Book Review #13: "Your Utopia" by Bora Chung
Chung re-imagines sci-fi tropes to envision the futures we will have and those that should be.
Given my extensive TBR list these days, I tend to collect books (with the intention of reading them later–I’m not a monster!) rather than starting them immediately. Still, I couldn’t help myself with Your Utopia by Bora Chung and, for that, I am glad. It has filled a number of holes on my bookshelf–namely international literature and short story collections. While I already knew the value of both categories, I tend to get stuck in American/English novels because they’re the most readily available. I also prefer long narratives over short stories–ironic as that may be given my newsletter. Your Utopia re-solidified the importance of diversifying my personal canon in as many ways as possible.
As usual, I learned about Your Utopia through Jack Edwards, who promised speculative fiction with an air of absurdity. That, combined with my recent sci-fi kick after finishing Project Hail Mary, fed my interest in Your Utopia. Each story in the collection centers on a different future–in one, a pharmaceutical company has found the answer to everlasting life, in another, an autonomous car roves around the remnants of a destroyed planet seeking companionship, and, in a third, people and plants have become biologically intertwined. The stories form a cohesive group with clear themes, while also harboring distinct voices that serve their individual themes. For example, I loved the conceit of “The Center for Immortality Research,” but had difficulty connecting with the narrator. However, I found the following story, “The End of the Voyage,” to be thriller-level engaging. Essentially, if you have any interest in climate change, AI, and the end of the world, I think at least a few stories in Your Utopia will spark inspiration.
An interesting subject in her own right, Bora Chung is a Korean scholar with a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. When she’s not writing award-winning fiction, she translates Roman and Polish literature to Korean. Her academic background gives her stories a nuanced edge; they are written with the care of an author who observes and intellectualizes the culture in which she exists. In her earlier and, perhaps, better known work, Cursed Bunny, Chung employs this expertise to discuss gender dynamics.
Your Utopia (and I’m sure Cursed Bunny, but I’ve only read two stories) introduces international readers to a range of issues that are at once universal and uniquely Korean. As Chung writes in her afterword, titled, “The Act of Mourning,” her activism around workers’ rights and transgender equality in Korea inspired several of the stories. The most challenging for me was “To Meet Her,” the collection’s final story. In essence, it describes a very old woman’s journey to see an author speak. In her first attempt, a terrorist bombs the location of the author’s book signing. We learn later that the author’s identity as a transgender woman is the catalyst for this attack.The story arch itself is a little less organized that some of its companions, but this more meandering narrative structure lends to Chung’s emotional state while writing. Chung explains that the story is for Sergeant Byun Hui-Su, an actual trans woman discharged from the Korean military after undergoing gender reassignment surgery. She took her own life in 2021. After reading more about Byun Hui-Su, I came to better understand the emotional impact and details within “To Meet Her.” It is a statement of hope in the face of terror. Transphobia may still exist in the future, but the author in the story also leads a fulfilling life–a life Byun Hui-Su had a right to.
Your Utopia also demonstrates the interconnections between various disaster scenarios without feeling repetitive. Sure, there are robots and aliens in a number of stories, but Chung expertly divides our existential fears into subcategories to better isolate what should scare us. She is at her best when discussing the more ludicrous aspects of our world. My favorite story is “The End of the Voyage,” which is about a pandemic that turns people into cannibals. It focuses on the ever present threat of disease, paired with an allegory about human greed in both our treatment of others and the assumed expectation that we can go to another planet when we’ve completely ruined our own. In “Seed,” some humans have expanded with and melded to the planet while others are loyal to mass corporations. Both deal with the impact of humanity on the Earth, but they do so in utterly different but equally satisfying ways.
My description of Your Utopia might make Chung seem like a pessimist, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. She shows us disaster scenarios to envision a better world. A world where robots have empathy instead of a desire to destroy humanity, a world where trees get the final say, a world where scanning someone’s dreams to incriminate them also results in a sympathetic connection. It’s a collection that begs the reader to move away from their utopia to work toward a collective one–our utopia, if you will.