Posted in: AMC, Netflix, TV | Tagged: ken liu, Pantheon

Pantheon: Sci-Fi Author Ken Liu Discusses TV Series Adaptation & More

Pantheon is one of the most ambitious sci-fi series to hit television. Author Ken Liu spoke with us about the adaptation and much more.

Pantheon, the animated TV series that adapts stories by Hugo award-winning Science Fiction author Ken Liu, is one of the most ambitious Science Fiction series on television. It depicts the Singularity from the point of view of a grieving young girl and her family as they discover her late father has been illegally uploaded into a digital consciousness as part of a tech corporation's plans for the next step in human evolution. Pantheon is a complex and ambitious Science Fiction series, covering topics like the uploading of human consciousness, The Singularity, Quantum entanglement, and the moral, ethical, philosophical, and existential questions that come with it, along with a commentary on capitalist exploitation.

Congratulations on the complete story of "Pantheon" finally becoming available. Can you take us back to how you came up with the original stories that ended up in "The Hidden Girl and Other Stories"? Did you just start with one before you felt inspired to explore the ideas further?

Thank you! It's such a pleasure to talk about Pantheon. The show is based on seven stories I wrote: "The Gods Will Not Be Chained," "The Gods Will Not Be Slain," "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain," "Carthaginian Rose," "Staying Behind," "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer," and "Seven Birthdays." Collectively, I refer to them as the "Singularity" stories. Six of them can be found in my collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories.

The three "Gods …" stories were originally written for the Apocalypse Triptych anthologies edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. From these, you get the basic plot line of Maddie and her dad and the uploaded "gods." The other stories are set in the same universe and explore the world before, after, and during the apocalypse of UIs taking over the world.

However, I didn't write the three Apocalypse Triptych stories first. I've been exploring the concept of consciousness uploading in fiction for over two decades (the very first story in this universe, "Carthaginian Rose," was my first published story, all the way back in 2002).

Why have I been writing about this subject so much? The idea of uploading minds is old and quite popular among some groups in Silicon Valley (for whom the success of uploading always seems to be just about a decade or so away). On the one hand, from a materialist perspective, it seems easy to accept the idea that human consciousness can run on different hardware, including upgraded hardware that could unlock our full potential. On the other hand, it also seems that if you "upload" in the manner described in my stories, the uploaded version would not be a "continuation" of you, at least not from the perspective of the you that dies in the process. The premise, uniting boundless hope with existential horror, is irresistible to the imagination. Stories that explore this theme, such as Pantheon and the video game SOMA, tend to generate a lot of debates among fans precisely because of this paradox.

From "The Apocalypse Triptych" to "Pantheon"

You've written at least a hundred stories. How did your Singularity stories end up getting picked to be adapted into "Pantheon"?

I had plans to turn the Singularity stories into a novel and actually started drafting it several times, but I could never quite figure out the right way to tell the story I wanted to tell. My media agent, Angela Cheng Caplan, then helped me package the stories together, thinking that a visual medium might be the right fit to develop these stories further. Carrie Gillogly at AMC then championed the project and connected the package with Craig Silverstein, the creator and showrunner for "Pantheon," and the rest was history.

How involved were you in crafting the key themes and elements of stories into a single story for Pantheon?

To be clear, the show is the creation of Craig Silverstein and the writing team. I was not a part of the writers' room and didn't write any of the scripts. Beyond providing the team with the stories and my incomplete novel draft, I was fortunate to participate in the creation of the show in various ways. Craig shared his initial draft story outlines with me and asked for my input, and then, later, after the writers' room was assembled, I got to fly to LA and join the writers during that initial period when we broke down the seasons and outlined the episodes. I found the experience extraordinarily rewarding as it taught me a lot about how a TV show is made. It really was a case where the sum was far greater than the individual participants. Later, Craig and the writers would occasionally have me participate remotely as well. I was very happy to see some of my contributions during these later sessions make their way into the show as well (for example, the hack to break into the data center in Svalbard.)

