Ken Liu - All That We See or Seem

One night Elli, a famous artist and extremely popular weaver of dreams, gets out of bed, closes the bedroom door on her still sleeping husband Piers, and walks out of the house. She vanishes. There's seemingly no reason for it. The police are baffled and Piers has no idea. Then he gets a phone call. Someone called The Prince has Elli, and is demanding that Piers return what she stole. The Prince tells Piers that he will kill her if he doesn't find the missing thing. The problem is that Piers doesn't seem to know what is missing and the Price is light on clues.

Piers finds Julia Z, a young woman who lives in the fringes of society. Its a world of data, surveillance and control. Everything from information about what you do, where you go and how you live is stored, bought and sold. Data is everything. Julia, in rejecting that, has learnt to live in the cracks and use her skills to earn cash through semi-legal schemes and also to resist the system itself. Julia, Piers hopes, can rescue Elli by identifying what is missing. 

So begins a romp through a future world that feels not very different to our own. This is Ken Liu's first techno thriller and he embraces the concept fully. Few pages pass without some new technological idea, equipment or concept being thrown at the reader. There's a lot of action, thrills and spills and some nasty bad guys - not least the Prince himself whose corporation manipulates data and knowledge to shift governments, opinion and, well anything. 

The problem is that its all a bit one-dimensional. Julia, the centre of the story, has a good back story that shows how she rejected society and entered the underworld. But she's just unbelievable as a person. Her skills are almost superhuman. At various points in the story she's able to reach into her rucksack and pull out a self-built gadget that can hack, store, video, fly or analyse. AI here is a tool to be used and key to modern life. Yet it's also a deus ex machina that fills every plot hole and drives the story foreward. There's no real innovation - the bad guys are comically bad, and the contrived plot let's Julia jump from escapade to escapade leaving the reader bored and unconvinced.

There's a good story here, trying to get out. But Ken Liu's world building, character development and overreliance on increasingly unbelievable technology as a problem solver didn't do it for me. As a commentary on our world of data and surveillance it failed.

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