The Crossed Keys Chronicle

There is a certain trope of sci-fi novels that never ceases to hook me into a book, and that's the one with lots of very odd and exotic proper nouns. The novel All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu had so many of them in the first few pages—cephaloscripts, neuromesh, egolets, just to name a few—that I had a pretty good idea that I was going to enjoy this novel.

In this book we follow Julia Z, who is a very experienced hacker in near-future Boston. She is approached by Piers Neri, who is looking for help finding his missing wife, Elli, who he, at least initially, believes has been kidnapped. His wife is a moderately famous oneirofex, another amazing proper noun by the way, which in the book universe is a person who facilitates group dream sessions that are mediated and augmented by personal AIs. Julia declines to help Piers initially, but her own AI, named Talos, lets her know that she might be in danger due to the group of henchmen that tracked Piers to her place. Julia then engages in some great spycraft to leave her apt undetected and eventually meet up with Piers to help him in his search. From there we learn a lot more about the fascinating world of the vivid dreamers that Elli was a part of and try to figure out where she might be.

Beyond just really enjoying the near-future world building that Liu accomplishes, I really enjoyed the story as well. From the first page of the book, the reader is aware that Elli hasn't been kidnapped and instead went on the run for her own purposes, so it's interesting to see how the characters eventually come to terms with that reality and how it impacts them. I think Liu also made a few bold choices. While I wouldn't call it a twist, around sixty percent of the way through the book there is a big plot turn that I wasn't expecting from this kind of book.

We also learn a lot about the backstory of Julia Z, and she herself is a very interesting character. Daughter of an immigrant whose mother became a very vocal and outspoken activist, which caused Julia to have a tumultuous childhood. She eventually ended up living on her own in a number of bad situations before getting involved with a radical hacking group, which is where she learned so much of her tradecraft. Beyond just being interesting background on her character for the book, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler due to the way Amazon even catalogs the book, but it seems like there will be future books with this protagonist as the lead.

If you are looking for a light techno-thriller set in a world that isn't too different from our own, I would highly recommend All That We See or Seem. Don't let all the neologisms scare you off from a well crafted and well told story. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, which is currently scheduled for release in the Spring of 2027.

Even though we are still a few weeks away from the crowning of the 2026 Booker Prize winner, time keeps marching onward. Thanks to a recent TikTok, I discovered that the list of books that are eligible for consideration for the 2027 international version of the prize has been compiled by an industrious book influencer, which I’ll link here. In 2027 the award will actually be renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize. The influencer is going to make an effort to catalog their reading of most or all of the possible books. I absolutely am not committing to anything like that, but it will be interesting to see how many of them entice me to try them out between now and next year. In going through the list I did realize that I had already read one of the eligible books, so consider this your first Booker Prize 2027 related review!

The book in question is If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, which is a collection of science fiction short stories by an apparently world-famous South Korean author named Kim Choyeop and translated by Anton Hur. Historically I’m a much bigger fan of the idea of short story collections than I am of the actual short story collections themselves. Typically if I enjoy a single story out of a collection I consider that a decent collection, but I can say this collection easily passes that bar. Of the seven stories, there was really only one that I didn’t care for at all, and all the rest I thought were pretty good to even great. While I wouldn’t dispute that the stories fall under the science fiction banner, I wouldn’t call Choyeop’s writing anything like hard sci-fi or even cyberpunk. Her style and approach are very much more grounded and would even be more along the lines of speculative fiction in a lot of cases.

The first of the short stories in the collection was by far my favorite by virtue of the big swing it takes as its premise. “Symbiosis Theory” opens with a short passage about Ludmilla Markov, who was a world-famous artist whose work consisted of art drawn from memories of places she’d never been to before. We then cut to the Institute for Neurointerpretation where scientists, through a set of experiments, have made a startling discovery about human development. They have found that as babies and up through around age seven, all humans have a mental symbiont that is an alien consciousness that they dub the “Them”. They further find that it’s that alien component that is vital for teaching humans such concepts as morality, ethics and altruism, the very foundation of humanity. The presence of the symbiont then disappears around the time that humans typically start to develop strong personal memories of self. The scientists struggle with whether or not they should even release these findings to the world, but they eventually realize that the fantastical art and world that Ludmilla had described in her works were actually the real memories of the homeworld of the aliens themselves. The story ends with the understanding that, out of all of humanity, she was the only person who had ever been able to sense them directly and was able to get them to not leave her consciousness as she aged, thus she never had to feel alone. A very touching and poignant end to such a high-concept story idea.

