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• Luminous : a novel / Silvia Park. By: Park, Silvia, Published: , - 2025 Simon & Schuster, New York, NY

• Department of English, J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, The University of Kansas website - https://sfcenter.ku.edu/people/silvia-park

  Prof. Silvia Park
  Silvia Park
  Fellow
  English
  Contact Info
  Personal Links
  English faculty profile English faculty profile
  Research —
  Research interests:
  speculative fiction
  digital storytelling
  Selected Publications —
  Luminous, Simon & Schuster, 2025.

• Stevenson University website - https://www.stevenson.edu/about/news-events/news/stevenson-universitys-english-department-names-silvia-park-its-2025-visiting-writer/

  Stevenson University’s English Department Names Silvia Park its 2025 Visiting Writer
  March 31, 2025 11 AM

  Stevenson’s English Department has announced Silvia Park as its 2025 Visiting Writer.

  Silvia Park grew up in Seoul and split their time between Korea and America. Park currently teaches fiction at the University of Kansas. They received a B.A. from Columbia, an M.F.A. from NYU, and attended the Clarion Science and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the Tin House Summer Workshop.

  Their short fiction has been published in Black Warrior Review, Joyland, Reactor, and reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2019. Their first novel, Luminous, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2025. The speculative fiction novel is set in a near-future unified Korea and follows three estranged siblings—two human, one robot—as they collide against the backdrop of a murder investigation to settle old scores and make sense of their shattered childhood.

  On Tuesday, April 1, Park will present a public reading followed by discussion and refreshments in the Rockland Ballroom.

• BookPage - https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/if-thats-our-future-its-already-here/

  March 11, 2025
  “If that’s our future, it’s already here.”
  Interview by Ralph Harris
  Silvia Park’s debut novel, Luminous, takes place in a near-future, reunified Korea where robots bear the weight of human emotions.
  Share this Article:

  You’ve finished your first book! How do you feel?
  Very relieved, like I’ve finally reached the surface for a sip of air. This isn’t the first novel I’ve started but the first I feel is finished. It went through many revisions, and I’m grateful to have people who’ve been so patient and supportive.

  What did you learn from writing Luminous that you would like to take with you while drafting future novels?
  I learned I can’t write in isolation. I like to be in dialogue with a couple books while I’m drafting. It’s like teaching a toddler to talk—can’t let them babble on their own. The books I kept returning to were Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

  What drew you to Luminous’ cyberpunk setting?
  I confess, this wasn’t a conscious choice so much as a failure of my imagination. I wrote the world I grew up in, and that was Seoul. It’s a crowded city, much denser in population than New York. It’s dizzyingly neon at night; it’s usually smoggy and outrageous and overstimulating. But it’s home.

  For me, the real appeal of cyberpunk is the noir element. There’s usually a detective story, which is the spine for Luminous. A mystery or conspiracy that reflects our eroding faith in society. The world is seen as dark, isolating, ravaged by capitalism and war, and people are so plugged in, they’re unable to separate reality from virtuality. That sounds rather familiar. If that’s our future, it’s already here.

  ” . . . we’ve replaced religion with technology in this pursuit of a solution to death.”

  Korean reunification is a central aspect of Luminous’ world. What interested you about that scenario? What resonance did it lend to the story for you?
  The setting of Luminous came to me much later. In earlier drafts, I started with sad, mopey people and dropped them into a thinly sketched Pan-Asia. Then it felt too fraught to envision a future like that. Korea was nearly obliterated a couple times throughout history; in the past century or so, there was the Japanese colonization, and then Korea was liberated—brief hooray—before it plunged into civil war and the country has been divided ever since. It seemed cruel to write a future cannibalizing a country that had fought so hard to exist. I wanted to respect its resilience. And it was very difficult to imagine a Korea of the future without the North, without the possibility of reunification in mind.

  Growing up in Seoul, you live with a cognitive dissonance, aware of the North’s suffering, just beyond that border. I think, like many in my generation, I’ve had to numb myself to let that reality sit in my chest. With it lives a kind of yearning, not for someone you’ve known, but for someone you should have known.

