The Kirkus Review
The lives of two estranged siblings—one a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit and the other a world-class robot programmer—collide when a robot goes missing in a unified Korea.
Jun, the cop, is a veteran of the “so-called Bloodless War” that united North and South. He’s also trans, and a recovering virtual-reality addict. His younger sister, Morgan, is a lonely corporate pawn gunning for her shine at Imagine Friends, the Apple of a thriving neurobiology industry.
Both struggle with the burden of their father’s pioneering career in technology along with tremendous grief for Yoyo, the robot brother he introduced into their family when they were children and then took away without explanation. It turns out that Yoyo lives, unbeknownst to his first family, in a nearby junkyard, where a young girl named Ruijie finds him and recognizes how special he is even in a world now replete with robots.
Both Jun and Ruijie are disabled, from war injuries and illness respectively, and use robowear, a bionic existence which offers them added kinship with these new members of society. The speculative world Park creates feels remarkably robust: The robot revolution mirrors the way smartphones fundamentally altered modern life in less than a decade and the post-war landscape erupts with familiar tensions around immigrants, refugees, class, civility, violence, and security.
There are some problems: The story suffers from an unnecessary withholding of information early on, as well as an overwhelming number of complications. Worldbuilding is one thing—and this world is indeed extraordinarily imagined—but the narrative bulges with tedious scenes and dialogue, questionable structural choices, and too many characters with little import.
Still, the second half more than makes up for the misses of the first. Stay with this one for the big philosophical questions it asks about the nature of God, souls, humanity, politics, power, purpose, consciousness, memory, death, and, of course, love. Park is nothing if not ambitious, and the sheer scope of the endeavor is the reward. While stylish, the single word title doesn’t do the breadth of the novel justice.
A messy, visionary debut.
The Shelf-Awareness Review of Luminous
Reviewed by Terry Hong
Robots are ubiquitously integrated into human society throughout Silvia Park's extraordinary debut novel, Luminous--as servants and staff, but also as daughters, sons, siblings, friends, even lovers. In a fast-approaching future, Korea is reunified, and robots and humans coexist symbiotically. A robot named Yoyo, once a son and a brother, is the focal point amid a disparate cast of characters who come together via serendipitous meetings, unexpected reunions, and wrenching losses.
Ruijie is the first to encounter Yoyo. She's not healthy: "the doctors lobbed acronyms, like ALS, PMA, and MMA." None of the letters stuck, but her young body continues to break down, forcing her to resort to customized "robowear" for mobility. Ruijie, a precocious three-time science fair winner, regularly scavenges the salvage yard next door to her school, looking for usable parts to enhance her failing form. Meeting irresistible Yoyo engenders easy friendship.
Out in the adult world, detective Jun of Robot Crimes--who was born human, but now lives in a 78% rebuilt body after a horrific accident seven years prior--is summoned to investigate a missing robot child. Unlike her "ungrateful son," the owner insists, "Eli is special." The search leads Jun to his younger sister, Morgan, from whom he's been estranged for years. Morgan is a robot designer at Imagine Friends, the pioneering, trend-setting company that originally issued Eli. Morgan is consumed at work with the latest secret project, Boy X, but at home, she's fielding robot challenges with her live-in creation, Stephen, whose interactions are becoming increasingly human--devoted, needy, even demanding. "I wanted someone to love me," she admits, unlike their fractured family. Growing up, Jun and Morgan had a third sibling, Yoyo, who disappeared. Their father, once the world's top neurobiotics innovator, unexpectedly transitioned to zoobiotics at the height of his career: "It was like watching a famed brain surgeon put down his scalpel to become a horse doctor," a colleague summarized. Soon Dad arrives in Seoul, expecting to see both his human progeny. None are ready for Yoyo's reappearance.
Park is a remarkably agile writer, moving seamlessly from speculative ingenuity to poignant family drama to deeply philosophical ruminations on humanity's future. "Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman... death is a problem that can be solved." But at what cost? In her brilliant new world, Park transforms machines into the truest barometers of humanity.
The Idaho Review Interview with Silvia Park
Silvia Park’s debut novel, Luminous, is a haunting portrait of the near-future where Korea has been unified and robots have fully integrated into society. Marrying heart and innovation, Luminous tells the story of both humans and humanity in a time of great change. Park talked with associate editor Kira Compton about the novel’s sweeping structure.
KC: Something I really loved and admired about Luminous is that it's got that very strong, story, but also this immersive and expansive world building. Were you building this world and you found the story, or you had this great story idea and the world came later?
