If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light, a collection of short science fiction stories by female Korean post-90s author Kim Choyeop, has created a wave of Sci-fi hit and brought “Korean science fiction” to the forefront of Chinese readers’ attention. Science fiction, as a traditional and enduring literary category, has always been in demand, although its coverage and influence is relatively weak compared to science fiction films and TV works, which has been dominated by European and American works for many years. That is until recently, when mainland science fiction writer Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award for Three Bodies and the box office success of the Wandering Earth series, that finally shone a new light to Chinese science fiction after years of silence.
For Chinese science fiction readers, Korean science fiction writers or works are probably more unfamiliar to them, which is why Kim Choyeop’s book If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light, which has been hailed as “Korea’s phenomenal conversation piece of the year” and “a representative of science fiction elegance”, is all the more intriguing to me and piqued my curiosity. It consists of seven short stories: Why Pilgrims Never Return, which asks whether genetic modification technology can create a perfect world; Spectrum, which explores whether human emotions can transcend language; ‘Symbiosis Hypothesis’, which explores how civilisations in different universes stare at each other; ‘If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light’, which explores how human emotional thoughts can transcend time and space; ‘The Materiality of Emotions’, which turns human emotions into a commodity for sale; ‘The Lost in the Museum’, which explores the identity of ‘women’ and ‘mothers’ in the context of technology that can upload the minds of the dead to the cloud, and ‘My Cosmic Hero’, which re-conceptualises the plight of vulnerable communities from a human perspective…
Although she came from the field of biochemistry, Kim Choyeop turned to literature (which seems to fit the life path of most science fiction writers). Her debut novel, If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light, was published in 2019 and bagged several literary awards and appeared on a number of book of the year lists. Interestingly, these science fiction works by Kim actually explore traditional family ethics and emotional issues under the guise of “science fiction”, especially from a “female” perspective, such as workplace dilemmas, fertility anxiety, and the different roles of men and women in the family.
All seven short stories feature female protagonists, reflecting the themes that not only the young Korean writer, but also many Asian women writers are thinking and writing about. It is also interesting to note that in an interview, Kim mentioned that another Korean science fiction writer who has greatly influenced her, Kim Bo-young, who was a script consultant for Bong Joon-ho’s Doomsday Train, is also a female writer.
If we echo the new era of the emergence of women writers in mainstream science fiction literature in Europe and the United States in recent years (whose successes have gradually surpassed those of their male counterparts) it may also bring some new directions and inspiration to Chinese science fiction literature.