  What was interesting to you about a sentient robot? Was there a specific influence you drew from?
  For Luminous, I wanted to explore the paradox of our relationship with robots. By far the uncanniest for me is the child robot. I grew up watching Astro Boy (Space Boy Atom in Korea). Even then, I thought it was creepy-cute to design a robot to look like a child. Now it seems so counterintuitive. A child has to learn everything from scratch. They’re still fumbling shoelaces and dribbling food on themselves. How is a robot supposed to mimic a child when everything about a child is so antithetical to a functioning robot?

  But nowadays, we have grieving parents who can take the pictures of their deceased child and use AI to age them, giving themselves a chance to see their child grow up. This was one of the starting points for Luminous, the way we’ve replaced religion with technology in this pursuit of a solution to death.

  Read our review of ‘Luminous’ by Silvia Park.

  Do you think you’ll see semi- to fully-sentient robots in your lifetime?
  I used to think the intelligence of the robots depicted in Luminous was still, perhaps forever, out of reach. But I also cannot underestimate our obsession with AI, especially for profit. In the race between achieving GAI (general artificial intelligence) and hastening climate catastrophe, I’ve no idea which will win. Just look at how crypto mining is casually devastating to the environment, but rarely is this discussed.

  Couple this with our capacity for immense loneliness, and I fear for the moment we successfully merge AI programming with a convincing, soft-boiled body. Not too long ago, we had a Google engineer, since fired, insist that a chatbot was sentient. If a software engineer can be convinced by a faceless chatbot, I don’t think us laypersons will stand a chance.

  If you had to replace a body part with a robotic replacement, which would you pick? (I would pick my left arm, it’s mostly useless anyway.)
  Great pick! I’d choose eyes. I have a genetic quirk that means my sight will degrade early in life. But I’d be scared to lose the skewed, hazy way I see the world, so I might halve it and just replace one eye, like Jun.

  “The future is so fluid, I think it’s best to reimagine it constantly.”

  Were there any key influences that molded Ruijie, Jun and Morgan?
  I decided to split Luminous into four perspectives: two adults (Jun and Morgan) and two children (Ruijie and Taewon). That choice was inspired by a line from Louise Gluck’s poem, “Nostos”: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

  I’m fascinated by memory. The older we get, the more we seem tempted to hold on to one version of a story and lovingly polish it until it gleams. This lends itself to a kind of myopia in adults that feels different from the solipsism of children who, for all their lack of experience, remain malleable, clear-eyed and hopeful.

  With Jun and Morgan, I wanted to explore these siblings who have clashing accounts of their childhood, casting different people in the roles of villain and victim, and how this has shaped them as adults.

  Ruijie, as I think I wrote in the first chapter, is a “child beloved.” What struck me about Ruijie, going beyond her very human moments of pettiness, jealousy and anger, was this capacity for immense tenderness. Many very ill children end up reversing roles with their parents, and have to be strong for them. I think that’s why hers is a love story. She falls in love with a robot in the way only she can.

  Would you consider writing more novels in this same setting?
  Oh, I hope not. I’d rather not stick around in a world for too long or it grows stale like a day-old scone. The future is so fluid, I think it’s best to reimagine it constantly.

  What’s next for you?
  My fingers are crossed for a much slimmer book than the last. I’m working on a novel about mermaids. Beautiful, bloodthirsty and matriarchal.

• Reactor - https://reactormag.com/a-conversation-with-silvia-park-and-kelly-link/

  Speculative Fiction Can Shake Us Awake: A Conversation With Silvia Park and Kelly Link
  By Reactor

  |
  Published on March 13, 2025

  author Kelly Link and author Silvia Park
  Kelly Link (photo credit: Sharona Jacobs Photography) and Silvia Park (photo credit: Han Jeongseon)

  Reactor is proud to host this conversation with Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love and Silvia Park, in conjunction with the publication of her novel Luminous. The two writers discuss speculative craft, the creative process, and—of course—robots.

  Kelly Link: At least a decade ago, I was interviewed by the writer and editor David Levithan at a festival in Australia. He asked me this question, which he says he always asks—and now I like to ask it, too. What did your grandparents do?

