Reactor is proud to host this conversation with Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love and Silvia Park, in conjunction with the publication of her novel Luminous. The two writers discuss speculative craft, the creative process, and—of course—robots.
Kelly Link: At least a decade ago, I was interviewed by the writer and editor David Levithan at a festival in Australia. He asked me this question, which he says he always asks—and now I like to ask it, too. What did your grandparents do?
Silvia Park: My grandmothers were mothers and wives. My paternal grandfather was a businessman, and my maternal grandfather a prosecutor who had to resign due to a controversial murder trial and he became a lawyer. His experience taught me how malleable the truth is, how we warp memory, our own and others, for the sake of survival.
If you don’t mind, I too have a burning question. A while back, while I was at Clarion, I asked you for advice on balancing multiple perspectives, especially in a big book. I thought I’d follow up. What, for you, makes a book with multiple perspectives greater than the sum of its parts?
KL: I thought, when I began a novel for the first time, that I was choosing multiple points of view because the scope of a novel meant that I could make something symphonic—or choral. I wanted to do something that the novel allowed that the story didn’t. But now, more than a year out from publication of The Book of Love, I wonder if I chose different strands of perspective because I’m accustomed to the way that short stories jostle together in a collection and comment on each other.
Your novel, a book I love with all my heart, also moves from point of view to point of view. When you began thinking about this project, did you know that this would be your strategy? Or did it begin with a single voice? And more generally, what was the starting place for Luminous?
SP: My approach was quite similar. I originally wrote this novel as a children’s book. A ragtag bunch of kids discover a robot named Yoyo. He looks like a child but he’s like a superhero, like Astro Boy, leading them on youthful adventures.
Then, when I introduced Yoyo’s siblings, who are human, I had a strange realization. Yoyo’s siblings would have grown up while Yoyo didn’t. And it felt like a kind of death, you know? When you lose someone young, they just sort of freeze in your mind. As you grow older, that gap widens. I think of the many people who lost their parents too young, how they wake up one day and realize, hey, I’m older than my dad when he died.
In my mind, a robot became the perfect vessel for this grief that’s so difficult to contain. Someone once told me that there are ordinary tragedies—say, the loss of a parent—and there are extraordinary tragedies—the loss of a child—and I realized that it was the latter for Yoyo. His disappearance became this unspeakable loss for his siblings. That’s how Luminous grew up. I kept the children’s story but the book had to expand to include Yoyo’s adult siblings, Jun and Morgan, who needed to tell their story.
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KL: I love this! The Book of Love, too, came out of a project I originally envisioned as a young adult trilogy. But then I realized that I was interested in what happened if I both expanded and condensed what I’d been planning to do. If I were to describe the scope and the tone of Luminous, I would say that it conveys both the possibility–and the actuality of catastrophic loss—but that it’s an inherently hopeful book as well. How did you approach writing about the near future? How did you keep hold of strands of hope?
SP: Oh I agree, I think the book is very optimistic. It has an almost glossy take on our future. Korea is reunited. Climate catastrophe hasn’t wiped us out. Robots are (almost) peacefully integrated into society. And I’ve been telling people that the book has a happy ending.
A few have called this book dystopian, which makes me chuckle (are we not already living in a dystopia?) and it’s true that I wrote Luminous very closely to the present. I was drafting most of it through the pandemic. Things back then seemed unfair and bleak. Although I think if I’d written Luminous now, it would have come from a place of even deeper cynicism so in a way I’m glad I wrote it when I was still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
The book also feels hopeful, I think, because of the children. The strands of hope—which is such an apt way to describe it—comes from the braided storylines. Luminous is split between the perspectives of four characters, two adults and two children. In my head, I lump them as two because I used different perspectives for the children and the adults. Meaning, they’re all written in third person, but I intentionally leaned more omniscient when I was writing the children. I let the perspective undulate in their sections, expanding at times to capture descriptions or observations that wouldn’t have been possible through the eyes of a child. This was intended to evoke children’s literature of old where we have children go off on rather dangerous adventures, but if the story is told by this all-seeing benevolent narrator, it gives the reader an illusion of safety. We have faith that these children are going to be okay. In contrast, the adult perspectives of Jun and Morgan are written in close third, and these characters, they’re not doing too great. They’ve gotten stuck in their own heads, so to speak. If hope comes for them, it’s because they were able to step outside of themselves.