SP: Neither. I began with the characters. Originally, I meant Luminous to be a children’s book. I had finished another long-term project that was horrible. Like, went up in flames horrible. I was burnt out and tired, so I told myself I would do something easy—which is foolish of me, children’s books are not, in fact, easy—but it refused to accept that shape. It turned into a book for adults. As I was fleshing out my character Yoyo, a robot who looks like a child, I realized that he had adult siblings who were in so much pain, who had difficulty grappling with the fact that they’d grown up with a robot, but this robot would never age.
The story really began there. It became the way I described Luminous. If the science fiction is the flesh of the body and the police procedural gives it structure, the family drama is the heart. After I had these characters, I began thinking about the world.
KC: Could you talk more about the transition from children’s book to an adult book?
SP: When I first started writing out the book, it was a mess. It was all over the place. In the final version, the book takes place over the course about a month. It's a very contracted period of time. There are four perspectives, and I wanted the storylines to feel like they were responding to each other, living off of each other.
Initially, I wrote each storyline separately. That was really circuitous and took twenty more drafts than it needed. My agent and my editor had to be very hands on, and we focused on weaving the adult and children’s storylines together, so they fall in a nice braid. But at the same time, I enjoyed writing those perspectives separately. The adult storylines are a lot darker, while the children's perspectives have a sense of hope and tenderness.
KC: Did any of these point of views come more easily to you?
SP: The children’s perspective has moments where it zooms in and out. I wanted them to have a bit less myopia than the adult perspectives. On my part, it was a conscious decision not to write from the robot’s perspective.
KC: Could you talk more about that? Why not a robot POV?
SP: I decided not to write from the robot's perspective because I don't think they'll think like us, and I didn't feel up to the task of trying to imagine that incredibly alien intelligence.
Part of the seduction of humanoid robots is that we want to think they think like us, especially when we have an intimate relationship with one. We want the robot to feel the same tenderness and intimacy that we feel for it. It was important for me not to reveal the perspective, because it's giving away the game.
It’s similar to our relationships with animals. We look at animals and we anthropomorphize them. We hope they get the love we feel for them, but at the end of the day, there’s no real way of knowing. Robots are an extreme example of that. They are going to be so good at mimicking and projecting. I want us to question whether these robots were really human, or were they just very, very good at acting human.
KC: I’d love to hear what part research played in a speculative novel like this. The technology felt very real.
SP: In terms of technology, I was particularly interested in the way academia, the military, and commerce interact. A lot of times, we think of technology as these smart guys in a garage, whipping out their computer. But actually, most of the time technology is funded and developed in a military space. We’re already seeing so much funding of artificial intelligence within the tech industry, but we're also seeing a lot of discrete things going on with the military. Particularly in the way it’s started to bleed into the Ukrainian war. Some soldiers are saying that there’s no point in carrying a gun, since it’s all about outrunning these drones, these mobile snipers.
These wars are extreme testing grounds, and we are going to see this kind of technology escalate to a terrifying degree. That's what I imagined for the Korea setting. I figured that if I'm writing about Korea and I'm writing about Korea in the future, I have to think about reunification, and I have to think about the possibility of reunification, but also how that reunification might occur. The way that reunification might involve bloodshed, might involve insurgencies, fighting. I envisioned a reunification war that incorporated robot technology. A bloodless war. A completely automated war.
KC: Any advice for writers early in their creative careers?
SP: Good luck.
KC: (laughs) That would be an amazing way to end the interview.
SP: (laughs) That’s my honest advice.
But if they want something to give them a bit more hope, here’s something that’s been useful not just for me, but for a lot of my peers. I call it the rain and the drought. There are periods of your life where you are incredibly productive. There’s water welling out of you. Nourish it, use as much of it as possible. But when the water fades and drought sets in, that’s fine. We all go through that. We’re allowed to give ourselves that grace. You are not just a productive machine. You are not just defined by labor or output. You’re allowed to nourish yourself with companionship, and inspiration, and reading.
If you’re feeling down about yourself, or are in a drought, just know it cannot last. As long as you are working, writing, learning, and reading. At some point, the drought will lift and the rain will come for you. If you haven’t prepared the soil, there will be nothing to take the water in. I’m using a lot of gardening metaphors, but that’s how I feel about writing. It’s like a tide. We need to accept it for its rhythm.
Silvia Park’s stories have been published in Black Warrior Review, Tor, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from NYU and attended the Clarion Science and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. They teach fiction at the University of Kansas and split their selves between Lawrence and Seoul. Luminous is their first novel.