What Birds Have Vanished

From the award-winning author of the Dandelion Dynasty series, Ken Liu returns with the sequel to ALL THAT WE SEE OR SEEM, the next electrifying novel in the Julia Z series — where love, identity, and immortality collide.

What price is too high in our war against death?

This isn’t the distant future. It’s tomorrow — just one breath away.

Every street corner watches. Every camera feeds a stream. Every stream ends in an AI. Nothing escapes their regard. Everything is captured, ingested and dissected.

From this torrent of data, new realities are conjured, indistinguishable from truth. The line between real and virtual isn’t blurred.

It’s gone.

Julia Z walks this vanished line. She understands the ebb and flow of information, she can see the world as the AIs see it. Like a priest of old, she can work with the new gods.

But she is not alone.

Others walk the same path. And for some of them, humanity is not sacred, it is substrate — raw material to be exploited.

For Julia Z, What Birds Have Vanished begins with a gift of love. It ends in a decades-long conspiracy of genes, brain scans, and forbidden research.

For the reader, it’s a razor-edged technothriller — a story of surveillance, sacrifice, and the soul.?
Because when the gods are algorithms, the question isn’t just what’s real.

It’s whether you’re still human.