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Ken Liu's Blog - Layers - July 09, 2025 05:48 | Goodreads

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My family and I just got back from a two-week trip to Europe (Italy and Greece). It was amazing, and I’ll be thinking about what I saw for years (no amount of hyperbole can do Pompeii justice). As I worked on the second Julia Z book (my new techno-thriller series) during the trip, I was struck by some of the resonances between my surroundings and her world. Classical Greece and Rome were built with stone, and that choice has shaped the way we engage with the past. Stone lasts. Things built with stone—and Roman concrete, which might as well be stone—have a better chance of being there in a thousand years than just about anything else. Everywhere you go in Italy and Greece, ancient ruins (sometimes still functional) stand proudly among modern buildings, tangible reminders that Faulkner was absolutely right: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Stone lasts even when it is removed from its original structure and repurposed into something new. After the statues at the Parthenon were

Ken Liu's Blog - Layers - July 09, 2025 05:48 Art of the Near Future + Book Event Early Buzz for All That We See or Seem Layers My family and I just got back from a two-week trip to Europe (Italy and Greece). It was amazing, and I’ll be thinking about what I saw for years (no amount of hyperbole can do Pompeii justice). As I worked on the second Julia Z book (my new techno-thriller series) during the trip, I was struck by some of the resonances between my surroundings and her world. Classical Greece and Rome were built with stone, and that choice has shaped the way we engage with the past. Sto

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