From its opening paragraphs, Silvia Park’s Luminous suggests just what kind of science fiction novel you’re getting: one set in the not-so-distant future, one where the pop culture and technology of now feels ever-so-slightly extended by a few decades. In this case, Luminous is set in a Korea that has reunified; this has been to the detriment of the nation’s soccer team, who in the novel’s second paragraph lose an international match to Mexico 7-0. (You can almost imagine an aging, frustrated Son Heung-min watching it all play out.) And in the pages and chapters that follow, Park establishes a fairly neat rhythm, following a trio of central characters one after the other.
It’s a similar template to works like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy, and it’s not spoiling much to say that Park’s book would fit neatly on a shelf beside these works. But what’s most interesting about Luminous comes from a different one of Park’s thematic concerns. This novel pulls off something I don’t see too often, in this case not since Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things: It’s a work of science fiction that includes religious belief as a major element without feeling either dismissive of it or evangelical about it.
Besides the novel being set in a reunified Korea, the other big change in its futuristic setting is the growth of robotic technology throughout society. This doesn’t just mean a lot of robots present in the world, though this is the case. It also means that the same technology used for robots is also utilized to help, say, injured war veterans or people dealing with chronic physical conditions. While Luminous is set in Korea, its scope is global; at one point, Park mentions that the laws governing whether robots need to be physically designated as such varies from country to country, with Korea having one set of policies and the United States having another.
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Though they aren’t the only major characters in Luminous, the book focuses on a trio of characters, two of whom have a very clear connection. Morgan works designing humanoid robots for one of the industry’s leading companies. Her brother Jun, a veteran of the war that reunified Korea, now works in law enforcement with a focus on crimes involving robots. A girl named Ruijie, age 11, completes the trio of main characters. It’s her we’re introduced to first, as she is scavenging parts from non-functioning robots and thinking about her own health. Park heartbreakingly summarizes Ruijie’s physical decline, which began with trembling and grew progressively worse.
The doctors lobbed acronyms, like ALS, PMA, and MMA, which regrettably was not the martial arts. There were nights she couldn’t sleep because her body clutched her awake in a squeezing iron fist. These nights she’d pretend to breathe softly when her parents sneaked into her room and knelt beside her bed so they could wrap her hand in sandalwood beads and pray.
Her encounter with a boy named Yoyo—who appears to be a robot, and declares that he will live forever—sends her mind on a specific line of thought that could serve as a thesis statement for this novel.
Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman. The world made a promise to her: death is a problem that can be solved.
Ruijie, who is increasingly dependent on machines to keep her active, has a complex relationship with technology. The two siblings do as well; an early flashback focuses on Jun waking up after recuperating in the aftermath of reconstructive surgery following an IED attack. “They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic,” Park writes. Jun is also trans, which adds another layer to his relationship to his body. As for Morgan, well, she’s in a relationship with a robot, Stephen—something that causes her general frustration as well as ethical conundrums.
(It’s about here that I should address the elephant in the room: Morgan’s subplot involves the high expectations for a new product launch after a previous generation of robots proved hugely disappointing. It gives me no pleasure to state that the name of this generation of robots was, in fact, Toby. Nor did it please me to read that, for Morgan and her coworkers, the name Toby “was fast fated to become a word for failure.”)
Gradually, the three storylines—Morgan’s robot development, Jun’s search for a missing robot named Eli, and Ruijie’s attempts to better understand Yoyo—converge in multiple points. This isn’t the kind of novel where everything comes together neatly; instead, the resolution is often messy, as resolutions tend to be. It’s not giving away too much to reveal that the key to part of the book can be found in Morgan and Jun’s childhood memories, and in their respective relationships with their reclusive genius of a father.
Yes, families loom large here, but so does belief. The scene earlier of Ruijie’s parents praying is one of the earliest places in this novel where religion shows up, but it’s far from the last. At one point, Jun drives to a church, where Park gives a sense of how religion and technology have clashed in this future Korea:
By the church’s main entrance was the notice, PLEASE LEAVE YOUR ROBOTS OUTSIDE. ROBOTS, NOT HAVING A SOUL, ARE UNABLE TO WORSHIP GOD AND HAVE NO PLACE IN THE CHURCH.
And yet Jun discovers Stephen working at the church’s bookstore. “I was programmed to believe in God,” Stephen tells Jun—and Park takes the implications of that very seriously. What does it mean to be a part of a belief system that doesn’t acknowledge your own sentience? It’s a big question, and it’s one of several that Park works through in Luminous.
In the end, the themes Park is working with here will be familiar to many readers of science fiction. When does artificial intelligence simply become intelligence? What role will cybernetics have in our own identity? What does it mean for a robot to die? These are things science fiction writers have probed for decades—but Park has found a fresh way to probe these essential questions.
Luminous is published by Simon & Schuster.
