Although he’s had a long and successful career as both a software engineer and a litigator, Ken Liu AB '98, JD '04 has always been compelled back to his first love: literature. Graduating from Harvard with a degree in English, he snagged a job at Microsoft his first year out of college. This led to running a startup with his friends, which then led to law school, followed by corporate law, and ultimately some years spent as a litigation consultant (meaning, he served as an expert witness in patent cases). However, all that is happily behind Ken now. Five years ago, he made the jump to a full-time writing career. Ken’s newest novel, out on October 14, is titled ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM. It’s the first in a series starring his new protagonist, Julia Z. 

“I really enjoy talking to technologists, hearing their stories, and trying to speculate in a responsible way,” Ken smiles. “My hope is to offer readers some insight into other ways of thinking about AI. I think a lot of the persistent debates in the media about AI are very clichéd, and in some ways, not as interesting. I'm not saying these things are not important. The economic impact of AI, the way that jobs and livelihoods are being threatened, I think these are real issues, and they are not to be dismissed. But I also think that if we only focus on those issues, we miss other issues that are just as important, if not more so, in the long term.”

Instead, Ken’s aim with this new series is to “draw out some of the implications for the long-term impact of AI.” He’s asking questions of himself and of his audience, such as, “What does it mean when human participation becomes both commoditized and more valuable, simply because it's so rare? What does human participation in that context mean? How do we find meaning in a world where machine-generated images and videos and deepfakes are pervasive? How do we actually maintain our humanity?” and finally, “How do we maintain that sense of connection?” As a self-described technologist, Ken knows this fascination comes across in his work. “I think of technology as the human mind made tangible.” He expounds, “I don't view technology as something alienated from our nature. Instead, I view technology as a lens that expresses our human nature. A lot of my fiction is premised on that.”

ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM is no exception to this framework. It’s a “sci-fi thriller meditating on all the ways in which humans use AI to be more and less human.” Ken notes that he’s not trying to pick a side in the novel, not looking to come across as pro-AI or anti-AI. He’s merely documenting observances: “Some people use AI as a way to treat other humans with more care and more empathy. Other people use AI as a way to reduce other humans to machines. Both are possible and present… My point, if there is one, is simply to sort of sketch out all the ways that I think this can happen, and meditate on the ways that we can think about this new technology: How do we express our humanity through it, and how do we prevent it from becoming a tool that some people use to reduce others to mirror a machine?”

The main character in the series is a hacker named Julia Z. Ken explains that it took a long time to figure out who Julia Z was: “The stories find me, rather than the other way around.” It took years to record Julia’s story, and these were the years of the pandemic. “I've always been a very optimistic person in terms of the power of stories to bring people together, but the pandemic was very challenging… powerful, paranoid, conspiracy-oriented collective stories really took over the world in a lot of ways. They became the things that drove the way we related to each other. And I was terrified, and very disappointed by the way humans were behaving.” Ken turned to the foundational text of Taoism, the DAO DE JING (which notable sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, from whom Ken has taken inspiration throughout his career as a writer, translated almost 20 years ago). In this exploration of such a peaceful, wise, and inspiring text, Julia Z came to him.

Memorably, Julia Z first told Ken one day that he was “worried about the wrong things.” But it took him a long time to finally figure out what she really meant by that. Everything came slowly, in very cryptic pieces, true to her character in the novel. Julia Z is surly, impatient, and mysterious, and she was like that even as Ken was recording her story. “You think you're in charge of the story, but you're really not,” Ken smiles. What surprised Ken most about Julia in the writing process was the way she took dreams very seriously. He says, “Historically, dreams are such a big part of how we understand the world and ourselves… but in the modern age, it's very different. We're dismissing dreams as entirely irrelevant… So much so that we've stopped daydreaming.” 

Ken laments that when waiting in line or for a train, people stare at their phones, rather than allow themselves to be bored and to daydream. “I think the lack of opportunity for daydreaming is deeply worrisome, because I feel like those are the moments where we actually become human. Those are the moments where we practice and actually enact our deepest psychic realities. Those are the moments we delve into the collective unconscious and find a sense of connection with spirituality, with religion, with all the things that make us human. It's all that we see or seem, right?”

The title of the novel itself comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem. “It just struck me as such an appropriate, beautiful term,” Ken explains. “‘All that we see or seem’ works only as a matter of dream logic. It's linguistically nonsense… It is about that space, about dream country, where we discover the truth.” This blending of dream and reality is demonstrative of how Ken thinks about genre across all his work. “I enjoy genre, but I don't enjoy debates about genre boundaries… I like the ways that genres open up different ways of telling stories, but I don't really think explicitly in terms of genre,” he says. Ken references Le Guin again, inspired by her idea that telling a story comes from the inside, not from what’s around you. “You journey into the collective unconscious, and you find the story there… And then you have to take that dream back into the real world, and then figure out how to tell that story. So, Le Guin says that artists who work with words are basically people who try to say with words what cannot be said… And I think that's very potent. I think that's very much what we do,” Ken emphasizes. “We try to say with words what cannot be said in words. And so sometimes symbolism makes sense if you express it via magic. Sometimes it makes more sense to express it via historical reimagination. Sometimes it makes more sense to speak in terms of technology metaphors… But ultimately, what I'm really trying to do here is to bring forth the dream I found in the collective unconscious.” 

Ken concludes with the idea that, “This moment we’re living through suggests a radical, strange re-evaluation of what it means to have intelligence. To what extent are our intelligences actually inside our brains, and to what extent are they really embedded in the entirety of the linguistic output of the human species that we've tapped into?” And that’s what he aims to explore in ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM, which will be released this month.