Listened to the audiobook with Kat Cleave – fine narrator.

I really liked The Paper Menagerie, so I was keen to try out some of Liu’s longer work. When The Grace of Kings disappointed, I chalked that up to the fact that it felt a little like an overreach – an attempt to squeeze an incredibly complex period in Chinese history into a fantasy setting. It read like Liu was trying just a little too hard to write a magnum opus. I figured that was a fluke and I was glad to find that Liu returned to sci fi for All that we See or Seem.

Only to find that his latest novel fell flat for me too.

The pitch is good, if a little generic – a loner with a skillset that wants to be forgotten by the world is pulled into One Last Case. The ‘twist’ here is that our loner is not a jaded, white, male, detective, but rather a young woman hacker.

Unfortunately, the story that spins from the prompt failed to excite me.

Part of the reason must be that the characters didn’t come alive. Perhaps the characters felt so flat because it appeared to me Liu was more excited about showing off his research into near future tech ideas than fleshing out his characters. Admittedly, there are a number of thought-provoking nuggets in his descriptions of technology. However, his dystopian vision of our near future – while not at all improbable – feels like it lacks imagination. And even though it hogs the limelight, frustratingly, it never feels like it is central to what is going on.

Liu’s focus on explaining the details of AI hacking or phone data tracking comes at the cost of developing, for example, his villain. Cartoonishly evil and without any form of motivation or background, his largest contribution to the novel are his phone calls to his equally generic goons.

The villain is not alone in this. My suspense of disbelief was thoroughly tested by a number of other moments that felt straight out of a cartoon. From improbable puzzles to listening in on the bad guys’ poorly scripted video game dialogue, from analysing company policy for determining what car to steal to analysing in what pot of food to hide one’s drone, All What We See or Seem is plagued by regular sections of underdeveloped prose that an editor should have taken an axe to.

Overall, All That We See or Seem is just the umpteenth cyberpunk noir that focusses on exploring a drab near-future dystopia over its own characters or message. My conclusion is that I should probably stick to Ken Liu’s short form fiction.