YOUR UTOPIA

Science fiction blends with pointed social critique in these short stories from South Korea.

In 2022, Chung’s first collection to appear in English, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. These eight stories pick up where that book left off, using darkly speculative premises—with surprising flashes of wry humor—to explore social ills. Where Chung’s debut skewed toward fairy tale–infused horror, these stories are full of SF staples: spaceships, robots, futuristic technologies. In the opener, “The Center for Immortality Research,” a low-level employee at the eponymous facility has to pull off a “ninety-eighth anniversary celebration.” When things go awry, the worker is hit by the hard truth of their employer’s mission. In “The End of the Voyage,” a Department of Defense linguist on a space mission designed to outrun a cannibalistic virus on Earth discovers she has the world’s worst co-workers. The title story is narrated by a piece of “inorganic intelligence,” a solar-powered “autobody” whose human occupant has perished (along with the rest of his species) in a cataclysmic virus—viruses pop up numerous times in these tales; no surprise, given the book originally appeared in Korea in 2021—and who now faces a series of obstacles for its own survival. In the poignant “Maria, Gratia Plena,” a worker scanning a comatose criminal’s brain for memories discovers, instead of clues to her crimes, a haunting past. In an author’s note, Chung says that “loss and trauma are the only common elements of human life,” which explains the book’s melancholy. But she also notes that the acts of imagining a utopia and mourning when it falls short are the first steps toward creating a better world. A big job for fiction; Chung’s up to the task.

The imagined worlds here may not be utopian—but the reading experience is.