“If that’s our future, it’s already here.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Photo of Silvia Park © Han Jeongseon.