I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. It’s out in October.

Julia had a difficult childhood, which included living on the streets and learning to be a hacker. Now, she’s making ends meet by doing pretty basic work; it’s not fulfilling but it brings in some money. Her life is thrown into turmoil when Piers turns up: he’s a stranger, looking for someone who can help him find his wife Elli. She’s a oneirofex – someone who leads others in vivid dreams – and she’s gone missing. It’s a case of pulling on a thread and the entire garment unravelling, as Piers and Julia discover unexpected things in Elli’s past that have very real consequences right now.

And then the story goes in a direction I really didn’t expect. The swerve made me quite disoriented, but eventually I could see what Liu was doing, and overall I think it works.

This is a near-future novel, and the key aspect is that it’s very clear Ken Liu has given enormous thought to the question of “AI”: what “artificial intelligence” actually means, how it might be used in future in large and and small ways, and particularly what the consequences might be. Liu is no “it’s all Skynet” doomsayer, but he’s also no “this is the answer to everything” evangelist. Julia, in particular, uses AIs in useful and creative ways. But at the same time, there is no doubt that the ubiquity of AI in this world has had some dreadful consequences: for artists, for privacy, for security, for what I would think of as ordinary life. This is a challenging novel in the best possible way: with an engaging narrative and characters that matter, Liu makes you think about things that are happening right now. It’s not didactic, but to me at least it’s pretty clear what Liu wants you to think at the end of the novel (but maybe I, as an anti-LLM person, am just reading in what I want to see).