South Korean author and translator Bora Chung has multiple novels and short story collections to her name. Her 2022 story collection, Cursed Bunny, was highly acclaimed. Your Utopia is another remarkable assembly of speculative tales. That Chung specialises in translating Russian and Polish literature into Korean perhaps explains the wry absurdism, black humour, sheer terror, and surprising moments of idealistic tenderness of these stories. There are hints here and there of Stanislaw Lem, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov.
That said, Your Utopia is, as you would expect, very Korean, with its themes of identity, memory, resilience, resistance, trauma and the social issues of rapid economic and social change and foreign influence. Anything written in South Korea will also be haunted by the ghost of the peninsula’s partition, even if it isn’t overtly stated.
Obviously it’s difficult to completely assess an author through the scrim of translation but, as I thought I would, I love this collection: speculative and horror fiction in voices from outside the usual UK-US-European axis is always refreshing and exciting. And whereas almost everything has been done, Chung’s twists actually manage to surprise. I genuinely didn’t often see them coming. I hope the collection might be something of a gateway for readers to other Korean speculative fiction writers available in English, such as Kim Bo-young, Djuna and Han Kang. Now that cultural phenomena such as K-Pop, the movie Parasite and TV’s Squid Game have fostered receptiveness to South Korean media, hopefully we will see more fiction translated.
The title may be Your Utopia, but although each story starts with some idealistic ambition or other, they are distinctly dystopian, and they move with enviable fluidity between genres and ideas.
The first story, The Centre for Immortality Research, feels like a commentary on South Korea’s rigid corporate hierarchies. A subordinate employee of said research centre, planning a huge party for the centre’s secretive, death-fearing benefactors, witnesses a crime she gets blamed for. The twist is why she gets the blame and why she can’t be fired. A gift can be a curse.
One More Kiss, Dear is more familiar territory. In an apartment building, the AI operating the elevator falls unrequitedly in love with one of the tenants.
Seeds is a nature revenge fantasy aimed at Monsanto-type GMO companies harming the planet in their greed, but to quote Jurassic Park, “life finds a way” (think about what pollen really is). Like many of these stories, this has more than a suggestion of magical realism about it.
Maria, Gratia Plena reminds somewhat of Dennis Potter’s TV series Cold Lazarus: a technician transfers memories from a comatose woman who is a notorious criminal. The government wants to understand her crimes, while the technician is haunted by the woman’s difficult childhood and her more relatable motivations.
The titular story, recalling Roger Zelazny’s classic 1960s post-apocalytic short novella For a Breath I Tarry, has an AI seeking out others of its kind in a post-apocalyptic desolation. The Disease, somewhat pertinent these days, is the story of a pandemic that only reveals itself if the infected tries to eat you – a fresh take on the zombie apocalypse without actual zombies.
Despite the relatively well-tilled fields – particularly the Black Mirror-isms and the motifs of technology (especially AI) being a crapshoot – Chung’s imagination is loaded with more fecund invention than any one person has a right to. Your Utopia is not quite at the exceptional brilliance and originality of Cursed Bunny, but it is still very, very good.
