Ken Liu ‘Prediction Is a Fool’s Game’
- Christopher John Stephens
- 15 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Boston-based sci-fi writer talks about ‘All That We See Or Seem,’ life parallels, AI, the future and present
Boston-area science-fiction writer Ken Liu gives readers a good ride as we meet Julia Z in his novel All That We See Or Seem. A paranoid loner hacker and bounty hunter, Julia is a type that's populated many similar near-future speculative fiction texts (literary or otherwise). But the trip Liu takes readers on is a necessary ingredient, if the author expects readers to embrace and follow Julia through this new series of adventures. Table-setting, after all, is a necessary part of any first novel in a series. And Liu, in his taut and controlled work, doesn’t waste time as he gives voice to his peripatetic young heroine:
“Virginia Woolf was right and she was also wrong. A room of her own was necessary but not enough…one had to be able to move freely without feeling you were being watched. Only through movement could you truly understand the nature of a thing…”
Julia is in a transitional period as we first meet her, but not for long. Lawyer Piers Negri wants her help tracking down his missing wife Elli Krantz, a dream guide whose skill is to induce vivid dreams for a paying audience. There are consequences when Julia initially declines and they’re another essential aspect of this genre. Our heroine more often than not has to be dragged into the action. Then, when the spark is lit, the true inner strength will be revealed.
These consequences create complications and a series of unavoidable fates. Elli has been taken by a character known as The Prince, whose henchman Victor will stop at nothing to get Julia and Piers. This results in the alarming appearance of secret slave factories and the inevitable fact that some characters we might have thought were righteous instead had duplicitous motives. When we all jump into a pool of blood, nobody comes out unstained.
The cat and mouse construction of All That We See Or Seem plays out competently for perhaps the first two thirds of the novel. It’s in its final third that Liu shines most, when he burdens Julia with grief that probably could have been prevented had she not gotten herself involved:
“Grief is tricky…like a trial to be endured. We want to do something…Anything so we don’t have to think about them. It’s a form of running away.”
There’s a sense of prescience to a plot development in the final third of All That We See Or Seem that’s more politically charged and drawn from today’s headlines than might make many readers uncomfortable. Who works at our data farms? How do we acquire and treat these employees? Liu leaves us to ponder these questions and more at the end of this exciting introduction to a strong hero whose skills will surely be put to equally (or more) dangerous and disturbing tests in future stories.
Sampan had the opportunity to interview Liu about All That We See Or Seem, issues raised in the novel, and the sometimes tenuous alliances between art, commerce, and real life.
Sampan: Two elements seem essential at the start of a book series: table setting and world building. The former are rooms and the latter is the building itself. You’ve done a great job setting the table for Julia Z and the components that make her who she is. Are there any precedents that served as inspiration as you embarked on this series? Is there anything in this book that foreshadows where we might realistically expect to find Julia Z in the next book?
Liu: Julia fits in the tradition of thriller heroines like Clarice Starling, Letty Davenport, Jane Whitefield: shaped by a horrific past she’d rather forget, wielding a set of unique skills that she’s ambivalent about, compelled, nonetheless, to seek justice and liberty.
In All That We See Or Seem, Julia is forced to confront evil-doers as well as the darkness in her own psyche. That hints at a truth for her future adventures: the darkness she confronts out there will always seek to overpower her by drawing on her own shadows; the only way for her to find peace is to be the guardian for people without power.
Sampan: At the risk of filling this with spoilers, I’d like to ask you to reflect on some lines that stood out for me:
“An artist… knows how to say no to many things and yes to only a few things.”
Is this as much a reflection of your ethos as it is Elli? What do you lose when you say no to plot strands that need to be laid out and brought together through the course of a book series?
Liu: This line is an echo of Steve Jobs’ line about focus. It’s a good summary of my own beliefs about art and life. Our time is finite, and it’s essential to ask yourself what you believe in so that you can dedicate that time to a few great things that will allow you to tell the story you want to tell. Too often, our inability to prune our choices leaves us in paralysis.
As a writer, I’d rather write one book that says something true than ten books that say nothing. The Dandelion Dynasty series did that for national constitutions, and the Julia Z books are my take on the American dream.
Sampan: On Sept. 4., U.S. First Lady Melania Trump made a rare appearance at the White House AI task force meeting to tell the crowd that, “the robots are here” and we need to prepare our children for the AI-centered decades ahead. It came off as particularly ominous when she noted that “our future is no longer science fiction….(we need) to treat AI as we would our own children-empowering, but with watchful guidance.”
That she implores us to empower something we have created and should maintain full control comes off as a surrender to the inevitable, the old meme “I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.” Could you speak to AI’s role in All That We See Or Seem and what you’re trying to say here? Is it pure escapism or something deeper?
