Book Review: All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

This book is ridiculously zeitgeisty. It's all brain-rotting AI, social-media meltdowns, mixed with some cracking technobabble.

She thinks about erasing more: all the practice session recordings; her own encrypted cephaloscripts; the dream-guide neuromesh of her personal AI; the interviews, fan messages, reviews—food for her vanity, training data for her egolets.

Fab! But, for all that, it's pretty realistic. Sure, it's set five-minutes into the future, but all the tech is plausible and all the hacks somewhere in the ballpark of reality. It is much better than The Ministry for the Future simply because all the technowizardry passes the smell test.

The plot is, charitably, basic. A woman has been kidnapped and her husband (who is a suspect) enlists a Private Eye hacker to solve the mystery. But you're not reading to discover whodunnit; you're there to revel in the pitch-perfect future-gazing and cower before the (hopefully not too accurate) predictions around how technology will be subverted to protect the powerful while leaving everyone else helpless.

The neologisms are off the chart - "Darcybots" to help you date, a "Fiscjinn" to interrogate your finances, and an "Oneirofex" to… well, I'll let you discover that! You'll need to have a good grasp of what's going on with modern technology in order to get more than half the references. I've no idea if the book will be intelligible half-a-decade from now. Perhaps we'll have our self-hosted AIs translate it for us?

At times, it feels less like a book and more like a series of parables woven into one story. The ending feels a little rushed - but it fits in with the fast-paced nature of the plot. A great slab of sci-fi to chew on.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy. The book is released in October 2025 - and will probably remain relevant for at least half-a-dozen weeks.