Silvia Park’s debut novel is about people, robots and cyborgs: that is, humans enhanced or augmented with robotic technology. Ruijie is a schoolgirl afflicted with a degenerative disease: “affixed to her legs were battery-powered titanium braces; the latest model, customised circuitry to aid her ability to walk”. As the novel opens, Ruijie is in a robot junkyard, scavenging for spare parts and better legs. Here she meets a robot boy, Yoyo, discarded despite being a highly sophisticated model. Ruijie takes the quirky Yoyo to school with her, and a group of friends assemble to protect him from scavengers and exploitation in the robot-fighting ring.
This element of the novel reads like a YA adventure, though the rest is more adult-focused: cyberpunk, violent and sexualised. In an author’s note, Park says that they began writing Luminous as children’s fiction, until a bereavement took the work in a different direction, making the novel “a shape-shifter, no longer so appropriate for children”. There’s an awkwardness to this mix of tone, although we could say it reproduces, on the level of form, the book’s central topic of hybridisation, cyborgification, different elements worked together, as the novel’s setting – a future unified Korea – does on the level of geography.
