ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
The other day, I was chatting with my buddy about something. I forget the details. It was one of those bar conversations that's like, oh, who was that drummer on that one song, or how fast can a cheetah actually run? It doesn't matter the question. The point is, he pulled out his phone and asked AI, and it felt normal because it is normal. This technology is everywhere in our casual conversations, our jobs, our relationships.
Ken Liu's new sci-fi thriller "All That We See Or Seem" takes place in a world not too far out from ours. It's just one where AI is slightly more ever-present, a bit more embedded into every nook and cranny of our lives. Liu is a big name in sci-fi and speculative fiction. His previous story, "The Paper Menagerie," won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award. That's a sci-fi hat trick. And he joins us now. Hey, Ken. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
KEN LIU: Hi, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.
LIMBONG: I mentioned at the top that this book is a thriller. So let me lay out the plot for the audience. Julia Z is our hero, right? She's a famous hacker trying to live a chill and quiet life when a guy named Piers comes knocking on her doorstep because he needs help finding his missing wife. And his wife, Elli, is an oneirofex. Can you explain to listeners what that is?
LIU: Yeah, so an oneirofex is a special kind of artist. So picture somebody like a rock star who's giving a concert, except the audience is sitting in their seats and they are falling asleep. And it's Elli's job to use AI to ascertain the mood of the crowd and to take them together into a collective dream experience. That's what she does. She's a dream guide.
LIMBONG: And what made you start thinking about this as a job, as a career profession for Elli?
LIU: So two things - one is as somebody who works in the creative fields and who's, you know, in the conversations about AI and the potential threat of AI, I've been thinking a lot about, how can human art remain relevant and what kind of new forms of art would be possible in the world in which AI is omnipresent? And the second piece of it is, I'm very interested in dreams as a mode of knowledge.
LIMBONG: I was going to say that makes me feel like dreams are a more tangible thing compared to AI, but they're not tangible. They are sort of, by definition, out there in the mist, right?
LIU: If you read religious literature, wisdom literature and history, dreams are one of the most important ways for us to sort of figure out who we are and where our place is in the universe. You know, it's the closest we get to travel to the collective unconscious. And in the modern world, we seem to have sort of pushed that away. We really don't trust dreams, but our deepest commitments are dreams. You know, we speak about the American dream, about I have a dream. These are important concepts.
LIMBONG: You write naturalistically about how technology works in this world, right? Julia uses AI to help her with hacking and her sort of day-to-day life, but she isn't naive about it. But also, there's one scene where, like, the goon's chasing her, and Piers will sometimes just kill time by talking to an AI girlfriend the way - sort of the way someone today might pull up a YouTube video on their phone or something. Can you talk a little bit about the mood and the tone you wanted to set as you built this world?
LIU: So the world I'm trying to create here is neither a dystopia nor a utopia. I don't actually think AI is necessarily going to make things 100 times better or 100 times worse. What it does is it amplifies our tendencies in both directions. So I wanted to sort of explore all the potential ways in which AI will make life much worse in specific ways, but also all the ways that AI will empower individuals in specific ways. And then it's up to the reader to decide whether these speculations are plausible, one, and two, whether they are desirable.
LIMBONG: Is you sort of weaving in between those two poles, those two extremes based on your own predictions or what you think the audience should think about?
LIU: I take the position that it's almost never possible for science fiction writers to predict the future in a meaningful way. And that's not what our job is. What we do is to construct the mythology of the future, and that's far more important. So by constructing the mythology of the future, we sort of give our readers a new way to think about these issues and to ask interesting questions. So I think a concrete example might illustrate my point well. So let's take Mary Shelley - right? - who wrote "Frankenstein." The story is still read today, not because we think her predictions about how you take cadaver pieces and create new life is true but because the creature, as a mythological figure, is very potent. We invoke the creature every time we discuss new technology. We talk about Frankenstein's monster or the creature all the time.
LIU: And in fact, the creature is incredibly relevant today because if you try to remember how the creature learned to speak, it did so by reading a copy of "Paradise Lost." So what does that remind you of? A large language model - right? - a creation that ingests our artistic output, and then thereby able to replicate our cognitive patterns. So I think it's that sort of thing that's very potent - the idea of creating a mythological figure, something that Mary Shelley pulled out of the collective unconscious, then became part of our mythological imagination and became part of how we think about the future.
LIMBONG: You know, before you were a full-time writer, you had a day job as a lawyer, right?
LIU: I did. Yeah, I was a programmer first, and then I became a lawyer.
LIMBONG: How did those two careers sort of lead you to writing speculative fiction?
LIU: I think what happened to me was this - because I was a programmer, I had a particular way of viewing the world. I sort of view the world as a set of symbols you had to sort of construct and arrange into some sort of structure to achieve the result that you wanted to achieve. And then later on, when I was a lawyer, it's the same thing, but now you're doing it with different symbols, you know, a different rule system. And we sort of construct our lives based around these patterns - tangible patterns, whether it's programming code or contracts.
And that very naturally led me into thinking about, what other ways do we spin these spells? And the answer is, you know, stories. Stories are the original programming code, the original contract, the original means by which we know the universe. And I wanted to - you know, all of my speculative fiction is centered around that idea. How do human mental patterns manifest themselves in the world in tangible ways, become, in other words, technology? All my stories are really technology stories in that deep sense.
LIMBONG: So the title page of this book lets us know that this is just the first book in a series of novels following Julia Z. What do you think is in store for her in the future?
LIU: So I've already written the second book.
LIMBONG: Oh, wow.
LIU: So I know what's happening to her.
(LAUGHTER)
LIU: But it's - I think we get to know Julia better. We get to know more about her internal struggles. When Julia is out there facing the monsters outside, she's also really facing the monsters inside her own psyche. And more of that comes through in the next books. She's always going to be there trying to do the right thing because she's driven by this deep sense of internal justice, but she's not without her shadows and her past. And the darkness in her psyche will come back to haunt her.
LIMBONG: Ken Liu's new book is "All That We See Or Seem." Ken Liu, thank you so much.
LIU: Thank you, Andrew. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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