  Silvia Park: My grandmothers were mothers and wives. My paternal grandfather was a businessman, and my maternal grandfather a prosecutor who had to resign due to a controversial murder trial and he became a lawyer. His experience taught me how malleable the truth is, how we warp memory, our own and others, for the sake of survival.

  ​If you don’t mind, I too have a burning question. A while back, while I was at Clarion, I asked you for advice on balancing multiple perspectives, especially in a big book. I thought I’d follow up. What, for you, makes a book with multiple perspectives greater than the sum of its parts?

  KL: I thought, when I began a novel for the first time, that I was choosing multiple points of view because the scope of a novel meant that I could make something symphonic—or choral. I wanted to do something that the novel allowed that the story didn’t. But now, more than a year out from publication of The Book of Love, I wonder if I chose different strands of perspective because I’m accustomed to the way that short stories jostle together in a collection and comment on each other.

  Your novel, a book I love with all my heart, also moves from point of view to point of view. When you began thinking about this project, did you know that this would be your strategy? Or did it begin with a single voice? And more generally, what was the starting place for Luminous?

  SP: My approach was quite similar. I originally wrote this novel as a children’s book. A ragtag bunch of kids discover a robot named Yoyo. He looks like a child but he’s like a superhero, like Astro Boy, leading them on youthful adventures.

  Then, when I introduced Yoyo’s siblings, who are human, I had a strange realization. Yoyo’s siblings would have grown up while Yoyo didn’t. And it felt like a kind of death, you know? When you lose someone young, they just sort of freeze in your mind. As you grow older, that gap widens. I think of the many people who lost their parents too young, how they wake up one day and realize, hey, I’m older than my dad when he died.

  In my mind, a robot became the perfect vessel for this grief that’s so difficult to contain. Someone once told me that there are ordinary tragedies—say, the loss of a parent—and there are extraordinary tragedies—the loss of a child—and I realized that it was the latter for Yoyo. His disappearance became this unspeakable loss for his siblings. That’s how Luminous grew up. I kept the children’s story but the book had to expand to include Yoyo’s adult siblings, Jun and Morgan, who needed to tell their story.

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  KL: I love this! The Book of Love, too, came out of a project I originally envisioned as a young adult trilogy. But then I realized that I was interested in what happened if I both expanded and condensed what I’d been planning to do. If I were to describe the scope and the tone of Luminous, I would say that it conveys both the possibility–and the actuality of catastrophic loss—but that it’s an inherently hopeful book as well. How did you approach writing about the near future? How did you keep hold of strands of hope?

  SP: Oh I agree, I think the book is very optimistic. It has an almost glossy take on our future. Korea is reunited. Climate catastrophe hasn’t wiped us out. Robots are (almost) peacefully integrated into society. And I’ve been telling people that the book has a happy ending.

  A few have called this book dystopian, which makes me chuckle (are we not already living in a dystopia?) and it’s true that I wrote Luminous very closely to the present. I was drafting most of it through the pandemic. Things back then seemed unfair and bleak. Although I think if I’d written Luminous now, it would have come from a place of even deeper cynicism so in a way I’m glad I wrote it when I was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  The book also feels hopeful, I think, because of the children. The strands of hope—which is such an apt way to describe it—comes from the braided storylines. Luminous is split between the perspectives of four characters, two adults and two children. In my head, I lump them as two because I used different perspectives for the children and the adults. Meaning, they’re all written in third person, but I intentionally leaned more omniscient when I was writing the children. I let the perspective undulate in their sections, expanding at times to capture descriptions or observations that wouldn’t have been possible through the eyes of a child. This was intended to evoke children’s literature of old where we have children go off on rather dangerous adventures, but if the story is told by this all-seeing benevolent narrator, it gives the reader an illusion of safety. We have faith that these children are going to be okay. In contrast, the adult perspectives of Jun and Morgan are written in close third, and these characters, they’re not doing too great. They’ve gotten stuck in their own heads, so to speak. If hope comes for them, it’s because they were able to step outside of themselves.

  KL: Are there novels that you think of as literary antecedents or close cousins to what you wrote? And what was your approach to research?

