All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu

American speculative fiction author Ken Liu has won plenty of awards for his fiction. In his new book All That We See or Seem Liu turns his attention to what might be described as a technothriller. The book is very much in the vein of William Gibson’s day after tomorrow (or possibly even day after today) cyberpunk-inspired fiction, set in a very close in time and slightly heightened future world and focussed on the role of technology.

The central character of All That We See or Seem is Julia Z, a hacker who is drawn into a mystery almost against her will. She is visited by a man called Piers who is looking for his wife Elli. But despite his precautions, Piers has been followed and as a result Julia soon finds that she is now also a target whether she helps him or not. Elli was a performer known as onierofex, a person who uses technology to take her audiences through collective dreams. But it turns out Elli was also dreaming privately with someone very dangerous and now that she is missing, that man also wants to find her and thinks that Piers is the key.

Julia is more than a digital native, she has a personal AI who supports her and a range of quirky tools like a chameleon drone that can morph into multiple shapes. Together with Piers’ legal skills they start to unravel Elli’s mysteries but in doing so expose deeper wrongdoing and put themselves in increasing amounts of danger.

Liu is fascinated in this book on the places that technology can take us. The way that AI can be used to crunch and analyse large amounts of data for good or ill. At one point Julia and Piers are tracked down because an AI can analyse the background noises of a phone call and track them to a particular location. In another, Julia uses her AI to support her make a daring escape in ways that she could not achieve on her own. But as a result of this the characterisations are a bit thin – the whole enterprise boils down to good guys (including some of Julia’s old crew) and bad guys.

But this, in the end, is a technothriller and characterisation is not the main game. Lui sets up a mystery and then explores how the technology that he has extrapolated can help or hinder its solution. The interesting part is that buried in the middle of this story is the idea that despite all of this technology there are still things that only humans can do in a way that will convince other humans, whether it is in the creative arts or on the influencing front. While there is plenty of darkness in Liu’s novel, this slightly optimistic and very humanistic idea tempers that.

All That We See and Seem is marketed as the first in a series featuring Julia Z and certainly Liu leaves the door open for further adventures in this world.

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu

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