This week’s guest is author, lawyer, and engineer Ken Liu— a man of many talents. You may know him for his collections The Paper Menagerie and The Hidden Girl, his fantasy quartet The Dandelion Dynasty, inspiring the show Pantheon, or perhaps even translating The Three-Body Problem. His recent novel All That We See or Seem is a near-future thriller about a beloved AI ‘dream artist’ who disappears without a trace, as well as the hacker trying to find her. It is the first of several planned ‘Julia Z novels’.
In this episode, we discussed Liu’s inspiration for this new novel, his concept of ‘silkpunk’ in the context of The Dandelion Dynasty, and the uncertain future of art in the age of AI. You can find more information about him on his website kenliu.name or right here on Substack at The Lion's Teeth. Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
00:00:12 – Intro
00:00:56 – Ken Liu’s new thriller All That We See or Seem
00:02:22 – “Dreamweaving” and why using AI feels like a dream
00:09:26 – Why did LLMs not make it into literature earlier?
00:18:13 – Writing near-future SF and “Real Artists”
00:27:36 – AI as a copying machine of the “desired original”
00:34:02 – Compensating artists in the age of AI
00:41:53 – Silkpunk and The Dandelion Dynasty
00:49:05 – Tax policy and cultural technology
00:56:23 – “All life is an experiment”
00:00:57 – Conclusion and final recommendations
01:02:51 – Synthesized Sunsets Backstage begins
01:05:17 – Ken Liu is unusually optimistic about AI art
01:12:22 – How will idiolects of AI and humans feed off each other?
01:18:03 – The Dandelion Dynasty as an experiment in exposition
01:23:45 – The character of Mata Zyndu and writing morality out of time
01:26:06 – The Paper Menagerie and The Hidden Girl are really different
01:27:44 – “Byzantine Empathy” by Ken Liu
01:30:29 – Ken Liu on the irrealism of fiction that avoids technology
01:33:03 – New season / reopening for submissions
01:35:03 – Conclusion and final recommendations
