I am absolutely delighted to be leading off the blog tour for this fabulous novel on its UK publication day. I do love SF, although I read little of it these days. However, waft a spec fiction novel under my nose and I will grab it. I love the familiarity of a world I know, but the strangeness of the direction it’s taken. This is the case with Korean author Park’s debut, Luminous, which is set in a recently reunified Korea where robots are now part of everyday life. You may argue that not having been there, I can’t be familiar with it, however, I have read enough novels set in this part of the world now to have a bit of a feel for that society (well maybe not the North!).
At its heart, Luminous is a story of two families: one broken, and one made through friendship.
Ruijie is eleven, as the novel begins, she is exploring the robot salvage yard close by her school. She is clad in her robowear, ‘battery-powered titanium leg braces, the latest model, customized circuitry to aid her ability to walk.; Ruijie has a rare life-limiting genetic disease. It’s there that she meets Yoyo, a robot boy who is unlike any other robot she’s met, hiding in the rubble…
In one movement, he pulled himself out of the robot’s belly and lanedd on the dirt with a clunk. He was her height but felt smaller, listing to the right where his leg ended at the ankle. The shine was covered in shredded skyn, like the hem of his pants had gotten caught in an angry chewy machine, exposing a calf full of wires in red and blue. His stump was so white it felt fragile, more ceramic than bone.
She was staring until he took her hand, Pressing his index on her lifeline, he wrote out his name. Sort circle, then two little strokes, a cut long and swift. Repeat. In hangul, then English.
“Does it hurt?”
“My leg?” He glanced at it. “Not very.”
She peeked at his write, his skinny elbow. “How bionic are you?”
“That’s impossible,” she said, and h laughed.
He slipped past her. A leg like his should wring his muscles, each thump sending shocks up the spine. Yet Yoyo moved like he was bree.
Ruijie will come to meet Yoyo every day after school, and introduce her friends Mars and Amelia to him, and later Taewon from the North, the nephew of the scrapyard’s manager. Together they will form a family of close friends, all fiercely protective of Yoyo, who seems to no longer have a family affiliation of his own. However, they must keep him safe from those who would take him to fight in bot demolition derbys.
Next we meet Detective Cho Jun of the Robot Crimes squad. Jun is a fascinating character – a trans man who had been a soldier, but got blown up by an IED.
The IED damaged 78 percent of his body beyond recovery. It was a miracle he was alive. No, it was Science. They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic.
Jun is investigating the case of a missing old model Sakura robot called Eli, who belonged to an elderly artist, to whom she was like a daughter. And the quest to find Eli runs through the backbone of the story. Jun knows what it is like to lose a robot who has become a family member. His younger ‘brother’ had be introduced to Jun and his younger sister Morgan by their father, who was then one of the foremost robot designers. There’s not a day when Jun doesn’t miss Yoyo, or wonder what happened to him. Yoyo was unique, one of a kind, a prototype designed by her father.
None of Jun’s family really speak to each other now. Their father has retired to creat zoobots instead, preserving animals facing extinction as machines. Morgan has become a robot engineer, one of the foremost like her father, at Imagine Friends, the company behind the best robots on the market. They are planning to introduce a new range including a boy and girl robot. The ‘Boy-X’ model is Morgan’s project and she is building it in Yoyo’s image. At home, Morgan has Stephen, a robot she had created to look like her favourite film star, and devoid as her life is of romance, she’s considering Stephen as a lover instead.
So you can see that Yoyo will link both stories in a way, although he has changed since parted from his family. Everything will build up to a climax at Imagine Friends’ launch of the new Yoyo-X and Sakura-X models, and along the way will be trials for all the characters, for instance: robot fights, bot brothels, and an awful toxic macho chat-up school, will be part of Jun’s investigations in his search for Eli.
We discover a little about the mythology that has sprung up around the killer HALO robots at Gaechon (a city in the former North) during the war that led to reunification – it is said that if you said you survived Gaechon, you weren’t really there! It’s clear that those from the north who have moved south are often treated as second-class citizens, only one step above the bots, so there is a layer of social comment running through the novel too. We get to see all sides of life in the city, the seedy bits in particular as Jun’s investigations continue.
Yun and Morgan’s lives will reintersect as their father comes back into their lives to give a keynote speech at the launch, and eventually they’ll discover the dark secrets he harboured and how they related to Yoyo. Somewhat surprisingly, Jun’s father seems more accepting of his trans status than his sister too.
Park’s world-building in this novel is second to none. She’s taken the Seoul that she knows into the near future and imagined a world where humanoid robots are part of daily life for all. It all works seamlessly and I was completely involved in it. Her characters are all so well drawn and totally engaging, and the relationships are all believable. Add in the drama of the main plot strands, linked with ‘luminous’ prose and the combination is unputdownable. Although the novels cover different eras, I was reminded of Sadie and Sam in Gabrielle Zevin’s wonderful Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow and their story of a gaming start-up in the 1990s – both novels have a similar sense of technological wonder, so if you enjoyed Zevin, you’ll doubtless like Luminous too. It’s not going too far to say that this novel will be in my year-end best of list – it’s certainly the best thing I’ve read so far this year. What a fantastic debut!
Source: Review copy – thank you! Oneworld / Magpie hardback, 388 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.
