Liu Ruijie is hanging out in a junkyard, looking for a pair of legs for herself. She is a cherished child of two architects. She wears robowear, mechanic braces that enable her to walk. She has a health condition that affects her limb muscle functions, which are deteriorating. Her world is centered around Seoul, in a unified Korea, after a war that has unified the peninsula. It is a hot July some 20 years after that geopolitical conflagration. Ruijie meets up with a robotic boy, Yoyo, who becomes her friend. So opens Silvia Park’s Luminous.
Ruijie abides by an apparently Taoist sense of the world:
She believed in the trillions of tenuous threads tying the self to the rest … Matter and I are One. The grace of union so the swimmer flowed with the ocean, so the archer flew in the arrow, so the calligrapher bled from the brush. With this belief, she would wake, walk, and breathe with cosmic synergy, full of darkness and spinning lights, and her body, which broke down day by day, remained a solar system where all the stars would burst and burn, but until then, every quantum speck quivered bright with integrity.
Then, there is Detective Cho Jun, an officer in the Robotic Crimes Unit. The work involves tracking down missing droids, and Jun and his partner can spare about 48 hours to solve the mystery or to let it go. Sometimes, they research incidences of robots that have apparently attacked humans. There seems to be both law enforcement and the law of the street, with some give-and-take between them. Jun’s goal is to rise through the ranks to get into Major Crimes. The robotics unit is a backwater. Their most current case: A young older-model Android named Eli has disappeared from the home of Kim Sunduk, a North Korean artist specializing in illustrating white tigers.
Robots are everywhere, designed to meet the needs of people, whether in homes or brothels or battlegrounds. By law, humanoid robots have to carry identifiers so they are not mistaken for people.
These are robots made from biological materials, nano technologies, and industrial materials. Robots can self-generate and self-assemble other robots. They can work as swarms to achieve particular aims. As they interact with humans, they are constantly learning and adapting and evolving. They have been designed to meet every human whim, and, as such, many are relegated to abuse and various forms of destruction (such as botfights). To meet customer needs, robot-makers create robots that bleed red substances, to meet the bloodlust of some. Child bots are subjected to various depredations. Does human treatment of bots serve as catharsis to dissipate violence and lust, or does it reinforce such behaviors and spill over to violence against people?
Morgan is a roboticist. She is Jun’s younger sister. Their father is a leading Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, first in neurorobotics and then later in zoobotics. Morgan has an robot whom she designed to meet her needs as an errand robot who is also her lover (these machines are multipurpose). The company Morgan is working at, Imagine Friends, is about to launch a new series of robots designed to more empathetically meet human needs. She is capable but quite judgmental.
It physically hurt her to see someone own a 2C, although her neighbor fell squarely into their target market: 65+ years; 68% female, 27 percent male, 5 percent other; single or divorced. Lonely Losers.
Luminous is about fluidity — in the form of mixed gender identities and transitional phases. One character observes: “Converting herself from oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon into a different chemical blend of wires, titanium, and nanofiber made the purest sense to her.” As a solution to human mortality and biological death, the game is about being “Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman.” Everyone has some augmentation. The world is multiple and shimmering. People use Delfi tools to communicate across languages.
Those who fought in the war to unite the peninsula are having a hard time adjusting. One thinks:
Tedium’s what fucked your head, after your squad gutted the shabby palace in Pyongyang, which was exhilarating at first until every framed portrait had been signed with piss, and the weeks bled into months faded into long beige hours of ennui punctuated by sporadic ecstatic bursts of fireworks whenever a high-value target lit up the map, flashing, and flashing again until you seize up. You’re phoning your doctor at obscene hours because your body won’t move from the agony.
Essentially, how people engage with each other and the robots in their midst reveal much about their true nature — in faith, in love, in dreaming, in memory, and in family and friendship. One master roboticist observes:
The robot understands that how we love isn’t divine. It is meager, selfish, and exquisitely cruel. Think of any time a war erupts. Who among us would not sacrifice the lives of many to save the one person we love?
Luminous is eminently readable and engaging. The dialogue crackles. The plot twists are skillfully woven. This work takes flight with a potent imagination, evocative of the best of cyberpunk fiction.
Silvia Park grew up in Seoul, South Korea, and the U.S. They received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and an Master of Fine Arts from NYU. Luminous is Park’s first novel. They have published short fiction in various well-known journals. Park teaches fiction at the University of Kansas.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