  SP: Definitely your work. It’s had such a huge influence on me, especially how you write the speculative with this really twisty, clever playfulness, but there’s also this profound grief found in many of your stories, including The Book of Love. I love how you write childhood. I can always feel a quivering hum, of the uncertainty and possibilities, like a shot of magic through the veins when you write children.

  That, for me, was what made writing a ‘robot story’ interesting. Because while we have a long and illustrious history of human-robot stories, not too many that focus on the experience of loving a robot through the eyes of a child. The ones I can think of are the classic Asimov story “Robbie” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. I read Klara after I had finished writing Luminous, so my book was actually in dialogue with a different Ishiguro novel. Thematically, Luminous is most indebted to Never Let Me Go and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

  For research… there was so much that I knew so little of. I think most of it was focused on artificial intelligence. I sourced from the present by focusing on intention, rather than the latest hypes of LLMs. For instance, I don’t think we’ll ever let go of our obsession to build a humanoid robot and achieve AGI. It’s funny how Silicon Valley has warped the definition of AGI to rake in investments, as if it’s this friendly enough chatbot, instead of an agile intelligence that is capable of anything a human can do. We’re definitely not there yet. Maybe we’ll never be.

  Related, I was also fascinated by how the lines between commercial, academia, and the military tend to blur—and I put them in that order because we usually see our tech firsthand when it finally reaches mass market, but it usually starts out in the academic and military spaces. A lot of AI researchers have hopped over to the private sector—it pays so much better—but I think some of the most ingenious discoveries take place in sandboxes that aren’t profit-driven. Unfortunately, technology also tends to escalate in high-pressure situations, such as war. The Ukrainian War has become this terrible testing ground for our first applications of robotic warfare. It’s like cars and horses again; drones have already replaced guns on the battlefield. I fear what that means for a gun-saturated society like America, then.

  KL: You are currently spending part of your year in Seoul and part in Lawrence, KS. What was it like to go back and forth with a novel-in-progress in your head? It may look like a division or a rupture—and I’m sure it feels that way at times—but it must also be a kind of sewing together? Both layering and dislocation? Were you in any way a different writer in Lawrence than in Seoul? (I ask, partly because I feel I am a very different writer depending on the place and how long I am going to be in it).

  SP: See, you’ve nailed them, the complex feelings of writing across land and water. Division, rupture, layering, dislocation. All of it. I mentioned this before, but while I was writing Luminous, my biggest rupture was the pandemic. I was in Korea, I had just started a new job at a university. Then week two: COVID hits. We plunged into chaos, the most bureaucratic and tedious of it was moving our teaching online. The hours on Zoom, the weary, washed-out faces. So many of my students were wearing masks indoors, yes, out of caution, but they also couldn’t bother to wash their faces. The pandemic hit Korea as early as late January, we were the bellwether of what’s to come but I don’t think the rest of the world took it very seriously until it spread to Italy. I felt very scared and upset for my friends in NY, which was next. But back home, our government tried to clamp down on COVID using technology through the ‘test, trace, contain’ method. Our phones tracked our movements, reported symptoms, counted cases, and the widespread ease of this, the prevalence, the surveillance—you couldn’t enter a restaurant without a smartphone—it probably shaped the futuristic, perhaps dystopian society in Luminous.

  Then I moved to the US and finished the book. There were times when I missed Korea terribly. And I would write about it with warmth. Then I would be back in Korea and I’d remember, oh yes, here’s how it sucks. And I was more critical. Moving back and forth, it can be grueling, but it also draws out so many selves within you. I’m a different person in America. I recall that first dislocation when I moved to NY for college and I was sort of shocked by how I was being perceived—for what I was, rather than who I am. But I’m also privileged, I’m able to move through different circles with relative ease, which is why I’m fascinated by the idea of passing. Jun is probably the character who grapples the most with this, as someone who is bionic and trans, and the way he likes to throw himself into potentially fraught environments. But Morgan too. She was younger than Jun when their family moved to the US, so her return to Korea was more difficult. She struggles with being a foreigner in her own country. This fear and loneliness shaped many of the decisions she made in the book.