KL: Are there novels that you think of as literary antecedents or close cousins to what you wrote? And what was your approach to research?
SP: Definitely your work. It’s had such a huge influence on me, especially how you write the speculative with this really twisty, clever playfulness, but there’s also this profound grief found in many of your stories, including The Book of Love. I love how you write childhood. I can always feel a quivering hum, of the uncertainty and possibilities, like a shot of magic through the veins when you write children.
That, for me, was what made writing a ‘robot story’ interesting. Because while we have a long and illustrious history of human-robot stories, not too many that focus on the experience of loving a robot through the eyes of a child. The ones I can think of are the classic Asimov story “Robbie” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. I read Klara after I had finished writing Luminous, so my book was actually in dialogue with a different Ishiguro novel. Thematically, Luminous is most indebted to Never Let Me Go and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
For research… there was so much that I knew so little of. I think most of it was focused on artificial intelligence. I sourced from the present by focusing on intention, rather than the latest hypes of LLMs. For instance, I don’t think we’ll ever let go of our obsession to build a humanoid robot and achieve AGI. It’s funny how Silicon Valley has warped the definition of AGI to rake in investments, as if it’s this friendly enough chatbot, instead of an agile intelligence that is capable of anything a human can do. We’re definitely not there yet. Maybe we’ll never be.
Related, I was also fascinated by how the lines between commercial, academia, and the military tend to blur—and I put them in that order because we usually see our tech firsthand when it finally reaches mass market, but it usually starts out in the academic and military spaces. A lot of AI researchers have hopped over to the private sector—it pays so much better—but I think some of the most ingenious discoveries take place in sandboxes that aren’t profit-driven. Unfortunately, technology also tends to escalate in high-pressure situations, such as war. The Ukrainian War has become this terrible testing ground for our first applications of robotic warfare. It’s like cars and horses again; drones have already replaced guns on the battlefield. I fear what that means for a gun-saturated society like America, then.
KL: You are currently spending part of your year in Seoul and part in Lawrence, KS. What was it like to go back and forth with a novel-in-progress in your head? It may look like a division or a rupture—and I’m sure it feels that way at times—but it must also be a kind of sewing together? Both layering and dislocation? Were you in any way a different writer in Lawrence than in Seoul? (I ask, partly because I feel I am a very different writer depending on the place and how long I am going to be in it).
SP: See, you’ve nailed them, the complex feelings of writing across land and water. Division, rupture, layering, dislocation. All of it. I mentioned this before, but while I was writing Luminous, my biggest rupture was the pandemic. I was in Korea, I had just started a new job at a university. Then week two: COVID hits. We plunged into chaos, the most bureaucratic and tedious of it was moving our teaching online. The hours on Zoom, the weary, washed-out faces. So many of my students were wearing masks indoors, yes, out of caution, but they also couldn’t bother to wash their faces. The pandemic hit Korea as early as late January, we were the bellwether of what’s to come but I don’t think the rest of the world took it very seriously until it spread to Italy. I felt very scared and upset for my friends in NY, which was next. But back home, our government tried to clamp down on COVID using technology through the ‘test, trace, contain’ method. Our phones tracked our movements, reported symptoms, counted cases, and the widespread ease of this, the prevalence, the surveillance—you couldn’t enter a restaurant without a smartphone—it probably shaped the futuristic, perhaps dystopian society in Luminous.
