Luminous, Silvia Park
In Luminous, Silvia Park crafts a speculative world that’s both hauntingly futuristic and emotionally intimate. Set in a reunified Korea where robots are integrated into nearly every corner of society—from household companions to artificial siblings—this beguiling debut follows estranged siblings Jun and Morgan as they’re pulled back into each other’s lives by an investigation. When a young girl named Ruijie discovers Yoyo, a discarded robot, the paths of our three characters converge. Blending family relationships with a mysterious crime, the story unfolds into a layered exploration of grief, memory, and what it truly means to be human.
Park’s worldbuilding is nuanced and genius. The Korea she envisions is not just technologically advanced but ideologically complex, raising questions about the future of AI, identity, and humanity. Her Korea feels vivid and lived-in, with social tensions simmering beneath it. Robots in Luminous are not just tools or servants, they’re extensions of human desire, loneliness, and care. By reflecting emotional labour onto machines, the book doesn’t just imagine the future but questions and confronts it. The novel is particularly moving in its portrayal of the relationship between humans and robots, as Park challenges us to consider what we owe the beings we create in terms of ethics and emotion; Can a robot grieve? Can it love? And if it can, are we obligated to love it back? Through Yoyo’s strange humanness and the characters’ bonds with him and other robots, Luminous pushes us to ask what makes something—or someone—real.
Park introduces brilliant and provocative ideas about AI, from bionic surgery to food and VR addiction, asking how far human reliance on robots can and should go. The novel doesn’t just imagine a robotic future, it questions how people might adapt and resist to it. At the heart of the novel, however, are themes of family and loss. Jun and Morgan’s fractured sibling relationship is scarred by the past and by grief, as they’re unable to meet in the middle of their pain. Park doesn't make grief loud; instead, it lingers, evident only in the silences. Through shifting points of view, each character brings a different emotional arc: Ruijie’s young voice offers innocence and awe; Jun’s is filled with regret and scepticism; Morgan’s is cold and lonely. This gives the story a sense of being fractured, but intentionally. There’s a quiet grief that soaks every page—a feeling of people trying and failing to connect, of machines feeling more than they’re supposed to, and of families broken by choices. Luminous reflects on the versions of ourselves and others that we can’t get back, and the ways we try to recreate them through technology and memory; it shows us that sometimes the clearest mirrors of our pain are the things we build.
As fascinating as Luminous is, certain threads remain unresolved and certain moments are lost in the fog. However, this can be seen as an astute observation from Park that grief, humanity, and the future simply aren’t themes that can ever be tied up neatly. All in all, Luminous is beautifully imaginative, rich in emotion and philosophy and, of course, utterly luminous.
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