A challenging novel that fearlessly faces a world full of AI
Julia Z is a hacker, and a good one. She has a mysterious past, but now, with the arrival of a client that needs her help, Julia is thrust into a dark world that, even given her technological skills and prowess, she could never have imagined. Julia’s story is the story of All that We See or Seem, the start of a new series by Ken Liu.
The title is a key to understanding and unlocking what Liu is after in this book. The phrase “All that We See or Seem” comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within A Dream:
This is a story about dreams, both metaphorical as well as literal. The novel runs on the rails of a plot involving a lawyer, Piers. His wife Elli is an oneirofex: she can help shape shared dreams, with individual clients, as well as large groups. But his wife has now disappeared. Worse, a mysterious entity known as the Prince¹ is demanding Piers turn over some at first vaguely defined information from his wife. The Prince not only doesn’t know where Elli is, but her disappearance is what triggered him to send his demands: he is looking for her, too. And so the race is on to use the information in Elli’s files and clues... and dreams, to find her before the Prince does.
At least, that is the ostensible plot of about two-thirds of the novel. A little context and background, first: What a lot of this novel is about and focuses on is the everyday use of LLMs and related technologies. The sort of AIs that we are seeing today are extended, developed and ubiquitous. Liu isn’t advocating for these technologies, mind you, but he does fearlessly lay out a world with AIs that act as personal assistants, legal researchers, and the like. The technology is seen as noncontroversial, but it is everywhere. Julia and Piers and the other characters swim in this water. They can’t imagine a world where they don’t have to manipulate and swim through AI stuff—be it dating apps to shopping.
But then there are dreams. The manipulation and crafting of shared dreams is shown to be a hot new technology (that Elli managed to be an early user and tastemaker for) and one that is absolutely human-made. It’s made clear that Liu thinks that in this new future anything that requires human craft will command a premium. Unlike most other creative arts, dreams are something an AI absolutely can’t replicate.
And yet, consider the poem that the title of the book comes from. It suggests that Elli’s craft (even if you can record them) is an ephemeral one. Sure, it can be recorded, but in the end it is a gossamer art, which could be destroyed by a touch. And there’s a desperation to try and hold onto something real from the dream.² Or is everything just a dream?³ Is it all ghosts and shadows, be it the AI-invented variety, or human-derived ones?
And now I’m going to get spoilery and discuss the phase shift in this novel, because, frankly, I don’t think that it actually works all that well.
HERE BE SPOILERS.
Still here? Okay.
Up to about the two-thirds mark, the story has been Julia and Piers as they try and track down Elli. It’s all from Julia’s point of view, with a couple of swerves here and there for brief bits with the antagonists—the Prince, as well as one of his lead henchmen. The pair get closer and closer to Elli, and have figured out why, as well as what the Prince wanted. And then they track her down, at the same time as the Prince’s forces do. The technothriller of the first two-thirds of the novel comes to a head.
In the ensuing course of events, both Elli and Piers die. Dead. Julia barely survives herself. And then the novel shifts into something else entirely (which I will not discuss, since I’ve brought you to this spoiler and will not go farther). Julia takes the lead, and the rest of the novel plays out. And I’m not sure that this gear shift works into what turns out to be an entirely different plot. It might be, if I squint, an extension of the original plot, but what gets revealed and explicated in that last third and what Julia deals with is not set up as well as I think it is. And to kill not only the MacGuffin but a primary character as well, leaving Julia at a nadir, feels like a bad gear shift, to be honest. We get to learn more about Julia and her past in the last third, and I realize that this series is HER series, and this is needed to flesh out her character some more.
So this feels like a “rebirth” and a “return to her origins,” which is fine, and the novel does eventually hit its theme in this last third, but the jettisoning of both Piers and Elli and the whole swerve from what the novel was trying to do… I don’t think the join between the parts exactly works. The last third on his own has some interesting ideas, too, which makes the clash all the more frustrating. The ideas don’t match the first two-thirds, and I think they aren’t as good, but there’s some intriguing stuff here. Liu’s speculation on these technologies and what they mean holds your attention—and may horrify.
SPOILERS END.
And then we come to the novel’s setting. This is a near-future world where AI is ubiquitous, and the focus of that worldbuilding (aside from the dream technology) is the use of AI. At a time when LLMs and related technologies are controversial, a novel like this can be hard to take. Liu makes it clear there has been a human cost to the use of this technology, but for the most part, he’s not judging it (negatively or positively). This makes the novel tricky, since this is such a contentious technology now, and in Julia’s world it’s everywhere. We get a lot of immersive detail in this future society, and it holds a bit of horrid fascination for me. But I can see how it might absolutely turn off some readers. If the very idea of ubiquitous AI makes you twitch, this is definitely not a book for you.
Also, most of the worldbuilding around the dream technology, which is free of any concerns regarding AI and its consequences, is in that first two-thirds of the book. The last third, again, takes things in a different direction, but it didn’t quite have that spark for me.
So in the end, though, this novel doesn’t quite work for me. It’s not so much the AI technology but the shift at the two-thirds mark that changes this to a completely different book, and while that last third is not weak, I just don’t think it is as strong. Jettisoning a lot of what makes the first two-thirds works, characters and otherwise, makes that last third less worthwhile.
Caveat lector!
Highlights:
- A novel that puts an AI future front and forward with a lot of clever speculation and worldbuilding
- A slowly unfolded main character
- A headscratching two-thirds turn
Reference: Liu, Ken. All that We See or Seem [Saga Press, 2025].
¹ It is very weird, personally, for a character with an online name of The Prince to appear as the antagonist in this novel, given my internet name of Princejvstin.
² And yes, the movie Reminiscence, which goes into memories and dreams, has entered the chat.
³ Ken Liu’s translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time now enters the chat and really feels important to this novel’s existence. Did that translation inspire Liu to write this novel? I wish I knew Liu well enough to go and ask him directly!
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
