As ideas go, “utopia” is a spectacularly Janus-faced one. The phrase itself is encrusted with opposing meanings, signifying each a really perfect place and no place.

Every utopia additionally encodes a dystopia; an imagined preferrred defines itself in opposition to antipodean values, lightness in opposition to darkness. Korean author Bora Chung completely embraces the time period’s quirk of contradiction in her new story assortment Your Utopia. Working once more with Anton Hur, who translated her first story assortment Cursed Bunny into English, Chung now scares up situations set in each the close to previous and close to future. If the expertly crafted tales in her prior assortment revolved round what M.R. James known as the “malice of inanimate objects,” the tales in her new assortment are extra tightly targeted on surveillance and the perils of superior expertise.

In “The Center for Immortality Research,” a glorified govt assistant works to plan an anniversary occasion for the titular analysis middle. The story takes place in 2010 and appears, at first, to be a office satire: The narrator, who wears her lowly standing like a hair shirt, is consumed with making numerous iterations of invites, altering a phrase on the invite to appease one board member, solely to alter it again on the behest of one other. Novelty-chasing tech gurus and politicians who make a fetish of lengthy life additionally are available for a roasting. A candidate for the National Assembly pledges to his constituency that if he’s elected, he “will make everyone in our country live forever” and speaks in neologisms like “thoughtified.”

When the anniversary gala rolls round, micro mortifications flip right into a mudslide of macro ones. It seems that a number of typos have been launched into the invitation copy and, as a coup de grace, the narrator is implicated within the theft of some DVDs after she is caught on surveillance footage. The twist is that she will’t be fired, since she and everybody else who works on the middle is immortal. I want that this concept had been extra totally developed, if solely to clarify why immortality ought to battle with job termination; as it’s, the revelation is given the wingspan of a sentence and the story rapidly peters out right into a lament concerning the narrator’s purgatorial standing: “As long as I lived, I had to figure out a way to put food on the table, and this eternal need to feed myself was frightening.”

With different tales, the prevailing feeling shouldn’t be that it ends too quickly, simply as issues had been getting attention-grabbing, however that Chung is rounding the nook of a plot twist on the exact second the reader is. “The End of the Voyage” has an thrilling premise: A mysterious illness causes individuals to show into cannibals. While there isn’t any point out of COVID in any of those tales, there are apparent parallels. Both emergencies give rise to vaccine nationalism: “Surely it was better for my country to find a cure before anyone else,” thinks the “linguistics specialist” narrator to herself. She and a small crew of others handle to depart Earth on a spaceship, solely to find that the captain and others on board have succumbed to the illness. The closing line, which I will not give away, essentially revises all that one has learn as much as that time, however appears tacked on.

More attention-grabbing are the contradictions between tales. The narrator of “End of the Voyage” muses tonelessly that “there is no such thing as two-way communication,” but the concept is defied by two extra promising tales. In “Seed,” a race of human-plant hybrids fights to take care of sovereignty over their small patch of land from the rapacious Moshennik Corporation (modeled loosely on Monsanto, it could appear). The merging of two totally different species is the fruits of “a symbiotic relationship rather than a parasitic one.” And the ultimate story, “To Meet Her,” envisions a world of “deepfake technologies that utilize Bakhtin’s Mirror Theory.” The AI expertise has internalized two gazes: “one that looks back on ourselves, like a mirror, and one we think the other is seeing when they look at us.” It’s two-way communication all the best way down. Words additionally drift like pollen from one story to a different, setting off allergic narrative reactions. “You can quit a company or disown a friend, but you can’t quit or disown your family,” opines the employee on the immortality middle. Yet in “End of the Voyage,” a minor character is disowned by his dad and mom after he chooses to develop into an engineer as an alternative of a lawyer or high-ranking administrator.

On a sentence stage, the prose in Your Utopia lacks the freshness of Cursed Bunny. The pages are sadly spackled with clichés: individuals “get wind of the project” in a single story and the primary character in “The Center for Immortality Research” despairs of by no means being promoted “in this organization until the end of time,” a cliché made much more flagrant by the truth that “the end of time” is void of which means for an individual cursed with immortality. In too many tales, the stripped-down, cold prose resembles one thing that may be churned out by ChatGPT. Sometimes, that is deliberate — as with the title story narrated by a car-like “inorganic intelligence” and one other story informed by an AI-enabled elevator. Yet a sure aloofness shades as nicely into tales informed from the angle of people; different individuals’s faces hardly ever charge an outline, to say nothing of their psyches.

In an afterword on “the act of mourning,” Chung writes that she took half in “ritual prostration” protests in 2020 for the Anti-Discrimination Act and the Serious Accidents Penalty Act. The Acts had been conceived to guard the rights of sexual minorities in Korea and employees injured on the job, respectively. At occasions, the tales give the impression of getting been written as a bid for relevancy in our gig work and tech accelerationist age. The final story even ham-handedly spells out the issue with companies pursuing “their endless greed for profit and money and more profit and more money at the expense of our whole world.” Yet the strongest of those tales impart a way of disorientation, reasonably than an ethical critique, evoking worlds that appear at first like utopias solely to reveal, upon deeper inspection, dystopias.

Rhoda Feng is a Washington, D.C.-based freelancer. She has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and The New York Times, amongst different publications. She is the winner of the 2022-23 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.

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