  KL: I think right now, as someone living in the U.S., it feels easeful (expansive?) to read novels set in the near future where the dystopic and the hopeful mix. I’m thinking of recent novels like Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, and now Luminous. I’m teaching a workshop right now at Smith College, and one of the things I’m urging the writers in that workshop to do is look for the liminal places in their narratives, places where radical shifts or changes are possible. Of course opportunities for shifts and changes are always present in fiction as well as in real life, but the future is one such opportunity, as is the fantastic, as is childhood. One of those spaces in Luminous is the question of what it means to be human or to be a person—the idea of the robot in science fiction has always been a kind of mirror or doppelganger. What draws you to this space, this question? And more broadly, what does the genre of science fiction offer you in terms of strategies (or narrative shapes or traditions) as a writer?

  SP: If you don’t mind, I’m going to call the genre speculative fiction. Not to pooh-pooh on science fiction but I want to include fantasy, which is a genre that’s often derided and dismissed. There’s an indubitably masculine seriousness associated with science fiction that seems to justify our academic discourse of it, while fantasy is relegated as mere escapism. It’s seen as frivolous or even feminine.

  Both genres are escapist. But there are times when we have to step outside of the world we take for granted in order to challenge it. That’s what makes speculative fiction so powerful, it’s a genre that twists and subverts and amplifies. It can shake us awake.

  I consider where we’re headed and I marvel at how it’s a handful of men who seem to think they hold all the reins. We’re supposedly in the age of artificial intelligence. The word that’s tossed around a lot is ‘inevitable.’ Our technocrats want us to think that AI is inevitable. They tell us our lives will be easier. But they also tell us that we are not wanted. Our labor is frivolous, inefficient. They accuse us of being bloat. We’ve seen this exact scenario simulated in science fiction. Writing about robots was my attempt to grapple with the modern age, which Meghan O’Gieblyn defines as one of disenchantment in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine. This worship of tech—pushed to the furthest, as transhumanism—has supplanted religion. And transhumanism is essentially disembodiment. It’s a rejection of our failing human flesh in order to achieve a technological immortality. In an age of disenchantment and disembodiment, the robot, created in our image, is the perfect solution. It’s also long been depicted as our greatest existential threat, second to climate catastrophe.

  KL: Is there a piece of advice that you would go back and give yourself as a younger writer? Or a piece of bad advice that you would steer your younger self away from?

  SP: My advice for younger me is the one I would have rejected most vehemently, which is—take your time. I write long dense novels because time is precious, which sounds a bit contradictory, but I want to devote myself to a book so it becomes meaningful as a testament to a significant chapter in my life. With time, I think we can also give ourselves a bit more grace. I have an approach to life that I call the rain and the drought. There are going to be periods in your life that are going to be incredibly nourishing. Inspiration is welling up within you, you’re publishing stories left and right. But there will also be dry spells where you can’t squeeze out a single word or everyone around you seems to be flushed with accolades and recognition. That’s their rainy period. Yours will come.

  KL: What are you working on now?

  SP: I’m working on a novel, still very amorphous. The anchor of it is mermaids. Bloodthirsty, matriarchal, hermaphroditic mermaids, and the marine biologist who goes a little mad trying to save them.

• University Daily Kansan - https://www.kansan.com/arts_and_culture/luminous-author-and-ku-professor-silvia-park-explores-family-grief-and-a-futuristic-korea-in/article_52b84f21-1098-4941-bd40-91589713d37e.html

  'Luminous' author and KU professor Silvia Park explores family, grief, and a futuristic Korea in debut novel
  Elyea Soileau | elyeasoileau@ku.edu Mar 20, 2025
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  Silvia Park at the Raven Bookstore
  KU English professor Silvia Park with their debut novel "Luminous" at the Raven Bookstore on March 13.

  Elyea Soileau / UDK
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  When Silvia Park, a KU English professor, began writing “Luminous,” their debut novel, the story was initially intended to be for children. As the writing process continued, however, they began to realize this complex story about the future, technology and family was better suited for older audiences.

  Released on March 11 to high anticipation, “Luminous” is a story set in a unified Korea, in a society where robots are integrated into society. The story follows three estranged siblings as they navigate their ways back into each other's lives as they investigate a murder.

