Fiction Reviews
All That We See or Seem
(2025) Ken Liu, Head of Zeus, £20, hrdbk, 416pp, ISBN 978-1-035-91594-1
At its core this is a straight out disappearing person mystery, set in the near future and underpinned by cool cyberpunk ideas. Secrets gradually reveal and, as the protagonists’ worlds unravel, they find intriguing truths about themselves.
The leads here are Julia Z, a hacker trying to escape her tortured past and Piers, a lawyer whose wife Elli has gone missing and who wants Julia to track her down. Elli creates shared dreams using sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), but criminals want to subvert that talent. One of her clients, The Prince, has her kidnapped, and is demanding the return of dream sessions he’s had with Elli. Julie eventually takes the case, but she and Piers are pursued across America by Victor, an amoral bad guy employed by the Prince. Julia must hack her way through scanty online evidence to find Elli, while avoiding Victor.
AIs are in charge in this world, essentially, but no-one quite trusts them, because they seem to be serving the needs of the rich and powerful, and the lack of integrity is rife. Julia must navigate her way through that.
But it’s a tough slog.
This novel was potentially promising, but I’m afraid I really didn’t like All That We See or Seem very much. For a start, given the action-chase setup, it is surprisingly slow. And I didn’t like the characters – the villains aren’t that nuanced and Piers the lawyer is underdeveloped and his relationship with Elli seems improbable. Worse, the protagonist, Julia, is a computer nerd with an unlikeable character and an unrelatable backstory. But that’s not the dealbreaker. For me it’s the pacing and the deep dives into tech-geekiness (for an early example see page two for a long, dense paragraph exploring how a computer virus worms itself into a school system (nothing to do with the wider plot) causing me some extensive head-scratching with reference to ‘specialised visual formatters, translators, audio synthesisers, policybots and ed-law jurijjins’). If you’re a gamer, work in IT or are under 25 you’ll probably be okay with that, but all the techie asides threw me out of the story, I’m afraid. So it’s a hard pass from me, and I won’t be checking out the promised sequel.
I really wanted to like this book. Ken Liu’s short stories are excellent, and I would recommend without hesitation The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. His fantasy novels are pretty good, too (check out the Dandelion Dynasty books). He can be quirky and inventive with well plotted, articulate stories with relatable characters and intriguing settings. So my expectations were high… And that’s probably why I found this book so disappointing.
Mark Bilsborough
See also Mark Yon's take on All That We See or Seem.
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