LUMINOUS, excellent, assured debut near-future SF set in reunified Korea

LUMINOUS
SILVIA PARK
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A highly anticipated, sweeping debut set in a unified Korea that tells the story of 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, perfect for fans of Klara and the Sun and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.

Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.

On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.

While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The world of Luminous is one that *will* come to pass. A lot of it has its early precursors in today's headlines. We've got Roombas scooting around sucking our rugs, we're fighting culture wars over trans folk, there are astonishing advancements in mobility devices, AGI is causing collywobbles across many cultural divides...none of what leads us into Jun, Ruijie, and most of all Yoyo's world is in any way remotely classifiable as more that a few tech refinements away. Absent, of course, the deliberate enshittification of the present-day culture and political consensus.

This is the storyverse the book works within, the one that arises from the success of today's trends and travails. Limitations put in place to soothe human fears, but not enough to stifle the march of profits...I mean progress...and the remaking of our daily lives to suit realities arising from technology's boons. There are always costs when there are boons. One cost of so many of us living past infancy is feeding (most of) us; one cost of women being educated is there are fewer of us at all. That last is scaring the tech Aynholes of the world as it means fewer slaves to do the stuff they don't want to, and buy the stuff they dream up. It really is an existential fight for them. The answer in this book is to create robots powered by AGI to do most stuff people can't do or don't fancy doing. Make the "fake" humans into more perfect versions of regular men and women, so you can sell more; but then that gets complicated because who will knowingly accept the second-best real human?

So the problem of slavery is shoved down the food chain. Robots have only the agency we give them. Problem solved, happy/limited scope slaves by the factoryload.

Nothing is ever that easy.

Author Park offers us a very well-made look at this not-distant reality's possible fracture lines. I'll paraphrase "Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto" by saying we take pleasure in creating boundaries, but seldom feel the weight of responsibility in creating them where we do. Does anyone in the culture we have now really think about the treatment of human beings they do not, for whatever absurd reason, like as the setting pf a moral or ethical boundary? It very much is, but unlike a world with AGI robots in it, there's much more of a push to treat these created humans "fairly" even when the details of that simply do not rise to the best we're capable of. Now put it onto a machine-v-human conflict....

Everything is up for redefinition in this world. That means humans are massively cruel, unfair, and unkind to those they fear. (It's not like this has ever not been true.) When the edge cases like Jun and Siejie, part machine or machine-dependent as they are, are part of the new moral calculus...?

We'd do well to start these mental gymnastics now. The time to do the thinking is before you need the answers. Luminous is a painless way to get the outlines of a fight we're going to have into your head. Plus I really enjoyed its family-saga roots as expanded here. The way we grieve our losses and estrangements is not dependent solely...primarily?...on biology. Happen I agree with Author Park on this. I'm giving it a half star off perfect because Yoyo and Ruijie's connection, and all the implications of this kind of blended family, were far and away the most interesting parts. I was less interested in the reunified-Korea setting so for my taste there was way more about that than I wanted to read.