  Park visited the Raven Bookstore for a reading and signing of “Luminous,” where they also discussed their writing process and thoughts behind the novel’s themes and overall message.

  “This is a book about siblings and family and heartbreak. It's a book about robots, but it's also about grief and some of the ineffable things about why we love when it causes so much pain,” Park said.

  The discussion was led by moderator Kij Johnson, who expressed admiration for Park’s literary talent and the powerful words that envelops readers as they read the story.

  “I just thought the entire book was marvelous. And, you know, it's like I was struggling for words, because it was, at times it was delightful, and at times it was searing, and at times it was deeply, deeply moving,” Johnson said. “But I thought that in particular, your [Park’s] world-building is so complex and so well done, that at different times I said it's a dystopia. No, it's not a dystopia. It's a fully flush world that has aspects of both, you know, beauty and horror.”

  When Park initially began writing “Luminous” in 2018, they initially intended for it to be a children’s book. However, as they continued writing, they quickly realized the subject matter would better suit mature audiences, and decided the story would be a literary novel.

  “So I started in 2018, but I wrote majority of it during the pandemic, and I think what I realized is, at first, when I was trying to imagine what would our future look like when robots are integrated, I thought, it's not going to be great, it's gonna be pretty dark. Then, when I wrote a particular climax, I thought, no this is too dark, this is too much,” Park said. “But then the pandemic happened and I saw just how, how awful we could be toward each other when we are suffering, even though we're suffering together we still turn on each other.”

  The novel leaves the reader with an open ending, letting them linger on the possibilities of what could come next.

  “So the ending was always the same. I think when I realized it was not meant for kids, I was going to expand the beginning and the ending. In fact, my editor wanted to change content, he said that we want closure, and I knew it was fiction, and I knew that I could give readers something, but instead, I gave them despair,” Park said.

  Throughout their writing journey, Park was surprised by their characters’ reactions and how they developed their characters within the story.

  “I had such a clear vision for the beginning and ending, what happened in between was what constantly surprised me,” Park said. “My characters turned out to be more horrible than I expected, or more damaged than I expected. They made a lot of mistakes, they hurt each other in ways that I had not anticipated and I was surprised by it. I kind of giggled, but at the same time, I wanted to penetrate deeper.”

  The characters in “Luminous” touch on topics of disabilities and coping mechanisms with that lifestyle, especially with cybernetics merged into society.

  “I have two characters among the four protagonists who have disabilities,” Park said. “One has a very visible disability, a progressive illness where it's a liken to ALS, but I guess one of the things I sadly imagined is that diseases would evolve in the future. And she has a particular illness, which now she wears robo-wear, which is like a cybernetic, sort of like outfit that helps her walk. For her, cybernetic means that it's she'll be cured. I wanted to push that with care, because oftentimes disabilities are erased in fiction, particularly in speculative fiction, and instead, what I want to examine is the way disability is not, you know, cured or a problem. It's not one or the other, it's a spectrum.”

  Park highlights the advancements in technology throughout history and how they used that to develop their own reality in the novel.

  “Technology is as simple as the glasses we wear so for people to be technologically enhanced in order to go about their day, I think that's just going to be the reality as we continue to develop this,” Park said.

  To read “Luminous, ”purchase the novel online.

Luminous

Silvia Park. Simon & Schuster, $29.99 (400p)

ISBN 978-1-66802-166-8

Sinister charm exudes from this android-filled mystery by debut author Park. In a near-future, unified Korea, Jun works as a detective in Seoul's robot crimes unit. He's searching for a missing AI when he's reunited with his sister, Morgan, a hotshot "personality programmer" for the robot manufacturer Imagine Friends. The two became estranged after high school when Jun enlisted in the military and was maimed in an accident, requiring much of his body to be replaced by bionic implants. Uneasy with the new Jun, Morgan tries to hide from him that she has a live-in android lover and is modeling Imagine Friends's next big release after her and Jun's missing older brother, Yoyo, a humanoid robot. Meanwhile, the broken-down original Yoyo hides out in a junkyard where he befriends a pack of wily schoolchildren, among them a North Korean refugee. Told with mordant wit (Morgan "had lived under the belief that she could be preemptively forgiven for the uniquely monstrous selfishness that preceded genius. But only if she had a cock"), the narrative takes a wide-angled approach to the theme of human-machine convergence. With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death. This lustrous, challenging work will reward readers who stick with it. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Luminous." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 6 Jan. 2025, p. 53. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1be6feb6. Accessed 24 Aug. 2025.

