Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at fourteen as the “orphan hacker,” is trying to live a life of digital obscurity in a Boston suburb.
But when a lawyer named Piers—whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals—barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly created at risk as she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor step away from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is an onierofex, a dream artist, who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live, in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s waking dream and providing an emotionally resonant and narrative experience. While attendees’ dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also providing a one-on-one dream experience for the head of an international criminal enterprise, and he’s demanding his dreams in return for Elli.
Unraveling the real and unreal leads Julia on an adventure that takes her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche.
All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu
Ken Liu’s first entry in the Julia Z series introduces us to a near-future Boston where AI and social media have reshaped daily life in ways that are equal parts impressive and unsettling. You have essentially no privacy, but your personal AI is genuinely useful and helpful in ways that are hard not to want. It’s a balance the book strikes well: this future is concerning without being hopeless or preachy, and the world just feels cohesive and plausible. Liu throws out plenty of cool ideas and concepts, and they land because they feel like something that could actually happen.
Julia herself grips you early. The former “orphan hacker” trying to live quietly in digital obscurity has more layers than she first lets on, and that turns out to be true of most of the cast. The missing Elli initially reads like a shallow influencer, her husband Piers like a somewhat naive man out of his depth. Neither is quite what they seem, and peeling that back is one of the quiet pleasures of the book.
The concept at the heart of the story is genuinely fascinating: Elli is an onierofex, a dream artist who weaves shared virtual dream experiences for live audiences, blurring the lines between dreams, identity and reality in ways the story explores with real imagination.
What the book is not, despite what the marketing would have you believe, is a thriller. There is a kidnapping, and yes, things get darker in the second half, but the pacing is slow and the focus is firmly on world, character and atmosphere. That’s not a criticism, it’s actually where the book is strongest. Futuristic mystery would be a far more accurate label, and readers going in with the right expectations will enjoy it considerably more.
The tonal shift when the darker elements arrive is quite abrupt. The first half has a breezy quality, with banter and a lighter touch, and then someone gets killed purely to send a message, and the book makes clear it means business. It’s a gear change, but not an unwelcome one, and seeing the exploitation lurking behind the polished surface of this future is genuinely compelling.
Which makes it all the more frustrating that the villain is pure cardboard. In a book full of characters with unexpected depth, he is evil for evil’s sake, absurdly overconfident, and almost laughably easy to outwit in the end. The resolution also leans a little too far into movie-script territory for a story that had, up to that point, been doing something more interesting. It doesn’t ruin the book, but it does leave you feeling it could have been considerably better with a little more care at the finish line.
All That We See or Seem is a confident start to a new series from an author who clearly has things to say about where technology and humanity are headed, and says them through a cast that keeps surprising you. If you can set aside the thriller label the marketing slaps on it, what you’ll find is a thoughtful, layered futuristic mystery with a protagonist well worth following into book two.
JC Kang