Liu: As a technologist, I’ve been experimenting with and thinking about AI for several decades now. I don’t think any of the metaphors we have for AI—our mechanical child, imperfect mirror, embodiment of rapacious capitalism, fumbling apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and yes, even robot overlord—quite capture our complicated relationship to AI.
Prediction is a fool’s game. Exactly how AI will impact our lives is unknown. For every white paper predicting a drastic change in how we’ll work, create, and love in the age of AI, there’s an equally impressive white paper deflating those claims as mere hype. I’m not interested in joining the pundits.
Instead, I’m interested in the mythology of technology. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s conception, speculative authors delve into the collective unconscious, the realm of dreams and myth and true religion, and return with symbols that allow us to speak about fears and anxieties and hopes for which we have no words. In the age of technology, those symbols (the Creature from Mary Shelley or the androids from Philip K. Dick) take the form of technology.
All That We See Or Seem, as a techno-thriller, is filled with technical speculation about how AI might change the way we lie to each other, do our jobs, make art, and find love. But the most interesting speculations, in my view, have to do with how AI might change the way we dream, alone and together. Elli, the oneirofex, uses AI both to beguile her audience and to craft her own narrative of who she is. Whatever the real impact of AI will be, it has become part of our dreams and infused itself into the collective unconscious.
You can see this in how readers now scan for “AI tells”—we’ve mythologized punctuation and word choice. I deliberately sprinkled in two em-dash sentences and an instance of “delve” in this answer because both have been cited as “evidence” for AI writing. I wanted readers who pay attention to that kind of thing to feel the weight of the myth working in their minds.
Sampan: Immigrants don’t exist as an abstraction here, and it’s thrilling to see in a book that could be written off as simply genre fiction. Of Julia, you write: “Unlike many other immigrants from the ‘wrong’ countries…she kept on being restless and fearless.”
Later, when reflecting on her mother, who didn’t play a big role in her life, Julia reflects that her mother always wanted Julia to “...work at making America live up to her ideals.” A few lines later you give us a key line that could speak to everything happening today:
“I’m going to be a patriot, and I won’t shut up.”
Will Julia Z’s voice continue to be heard as we follow her in this series? Your fearlessness is admirable in a political climate where speaking up could have consequences.
Liu: Julia Z herself would be the first to tell you she’s flawed. She wishes she were a better friend, a better client (for her lawyer), someone who’s easier to get along with. But she’s never considered her compulsion to speak up a flaw, and I’m not going to tell her differently. For better or worse, she’s going to continue to speak her mind in the future.
Julia is the biggest believer in the American dream, and she loves her country with a purity and fierceness that needs no explanation.
Sampan: You cite a Susan Sontag line from On Photography in which she reflects that photographic subjects are more than just images. They’re interpretations of reality. They’re “...a footprint or a death mask.” Is AI tantamount to this? Will AI ever have a balanced relationship with photography or always be deceptive? Is AI going to be the death mask for fiction? Will writers have to surrender to the inevitable or can there be a common ground?
Liu: When it comes to AI and the arts, in the short term, there will be a lot of uncertainty and anxiety, but in the long term, I’m optimistic. Time and again, technology that displaces human craft turns out to serve human creativity, enabling the creation of new forms of art otherwise impossible without the technology: photography, cinema, computer animation .… AI will lead to entirely new mediums for artistic expression by humans. Artists are already experimenting with machine-augmented dreaming, like what’s envisioned in my novel.
Sampan: It’s hard not to see parallels between the entire for-profit prison/industrial complex in the final third of this novel. Again, without spoiling anything, the fact that The Prince justifies exploiting migrants with slave labor at his information data farms by saying “every civilization worthy of the name in the history of this planet had relied on slavery…” speaks profoundly to international labor exploitation happening today. Was that your intention?
Liu: Modernity launders suffering. Whether it’s historical colonial exploitation far from the “civilization” of the metropoles or modern forms of out-of-sight slavery propping up sanitized hyper-consumerism, we like to disclaim personal responsibility. The Prince may seem cartoonish in the way he rationalizes his own evil, but many who would laugh at him would just as readily blame the victims of globalization for their own suffering. Self-awareness is not easy, and this book tries to pull back that scrim.
Sampan: Congratulations on an intriguing, compelling start to this series. Julia Z is a powerful character who doesn’t wear her traumas like a crown of thorns and you’ve created a world with great longevity potential.
Liu: Thank you so much for speaking with me about Julia Z. I’ve loved working on this series, and I hope readers find her adventures as compelling as I do.
This story will be featured in an upcoming print edition of Sampan.