurred. Julia Z has to learn
about her dreams because she is edging into that world.
“So began
Julia’s lesson as a dream guide. She learned to read Elli-Egolet’s simulated
bio signs, to pull out seed images from a library of architypes, to turn the
seeds into generated clips and sync them to Elli-egolet’s moods as the model
drifted on the shoreline between solid consciousness and turbulent dreams.”
Elli
guided people to have designer dreams but interesting things happen when her
Egolet tries to dream. The egolet did have dreams, but they didn’t quite work. “Elli never put all of herself into her
personal AI. She had to lead a double life and hid half of herself from neuromesh.
But you can’t dream with only light and no shadows.”
For all
the money the tech companies are dumping into AI… IT CAN NOT FEEL. IT CAN NOT
DREAM.
All
That We See or Seem
Is an excellent Science Fiction thriller speaking to darker realities, using a
mystery to explore questions that society as a whole should be asking. It is an
important novel, and without giving away the ending, the source of data feeding
the all-mighty algorithm is a believable horror. One of the best novels I read
this year, a thriller sure but a novel about thinking machines that will get
the reader thinking.
Now on to
some notes on the Dickian stuff. It might seem like random world-building, but
much of the in-world internet is simply bots communicating with themselves. I was
struck by this part about bot-farms…
“That’s
ridiculous,” She said. “It’s an old scam. Fifty cents for a generated follower
on FlipClip, a dollar for a bot on TrendBlend. It sounds grand, but after you
walk away, what have I really bought? A bunch of useless accounts with
gibberish posts that will never be seen by a human, pretend likes, that will
never affect the algorithm, nonsense that will add to the conversation except the
kipple of the dead internet. The bladerunners are too good. Astroturfing is
dead.”
Kipple and
bladerunners. Of course, only one of those terms was actually invented by PKD,
but Kipple was a term PKD used most famously in Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, but also in Now Wait for Last Year. It is a build-up of junk that has built
up in their lives. Most readers will not notice it, but Liu used it twice. Awesome
He is
coming on the PKD hangout on October 21st. Can’t wait to talk to
him. Hell yeah.
