Laura McLean-Ferris
Silvia Park’s cyberpunk-noir novel reenvisions love and relationships in a futuristic unified Korea.
Luminous, by Silvia Park,
Simon & Schuster, 388 pages, $29.99
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“How bionic are you?” one character asks another in the opening pages of Luminous, the debut novel by Korean/American writer Silvia Park. How real are you, might have been another way of posing the question. But the deeper issue troubling this crunchy, science-fictional world, where artificial intelligences and artificial bodies mingle with organic ones, is what makes anything real at all. Set in a Korea unified after a violent war, the novel lays out a densely articulated future in which many people have robot companions as servants, children, and lovers, and some are, themselves, partly bionic. Reality-doubt has crept into every aspect of everyday life: even fruit juices have labels that shout “I’m Real.” But the anxiety reveals what is at stake: By what measures can an artificial being become “real” to humans, and therefore gain equality with them? In fiction, the answer often hinges on the ability to love.
Luminous is a cyberpunkish, tech-noir novel, emphasizing hardware and rusty robot scraps, and starts off a little hard-boiled. We meet Jun, a twenty-eight-year-old detective in Seoul’s Robot Crimes Unit, as he begins an investigation into the kidnapping of Eli, a robot child—a case that brings him back into contact with his younger sister, Morgan, who works as a high-level personality programmer at a leading android company called Imagine Friends. Jun, who is trans, was seriously injured in an explosion during the unification war, and has been avoiding Morgan and the rest of his family for some years, following a perilous drift into VR addiction from which he has since recovered. Jun’s gender transition coincided with the operations that saved his life: 78 percent of his body was replaced with machine parts after his accident, meaning that he is often mistaken for a robot. Yet he glancingly accepts such misapprehensions, understanding his relationship to his gender as triangulated by his mostly artificial body. When taken for an android, “he got to feel like a magician, a master of misdirection, his partial robotness a shiny distraction to cement how, in fact, he was indisputably, irrevocably male.” In moments of intimate reflection such as these, the novel glints with a kind of bruised insight, dusky and silver.
Morgan, for her part, has been using her robot-crafting skills to make a perfect lover for herself named Stephen, a gentle guy with the visage of her favorite movie star, whom she cannot bring herself to have sex with, despite regular attempts. Imagine having sex with a man of your own design! A brilliant, horrible proposition, and one full of uncanny details that lead Morgan into a state of repulsion toward her own human body: “their saliva mixed—his, fresh apple mint; hers, absolutely disgusting.” Her inability to see it through, as well as an argument they have when she is drunk about the fact that neither of them—she as a drunk person, he as a programmable servant—can truly consent, also suggests that sex, even with artificial intelligences, can only happen if the acceptance of another consciousness can be negotiated. Because Morgan is not able to move beyond her own programmatic controls—she chose that apple mint flavor, after all—she cannot meet Stephen on an erotic level; she can only meet her own design choices.
Some of Morgan and Jun’s problems and preoccupations stem from their upbringing as the children of a famed robot designer, Professor Cho Yosep, who introduced a custom-built robot child named Yoyo into his own family—a brother the two siblings loved and even idolized—before dispatching him to fight in the war. Presumed destroyed, Yoyo’s loss has gravely marked the adult brother and sister, and an exploration of the love between humans and robots at the lateral level of siblinghood is one of the book’s brightest spots. There’s a horizontality to sibling dynamics that, as the psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell points out in Siblings: Sex and Violence (1992), has been under-considered as a structuring principle of social life, even though it plays out across so many relationships in war, work, friendship, and romance. Could AIs, indeed, become something like siblings to humanity, or some adjacent, parallel, kind of kin? Yoyo, who we understand from the beginning to be, in fact, still alive, continues to form strong, even loving attachments with other children. We see him through the eyes of a group of kids who explore a robot scrapyard near their school; they find him captivating, with skin that can nanostitch itself back together after injury using hot water, a battery that can be charged by the sun, and the ability to sync with the consciousness of other robots in a manner that is quasi-religious, as a colorful halo of light circles above his head.
There are many such intricate details in the novel, where innovations, ideas, and gimmicks build out a rococo world of technologies. Yet I must register some complaints. The onslaught of information that builds the world of the book during its first half is relentless, and includes many narrative dumps that perversely leave out key information about, say, the war. A wartime tragedy in Gaechon, in which unarmed civilians were murdered en masse, is described as “a special flavor of shit show,” but we understand little else about the facts of the event. There is a kind of ironic, quippy cadence to the characters’ dialogue and thoughts that I find off-putting and sometimes even anxiety-inducing, as though Park didn’t have the confidence to resist backchatting their own writing: “Ruijie watched a white bird land by Mirror Lake, the name an exercise in redundancy.” Ok, call it something else then? Crucially, however, the hallmark of the prose is its overreliance on visual details at the expense of a wider picture, and I often lost a sense of my bearings. A murder is glimpsed from some distance as a highly cinematic detail that allows the perpetrator to stay anonymous, the witness managing to see a “flash of silver, the swing of the baseball bat,” a shot which might make sense on screen but feels unbelievable on the page. That the adaptation rights have already been acquired is not a surprise, and I wonder whether as television it will find some of the breathing room and three dimensions that it sometimes lacks as a novel.
But as a kind of philosophical inquiry about the design of new minds, Luminous is expansive. It seems clear that Yoyo is a special type of robot, but this story is less interested in categorizing him as a “real” boy than in asserting that the way he is able to love is real, strange, and new, possessed by a kind of systemic empathy that goes beyond a limited, human conception of love. Jun and Morgan’s father remarks that humans love in a way that is “meager, selfish, and exquisitely cruel,” a fact that robots understand and navigate. Whether we agree with this assessment is another matter, but in our political present, with state-led techno-fascism on the rise, it seems unlikely that divine empathy will be a priority for any of the artificial companions that we are soon to meet.
Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in Turin, Italy. Her criticism and essays have appeared in Artforum, ArtReview, Bookforum, frieze, and Mousse, among other publications, and she was the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Formerly she was Chief Curator at Swiss Institute, New York, where she recently curated the first survey of Rosemary Mayer and coedited the publications Rosemary Mayer (2023) and The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer (2022).