Then I moved to the US and finished the book. There were times when I missed Korea terribly. And I would write about it with warmth. Then I would be back in Korea and I’d remember, oh yes, here’s how it sucks. And I was more critical. Moving back and forth, it can be grueling, but it also draws out so many selves within you. I’m a different person in America. I recall that first dislocation when I moved to NY for college and I was sort of shocked by how I was being perceived—for what I was, rather than who I am. But I’m also privileged, I’m able to move through different circles with relative ease, which is why I’m fascinated by the idea of passing. Jun is probably the character who grapples the most with this, as someone who is bionic and trans, and the way he likes to throw himself into potentially fraught environments. But Morgan too. She was younger than Jun when their family moved to the US, so her return to Korea was more difficult. She struggles with being a foreigner in her own country. This fear and loneliness shaped many of the decisions she made in the book.
KL: I think right now, as someone living in the U.S., it feels easeful (expansive?) to read novels set in the near future where the dystopic and the hopeful mix. I’m thinking of recent novels like Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, and now Luminous. I’m teaching a workshop right now at Smith College, and one of the things I’m urging the writers in that workshop to do is look for the liminal places in their narratives, places where radical shifts or changes are possible. Of course opportunities for shifts and changes are always present in fiction as well as in real life, but the future is one such opportunity, as is the fantastic, as is childhood. One of those spaces in Luminous is the question of what it means to be human or to be a person—the idea of the robot in science fiction has always been a kind of mirror or doppelganger. What draws you to this space, this question? And more broadly, what does the genre of science fiction offer you in terms of strategies (or narrative shapes or traditions) as a writer?
SP: If you don’t mind, I’m going to call the genre speculative fiction. Not to pooh-pooh on science fiction but I want to include fantasy, which is a genre that’s often derided and dismissed. There’s an indubitably masculine seriousness associated with science fiction that seems to justify our academic discourse of it, while fantasy is relegated as mere escapism. It’s seen as frivolous or even feminine.
Both genres are escapist. But there are times when we have to step outside of the world we take for granted in order to challenge it. That’s what makes speculative fiction so powerful, it’s a genre that twists and subverts and amplifies. It can shake us awake.
I consider where we’re headed and I marvel at how it’s a handful of men who seem to think they hold all the reins. We’re supposedly in the age of artificial intelligence. The word that’s tossed around a lot is ‘inevitable.’ Our technocrats want us to think that AI is inevitable. They tell us our lives will be easier. But they also tell us that we are not wanted. Our labor is frivolous, inefficient. They accuse us of being bloat. We’ve seen this exact scenario simulated in science fiction. Writing about robots was my attempt to grapple with the modern age, which Meghan O’Gieblyn defines as one of disenchantment in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine. This worship of tech—pushed to the furthest, as transhumanism—has supplanted religion. And transhumanism is essentially disembodiment. It’s a rejection of our failing human flesh in order to achieve a technological immortality. In an age of disenchantment and disembodiment, the robot, created in our image, is the perfect solution. It’s also long been depicted as our greatest existential threat, second to climate catastrophe.
KL: Is there a piece of advice that you would go back and give yourself as a younger writer? Or a piece of bad advice that you would steer your younger self away from?
SP: My advice for younger me is the one I would have rejected most vehemently, which is—take your time. I write long dense novels because time is precious, which sounds a bit contradictory, but I want to devote myself to a book so it becomes meaningful as a testament to a significant chapter in my life. With time, I think we can also give ourselves a bit more grace. I have an approach to life that I call the rain and the drought. There are going to be periods in your life that are going to be incredibly nourishing. Inspiration is welling up within you, you’re publishing stories left and right. But there will also be dry spells where you can’t squeeze out a single word or everyone around you seems to be flushed with accolades and recognition. That’s their rainy period. Yours will come.
KL: What are you working on now?
SP: I’m working on a novel, still very amorphous. The anchor of it is mermaids. Bloodthirsty, matriarchal, hermaphroditic mermaids, and the marine biologist who goes a little mad trying to save them.
Luminous is available now wherever books are sold.
