Ken Liu Is a Dream You Don’t Quite Wake Up From

It’s okay, you can still dream in private. Just know that you can pay for the privilege of vivid dreaming in a group.

Despite all appearances, Ken Liu’s new book All That We See or Seem is optimistic about the future. Even though it portrays a world dominated by corporations, saturated with AI, and shadowed by quasi-slavery across Asia. All That still imagines a near future North America largely clear of authoritarianism and where AI is used primarily to extend human ability rather than to make humans dispensable. Indeed, Liu — who presumably wrote this a couple of years ago, despite its release date in October 2025 — relies on, AI being somewhat curbed on social media in favor of marks of human attention.

The clumsily titled novel launches Liu’s new “Julia Z” series. A Hugo and Nebula winner, Liu is an expert storyteller, and this is a brisk, if slightly hackish, double-barrelled romp through a near-future landscape.

All That We See or Seem  
By Ken Liu
Simon & Schuster/Saga Press; 416 pages

Liu’s world feels like 2023 projected forward a decade or so. Commodity capitalism and corporate power is the danger, not populist nationalism harnessed by global oligarchs. Semi-autonomous “edge-run” AIs stand between Americans and their data, money, and freedom — tools that only hackers like Julia Z can truly master. Julia’s “fiscjinn,” voiced in her late mother’s tones, manages her threadbare finances.

Mostly the novel is a thriller centered on the tiny, young, Asian American woman Julia. She is trying to remake her life in her early 20s, after a lifetime of being on the run either with her activist mother, or with a resistance cell. When, Piers, a client of a friend suddenly arrives and pulls her into his adventure, Julia knows what to do.

Piers is a “boring,” stable lawyer who sees himself as the Ithaca to his wife’s Penelope: a loving home that she can rely on when she returns from her creative work. Elli, his wife, is an Oneirofex — a director of dreams. The mechanism of “Vivid Dreaming” and the vagaries of becoming a celebrity artist are two of the few things into which Liu has put significant thought. Elli, who is a rockstar of Vivid Dreaming, provides both mass dreaming events in arenas and individual sessions but she suddenly goes missing. That worries not only Piers but also one of Elli’s individual clients who fears that his dark business secrets may be at risk of going public.

With her tech skills, her external drive Talos, and the help of her polymorphous drone Puck, Julia cycles first around the adventure of Elli and Piers and then, secondly, around the related adventure of Elli’s client. On the way we find out plenty of information about her mother and the folks in her now-disbanded resistance movement. The character drawing and development is pretty basic though. With the exception of Elli who is herself a sort of stereotype of artist yearning to be free, every character seems drawn from stock: the betrayed ally, the wise hermit, the loyal pet. Even Julia, for all her backstory, remains a type — tech-savvy, emotionally blocked, justice-minded, haunted by her mother.

The plot moves briskly, impressively so for a novel of over 400 pages. There is minimal reflection on the state of tech or of the world but what there is, comprises smart undergrad observations rather than anything either usefully insightful or just plain wrong. More worryingly, for the first novel in a series, the most interesting character of the book is Elli, who we assume has been left behind by the end of All That.

Despite his pedigree, I nearly skipped All That We See or Seem because of its corny title and retro cover. I’m glad I didn’t — it’s entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking — but if I had, I wouldn’t have missed much.