Books book reviews All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu Is an Imaginative High-Tech Thriller Ken Liu’s latest examines the “complexities of artistry…” By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on December 3, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Julia Z is a hacker in the not-so-distant future who, after a childhood of ignominy, is trying to stay under the radar in a quiet town outside of Boston. One day, however, a man named Piers shows up on her doorstep. His wife Elli has disappeared, and an unabashedly evil man named the Prince says he’s kidnapped her and will kill her unless Piers gives back something Elli stole from him.  Piers, a corporate lawyer who really loves his wife but is a self-professed luddite, believes he hasn’t been followed to Julia’s home. Piers is wrong, and Julia finds herself now entwined and on the run with him, trying to find Elli and save them all from the Prince’s wrath. Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem is marketed as a sci-fi thriller, and there’s certainly elements of that, but I’d argue that other aspects of the book give it a solid foot outside that subgenre as well, including into hard sci-fi. Let’s start with the technology. It’s clear that Liu has done intensive research into how AI could develop and become integrated into society. Almost everyone, for example, has a personal artificial intelligence that has grown up with them (Julia’s is named Talos), which has turned their AI into de facto extensions of people. There are benefits to this—no one’s organic brain can crunch numbers like their AI one can—but it comes with a loss. Later on in the book, for example, we get this illustration of humanity’s new dependency: In the same way that few contemporary writers could compose even a five-hundred-word essay with the help of AI as research assistant, fact-checker, dictionary, thesaurus, grammarian, and, in extreme cases, amanuensis, very few contemporary programmers could create a functioning nontrivial application without the help of codedaemons, bug-genies, patchsprites, scriptpixies, and a whole fairyland of similar artificial intelligences. In half a page, Liu has painted a future that feels depressingly plausible: It seems more likely than not, the way things are going, that this will be the world when my five-year-old is Julia’s age.  But What We See or Seem explores other potentialities as well. Take Elli’s profession as a dream guide, a person of some celebrity who guides thousands of people through a shared vivid-dream experience that is created by the hopes, fears, and thoughts of those involved. How vivid dreaming works, specifically how the technology interacts with people’s brains and how Elli constructs the shared experience, is intricately explained and developed. Julia Z’s various hacking abilities (Is there a seemingly insurmountable problem? Julia knows the AI for that!) also reveal the level of detail Liu has thought through.  Buy the Book All That We See or Seem Ken Liu Buy Book All That We See or Seem Ken Liu Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Liu also has imagined how this technology would work in a capitalist world, including how the companies that create these products can use them to alter what their human consumers may perceive: Does some Saudi prince, for example, not want their photo taken? The camera you use will automatically black them out of any images. Through this and other, more horrible means, the elite can alter the shape of the internet and, as a result, what is perceived as reality.  Through Elli, Liu also examines the complexities of artistry, and how creative desire, for many, cannot be completely divorced from external validation and perceived success. “There is so little certainty in art, so few ways to concretely judge where you are, that the hunger for approval, for the magic that comes from having sold, from being desired by many, becomes the polestar by which all steer,” Liu writes about halfway through the book. Here, he’s talking about Elli, but it’s clear that we see that tug everywhere today, and that behind the personas people put out in their quest for creative success, there’s a complex person (Bo Burnham’s songs, “White Woman on Instagram” and “The Internet”, also tackle this, and makes for an unexpected but delightful pairing with All That We See or Seem.)  These are meaty questions, and Liu weaves these larger themes over the course of the story. Doing so slows the story down a smidge, especially when considering that “Thriller” label, but things still move along at a decent pace. And without getting into spoilers, the book also takes a major turn a little over halfway through, plunging the reader into a story that’s different from what they might have been expecting. (Whether that turn works or not will likely vary from reader to reader.) One thing I would have loved to see more of is the development of certain characters. Julia as the protagonist (and as the main character in what will reportedly become a series), is fairly fleshed out: We get her backstory, which not only explains how she got her hacking skills, but reveals why she’s afraid to put her trust in or even connect with others. Piers, however, is disappointingly less developed, although we’re given more of Elli’s motivations to understand her better. There are also a slew of characters from Julia’s past and present whose primary purpose, like NPCs in a video game, seems to be to move the plot forward. Their introductions and subsequent exits from the story felt abrupt and wedged in—mainly there because Julia needed some kind of assistance or a sounding board. In the same vein, the Prince as the villain of the story, along with his main henchman Victor, are also one-dimensionally evil. Are there people like them in the real world? Sadly, yes (I can even think of some candidates). But for fiction, it would have been interesting to explore how people can break bad so completely.  Thrillers, however, usually do spend more time on plot than character development, and sci-fi thrillers usually do get into the details about the technology in the (usually) dystopian future that they paint. All That We See or Seem also gave me some Caprica vibes at certain points, which I appreciated. And so when the next Julia Z novel comes out, I’ll happily add it to my TBR list. [end-mark] All That We See or Seem is published by Saga Press. The post <i>All That We See or Seem</i> by Ken Liu Is an Imaginative High-Tech Thriller appeared first on Reactor.