The other story I really enjoyed was “Spectrum”. The narrator retells the story of their grandmother, who was a deep-space explorer who had been missing for over 40 years. During her lost time, she crash-landed on an alien world where she was befriended by some of the intelligent life there, most particularly an individual by the name of “Louey”. While they were never able to communicate directly with one another, Louey became her protector and they lived for some time together on the alien world. Eventually the narrator’s grandmother (named Heejin) discovered that the aliens are very short-lived, only three to five years on average. But what she also learned is that they seem to maintain some continuity of self through a set of written papers that they store and maintain. They were sets of papers that, after many years, Heejin was finally able to look at, but was never able to fully understand because much of it was written in colors that human visual systems weren’t able to interpret. In the end, the fifth and final Louey she knew was killed in an animal attack, and she was able to find her crashed ship and eventually escape. Heejin then spent another decade alone in space before finally signaling for help in order to hide the location of the alien planet from humans. She knew that while on her own she was welcomed as a friend, the next time humanity would encounter that race, they would do so from a position of power and it probably would not end well for them sadly.

If you are looking for a quick sci-fi read, I think this is a good choice for you. The entire book clocks in around 186 pages, and each individual story rarely gets above 30 or 40 pages, so it’s easy to dip in and out of as you have the time. Based on my experience with the 2026 Booker shortlist, I absolutely don’t think this book will make it due to its actually being relatively upbeat and positive, but maybe positivity can reign over the translated works version this coming year.

After the past few months of reading various long lists for the Booker and some other upcoming fiction prizes, which on the whole I haven't super enjoyed, I decided I needed to return to a type of fiction that never lets me down. I'm speaking, of course, of far-future space operas. The best author in that genre, in my opinion, is the criminally overlooked Peter F. Hamilton, but a close second is the sadly departed Iain M. Banks. When it comes to his sci-fi writing, he's best known for a series of ten books that all take place in a shared universe that mostly centers on a civilization named the Culture.

The civilization of the Culture seen in the books is one of the most utopian you'll find in mainstream fiction. Hundreds of billions of humans and other alien races live together in basically a post-scarcity world, spread across million-kilometer-long space habitats or enormous General Systems Vehicles that are over 200 kilometers long and can hold millions of souls on board. The ships themselves have randomly assorted names, like Sleeper Service, Just Read the Instructions, or Reasonable Excuse, and are controlled by incredibly sophisticated AIs of a type they call Minds.

Given the basis of the world being stable, peaceful and incredibly carefree, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that most of the novels set in the Culture-verse look to external factors coming up against the Culture in order to drive the conflict needed for a satisfying novel. In this book of the Culture series, book five of ten, Excession, the external factor is the reappearance of what they term the Excession. It presents itself as a perfect black-body sphere exactly 53.34 kilometers in diameter, with zero apparent mass but directly connected to the underlying energies of the universe in ways that even the Culture can't achieve. This leads to a secret, self-organizing collection of ships, which call themselves the "Interesting Times Gang," attempting to control access to the artifact before anyone else can.

I am only slowly working my way through the ten books of the Culture series, but Excession has by far been my favorite that I've read thus far. While in my literary fiction I enjoy strong characterization and deep emotions, when it comes to my space operas, I like super-advanced technology, descriptions of cool spaceships and universe-spanning mysteries. Let me tell you, this book has all of those in spades. My only criticism of it is that, ironically, there is far too little of the actual Excession featured in the story. It is very much used as a MacGuffin to start and propel all the main actors along in their arcs, but I do wish we could have gotten more scenes and even point of view from it. Some minor spoilers for the end: what is revealed only to the readers, and not actually to anyone in the story, is that the Excession was there to do a bit of recon to see the state of the life around the area it popped into. Due to the events in the book, though, the local volume of the Milky Way doesn't exactly cover itself in glory, and the object decides to leave with all of its far-future secrets intact.

While I love the sort of rarefied techno-speak that only the true greats of sci-fi can spout (true fans know the wonder of monobonded concrete), I would caution people if they choose this as their first novel of the Culture. While none of them are direct sequels or continuations of each other, it doesn't hurt to have a passing familiarity with the universe and concepts. All in all, if you are a hard sci-fi/space opera fan and you haven't checked out the series, you thankfully have a big backlog to look forward to.