Park, Silvia LUMINOUS Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $29.99 3, 11 ISBN: 9781668021668

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.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Park, Silvia: LUMINOUS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785071/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ccca98c3. Accessed 24 Aug. 2025.

Silvia Park's debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: " affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk". As the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.

This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author's note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children's fiction, until a bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel "a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children". There's an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book's central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel's setting -- a future unified Korea -- does on the level of geography.

Yoyo has two younger human siblings -- but he is forever 12 years old, and they are now adults. One is Detective Cho Jun, of Robot Crime, who is investigating a missing persons case: the person in this case being a robot. Jun is a cyborg, more machine than man; blown up by an IED during the unification war, he "damaged 78 percent of his body beyond recovery. They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic." He will be paying off the cost of the surgery for a long time: "it's going to take another 30 years before I can afford to upgrade my cock."

Luminous is profoundly interested in what it means to be a person, in where authenticity is located -- through love, grief and connection

Jun's sister Morgan is a designer, working for the corporation Imagine Friends. She lives with Stephen, her robot lover, whom she built from scratch, modelling him on a film star heartthrob. Though constructed specifically to meet her needs, Stephen is a distinct and original individual, in some ways the most interesting character in the novel.

The future Korea of Luminous is busily and vividly rendered. Robot-sex addiction is rife. Kids have grown dependent on their robot nannies: "botwired, these children were called. Children who supposedly couldn't go anywhere without a robot. Undersocialised, entitled, prone to tantrums and anger issues." This speaks, obviously enough, to present-day anxieties, but Park is doing more than satirising our current tech dependencies. Luminous is profoundly interested in what it means to be a person, in where authenticity is located -- through love, grief and connection.

There are similarities with Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, although Luminous is busier, more capacious, more streetwise. The book is also in dialogue with Brian Aldiss's Supertoys Last All Summer Long, the story behind Steven Spielberg's AI. Yoyo explains his existence to Ruijie: "My father's older brother died in a fire. He was 12 years old. I was made in his image. When I woke up, I saw my father weep. I learned people can cry from sadness, they can cry from joy, and sometimes they don't even know the reason why. I wept with my father, but he pulled away and the feeling went away. My tears repelled him. Because it was a different kind of sadness. A movie sadness."

For all its exuberance, Luminous betrays some roughness. It is too long, the work of a writer in love with their imagined world and pouring in detail. The pacing is uneven, the plotting a little messy. Stylistically it is vibrant, sometimes funny and memorable, although the prose can stray into oddness: "his body shuddered with a molecular resistance"; "heat stuffed up his nose squeezing his eyes". But the larger sweep of this energetic and imaginative debut carries the reader through: it's a novel of huge humanity not despite but because Park is so attuned to the encroachments of technology and artificiality upon the human condition. This is the arrival of a major new voice in SF.

* Luminous by Silvia Park is published by Magpie (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Credit: Photograph: Matthiola/Alamy

Bionic vision ... Luminous.

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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Luminous by Silvia Park review -- a major new voice in SF; From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person." Guardian [London, England], 23 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836889185/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=84ea2082. Accessed 24 Aug. 2025.

"Luminous." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 6 Jan. 2025, p. 53. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1be6feb6. Accessed 24 Aug. 2025. "Park, Silvia: LUMINOUS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785071/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ccca98c3. Accessed 24 Aug. 2025. "Luminous by Silvia Park review -- a major new voice in SF; From humans with robotic body parts to robots with human emotions, a vibrant debut set in a unified Korea examines what it means to be a person." Guardian [London, England], 23 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836889185/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=84ea2082. Accessed 24 Aug. 2025.

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