"Pantheon": Crafting a TV Series

A recurring theme in your work is the way systems and those in power brutalize people in dystopian and apocalyptic settings, including the historical past and your Silkpunk stories. Your Science Fiction stories feature technocratic oligarchs using new technology to force change on society that manipulates and oppresses people. That was an emerging issue years ago and become even more current now than when the first season of Pantheon premiered in 2022. Did you have any discussions with the writers' room about that at the time?

That was certainly one of the many topics that came up during our discussions. That writers' room was extraordinary, and every person had deep insights into technology, art, humanity, and how the desire for power undergirds humanity's basest as well as noblest instincts.

"Follow the money" is a useful heuristic for understanding human behavior, but incomplete. Many who strike out for Silicon Valley, for instance, aren't there just for the money—the money is a proxy, a desirable side effect of the real prize: power over the fate of humanity, the feeling that you've put a dent in the universe. More than finance, more than politics, more than art and entertainment and sports and philosophy, today, the most direct way you can make a big impact on society is through technology, by inventing it, selling it, building big companies around it, getting billions of people to use it.

The combination of our insatiable desire for the new and how cheaply and quickly digital technology can be deployed gives contemporary technologists unprecedented power over all of us. On its own, this is neither good nor bad—the power, like all powers, can be used for good or ill—but it is a very different kind of power dynamic than in the past.

You could argue that even before anyone has uploaded, gods already walk among us.

Was it an accident that Steven Holstrom looked like Steve Jobs?

Well, I did use that quote about putting a dent in the universe above …

To be frank, I didn't explicitly model any of the tech titans in my stories on Jobs or anyone else from real life. It's not about wanting to avoid referencing real people; rather, it's because I don't think there's anything special about our powerful tech founders. They are human, no more and no less. To model my characters explicitly on them would imply that the founders we have are special, somehow different from the rest of us mere mortals, endowed with unique qualities that set them apart, qualities that my characters must copy. I don't believe that, and so my fictional tech titans are also mere human beings, no more and no less.

As for whether Craig and the writers wanted to reference Jobs with Holstrom, I really don't know.

How much discussion did you have with the series writers about the Singularity, the uploading of consciousness, Quantum entanglement, and time travel? Was that ending the first choice for the series?

We discussed the technical aspects of the universe and their interesting speculative ramifications extensively (and those were some very fun discussions).

As for the way the seasons played out, I always loved the fact that Craig planned the show to be very grounded in the first season but then to take off into realms that couldn't be easily represented via traditional live-action filming: the wild speculative (virtual) realities discussed in "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer" and "Seven Birthdays." That was one of the reasons why Craig and I were both excited about animation as the medium for Pantheon. You just can't visualize the things I imagined for those far-off futures without animation.

I believe Craig didn't settle on the exact ending for the show until later in the development process, but it was always going somewhere grand and far (very far) in the future.

His Next Book

Now that your Dandelion Dynasty Silkpunk series is completed, would you like to talk about your upcoming book, "All That We See or Seem," which starts the Julia Z series? It looks like a cybercrime hacker series.

Oh, I love talking about this new series of near-future techno-thrillers featuring a hacker who could always think her way out of trouble. Here's how I describe All That We See or Seem: Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at 14 as the "orphan hacker," is trying to live a life of obscurity in a Boston suburb. But when a lawyer whose famous artist wife has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals barges into her life, Julia is forced to use her unique skillset to track her down. The result is a harrowing journey across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche.

Julia Z has the unique skills required to find the seams in a world dominated by AI and the empathy necessary to build rafts on a sea of loneliness. I wanted to use this book to explore my thoughts on the future of human artists in the age of AI, on machine-learning as a new medium for art, on the seemingly irreversible social trend of commoditizing and professionalizing emotional labor—and above all, on how we can remain human in a time of cataclysmic transformation.

Pantheon is now streaming on Netflix in the US. The original source for the series, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is now available.

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