Luminous: A beautiful debut

Luminous by Silvia Park 

Luminous (2025) is the debut novel for Silvia Park, and as such evinces some of the issues that sometimes crop up in first books in areas such as structure and pace. Those issues, however, are more than eclipsed by the book’s shimmering prose, frequently moving moments, and thoughtful exploration of a number of themes, all circling around the question of what it means to be “human.”

Park sets her novel in a unified Korea, roughly twenty years after the war that ended their separation. In this not-too-distant future, robots are nearly as ubiquitous as today’s smartphones, appearing in all facets of life and shaped into form based on function, with many of them androids (humanoid form). Major/important characters in the world of Luminous include:

• Morgan, a high-up “personality programmer” for Imagine Friends, the largest, most advanced manufacturer of humanoid robots in Korea, which is about to launch a huge new model (Boy X). Already anxious over the launch, Morgan is also stressed out over her relationship with Stephen, her own live-in robot that despite being designed/programmed by her seems unable to meet her desires, whether romantic or carnal.
• Jun, Morgan’s brother and an injured war veteran who now works in law enforcement in Robot Crimes, mostly dealing with missing, stolen, or abused robots. He himself is part-mechanical following a post-injury surgery that “repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic.” Being trans adds another layer to his view of his own identity (when he is confused for a robot, a not-uncommon event, he compares it to how he used to be misgendered). His storyline involves a search for a missing robot girl.
• Ruiije, a tween girl suffering from a degenerative illness — “the doctors lobbed acronyms like ALS, PMA, an MMA” — that has her needing a robotic exoskeleton and that will eventually require major bionic surgery. After scavenging in the robot salvage yard and finding an old, abandoned robot (Yoyo) in the form of a young boy, she and several classmates form an attachment to him, trying to help him repair himself while protecting him from the “scrappers” who break up found robots for parts. As they interact with Yoyo, it quickly becomes clear he is a wildly different sort of robot than any of them have ever seen or heard about.
• Taewon: one of Ruiije’s above schoolmates who lives with his scrapper uncle
• Stephen: Morgan’s robot who wrestles with his failure to please her (particularly the balance between subservience and challenging stimulation), religion, and his own sense of self-identity
• Morgan and Jun’s dad, who is mostly absent but whose impact is felt throughout, as he and his colleague made the breakthrough that led to the modern robot (his work in “neurobiotics” underpins Morgan’s), though shortly afterward he abandoned humanoid robots to work on “zoobots.” He also, when Morgan and Jun were young, brought home a boy robot that became their brother for some years until he mysteriously disappeared, leaving an emotional scar that both Morgan and Jun are still trying to deal with in their own ways.

The storylines — Morgan’s big launch, Jun’s investigation into the missing girl robot, Ruiije’s new robot friend, and Stephen’s quest for a sense of self — eventually converge, as might be expected. Thankfully though, this doesn’t happen in any sort of neatly tied off and contrived fashion as can sometimes be the case with these structures. Instead, the plots come together messily, chaotically, as is often the case in real, unscripted life, and the book is better for that decision.

Park explores all the familiar themes one expects in this sort of work. What is consciousness? What defines being “human”? Can robots be “human”? What is the line between human, augmented human, cyborgs, and robots? Does a line even exist? How will the permeation of robots into society affect our society and culture? Affect how we view the world, each other, the sentient beings we now share it with? What will be the impact of robots in warfare? Can robots have feelings? Do they “die” like humans or like an old toy? Can humans and robots form “real” relationships? Fall in love? While these ideas have been explored in sci-fi through countless works (particularly Dick’s classic and highly influential Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), Luminous reminded me most strongly of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and both Brian Aldiss’ “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” and Spielberg’s subsequent adaptation/expansion, AI, works that focus as much (if not more) on character and society as on technology, often in mournful, bittersweet fashion.

Sylvia Park

As familiar as these themes are, they don’t feel overly familiar or trite, presented in a way that reads original and individualized to this particular story. Park brings us face to face with these questions immediately in the opening paragraph:

That summer was immortal. July was especially savage with thirty heat deaths in Seoul, punctuated by the spectacular fizzing breakdown of a GS-100 security android when it crumpled knees-first outside a United Korea Bank. A cleaner broomed away the remains. The head was left grinning on the pavement, chirping at passersby to warn them of today’s heat.

We get the subtle information about the unified Korea via the bank. The key themes of immortality and death. The ubiquity of the robots (specific models, specific tasks, the way no one takes notice of them). And that wonderfully unclear use of “punctuated by” — is the robot interrupting the enumeration of human (i.e. “real” deaths) or is it part of the enumeration? And what does it mean that the head is left? Is this the robotic promise of immortality — it’s not truly dead? Or is it a mark of the callous disregard with which robots are held? It’s a great opening.

These questions continue throughout. With regard to how humans view robots, Jun’s department often investigates the missing robots as more akin to property damage/theft in the somewhat cursory investigations: not a lot of time, not a lot of resources, just some fines even for total destruction (child robot crime is treated a bit more harshly). This perspective comes across as well when one of his co-workers reminisces about a case where he went to inform the “parents” of what had happened to their robot/”child” and how when he rang their doorbell, “”the same boy answered. That couple couldn’t wait two weeks before replacing their son with the same model … If you need a coffee machine, you get a new coffee machine.” On the other hand, Jun muses how he “had seen people mourn robots like they were beloved pets or lovers, or even children.” Meanwhile, the Church places “no robots” signs outside their doors, noting on them that “Robots, not having a soul, are unable to worship God and have no place in the Church.” Though that doesn’t stop Stephen from arguing that “I’d like to think in the end God would be merciful” as he and Jun debate souls and the afterlife.

Which brings us to the idea of death and immortality which, like questions of identity and humanity, run throughout. Sometimes it is overt, as when Yoyo tells Ruiije he will live forever, or she thinks about how this new technological work “make a promise to her: Death is a problem that can be solved.” Sometimes it arrives via analogy, say through a group of robot rabbits or Ruiije’s pet cat that died when she was young, or through allusion, via multiple references to Peter Pan, famous as the boy who never ages, which makes him the perfect vehicle as a symbol for robots who themselves, seemingly at least, are frozen at their programmed age.

Though that becomes one of the overriding questions of the book: can these robots, in fact, age? I.e. develop and mature into something other than what they began as? I won’t spoil that by giving the answer but will simply say that all these questions provide for some deeply poignant, moving moments conveyed via lovely language. On a sentence level, the prose is sharply, often gorgeously written. Park shows an equally deft hand with the worldbuilding, which is rich, detailed, but also economically presented.

As for those issues I mentioned at the outset. The pacing sometimes bogs down, some characters and scenes feel like they either wanted to be expanded or cut, I’m not quite sure Park nailed the balance between offering up too much information and holding back information, and there sometimes seems an awkward stylistic and narrative tension between the older characters’ storyline and Ruiije’s, almost as if a YA story were being grafted onto a more adult one, though I’d say that overstates the case and its impact (I just can’t think of a better way to describe it).

But while those issues were noticeable, as noted in the introduction, they are more than outweighed by the book’s many, many strengths: the rich worldbuilding, the beautiful prose, the poignant emotions, and the delving into some deeply thoughtful and topical philosophical questions. Highly recommended.