Review: Luminous by Silvia Park

My experience with Luminous was the literary equivalent of type two fun, of something that feels valuable in hindsight but isn’t fun as you go through it. Its story is disjointed, suffers from uneven pacing, and is at times frustratingly difficult to follow. I found the book tedious to the point that I thought about putting it down for good. But it is also a fascinating fusion of science fiction and literary fiction, and one of the most interesting and timely works I have read about how humans and machines relate to each other.

Luminous takes place in a future Korea where human-like robots have become a ubiquitous and normal part of life. They have replaced humans in many jobs and live in households as pets, helpers, and even family members and romantic partners. The book’s story follows several protagonists: Jun, a police officer investigating the disappearance of a child robot; Morgan, his sister, who works for a company producing cutting-edge robot companions; and Ruijie, a schoolgirl who finds an abandoned robot in a scrap yard and bonds with it.

All of their lives are intimately tied up with robots. Jun was severely injured during a military campaign and had large parts of his body replaced with robotics. Morgan is not only working in the robot industry, but also dating and living with Steve, a robot of her own creation, modeled after her dream partner. Jun’s and Morgan’s estranged father is one of the pioneers of robot technology, and the two grew up with Yoyo, a robot sibling. And Ruijie suffers from an illness that makes her dependent on robotic aids.

Ostensibly, this is a book about robots, but not in the way that many other science fiction novels are. The robots in Luminous are not part of a machine uprising, they don’t have superpowers and they don’t go rogue, and there is little confusion about who is human and who is machine. Rather, the book is about how humans emotionally relate to the robots they build, own, live with, desire, and despise, and about the prospect of robots playing roles and fulfilling needs for which we are so far reliant on our relations with other humans.

The book evoked thoughts and feelings in me that reminded me of Blade Runner, the 1982 movie, in which a bounty hunter chases several fugitive humanoids. Both the movie and Luminous are about what we see in robots, and about why we care so much about drawing a line between us and them. Many of the humans in both are emotionally stunted, and the most touching moments focus on robots — but not because they have emotions, but because of how we as humans relate to them and what they mean to us.

Plenty of other works of science fiction ask questions about the role of technology in our lives, but I hardly ever found them as relevant and specific to our present moment as in Luminous. There is already widespread and justified concern about how humans get support, compassion, and companionship from artificial intelligence and basic robots. The book pushes this to the extreme, but without overt alarmism and judgment. Instead, it shines a light on what these developments may say about our most basic needs and how we struggle to meet them.

Luminous also resembles Blade Runner in that both thrive on the worlds they imagine, in which futuristic technology is mundane, terrifying, and fascinating all at once. Both also play with what they show but don’t explain. In Luminous, the two Koreas are unified, there was a war, and there are refugees. There are human children who are raised by robot nannies, there are robot children who live with humans. But we only get glimpses of that, and while I would have criticized this incomplete world-building in other books, I found that it allows Luminous to create an interesting setting while keeping the focus squarely on the humans and robots at its center.

Unfortunately, the plot of Luminous lets all of this down. The book seemingly cannot decide whether it wants to tell a family drama, a detective story, or a youth adventure, and it jumps back and forth between these genres without ever finding a rhythm or developing momentum. There are whole chapters — if not whole plot strands — that feel like they could have been cut without anything being lost. The protagonists remain distant and stuck in their minor predicaments, and throughout the book I felt very little urge to know what happens next and how any of it resolved.

On top of that, Luminous suffers from its confusing style. This might be intentional and a reflection of what the protagonists experience, but I quickly grew tired of it. In many scenes, I didn’t feel like I was fully understanding what was going on, as if I’d been dropped into something without knowing how or why we got there. That does not mean that the writing of Luminous is generally bad. In fact, I think that the book frequently excels with its evocative language, as when it describes that “yellowing leaves pressed their faces against the windows” or that a body “shuddered with a molecular resistance.”

Luminous ultimately felt like watching a still life painting. It is captivating for a while, and it made me wonder about what it all means and what’s beyond the frame. But the plot does little more than move the pieces around, shuffling the protagonists from scene to scene without ever amounting to much. And while a still life is pleasant to look at and contemplate for a few minutes, Luminous is a book that overstays its welcome by a lot and does not earn its length of four hundred pages. It was therefore one of the rare works where I was looking forward to the ending for all the wrong reasons.

That makes Luminous one of the most thoughtful yet frustrating works I’ve read in recent times, and one of the more ambitious fusions of science fiction and literary fiction. Most science fiction about humans and robots imagines a distant future. Luminous reads like it is about right now and the trajectory we seem to be on, which is precisely why it’s such a shame it doesn’t come together as a reading experience. Type two fun, in other words, and not a book I enjoyed or would recommend, but one that stuck with me.