Despite being the best-known Korean science-fiction author in the English-speaking world, Kim Bo-young claims not to write science fiction, at least not intentionally. “Many of the stories I’ve written came into being without me consciously trying to turn them into SF. The tales I’ve told have simply unspooled from inside me. It’s only later that I found out that readers labeled them SF.” So she declares in a curious mini-essay included in her collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories. “My own body came equipped with a set (of breasts),” she explains; she didn’t decide to install them herself. Science, by the same token, is just one of the elements of her fiction that has arisen organically among many others, especially conspicuous though it may be.

Indeed, certain of the narratives in this book seem, at first, to have nothing to do with science, at least in the high-tech form in which it manifests in conventional science fiction. For instance, the long story “An Evolutionary Myth,” set in second-century Goguryeo, seems to take place in the realm of fantasy, where an unexplained condition causes humans to transform into chimera-like creatures. It happens also to afflict the narrator, an exiled prince, whose personal transformation proceeds according to a grotesque evolutionary logic. Though each of the tales seem to cover a disparate topic, common threads that run through the entire book are Kim’s apparent fascination with the mechanics of evolution as well as her skill at transposing them into worlds both like and unlike our own.

“Stars Shine in Earth’s Sky” takes place in a world that, at first, more closely resembles our own. After describing herself as suffering from “narcolepsy,” its narrator goes on to explain how she’s come to manage its symptoms: “I fatigue more easily than others” “my nerves are quick to fray, often diminishing my mental acuity. And yet as long as I stick to my routine of going unconscious from time to time none of these issues bother me.” The only challenging part for her is synching her daily rhythm with others. But as it soon becomes clear, those around her don’t sleep at all, nor do they accept her habit of climbing into a box and plummeting “into a state of total oblivion for a minimum of five to six hours.” Such a high density of stars surrounds the narrator’s planet that the sky remains perpetually bright. The box is necessary because nowhere else can she find darkness, even at night, or what we on Earth call night. 

It takes some effort for a reader to imagine the rhythms of life on such a planet, just as the inhabitants of the narrator’s planet struggle to imagine the rhythms of life on Earth. Set apart from the rest of her race by her need to “faint” for prolonged periods, the narrator feels a natural connection to that strange and distant world. “It’s my belief that most creatures on that planet have the same condition I do,” she says. These thoughts lead into deeper speculation as to whether her ancestors came from a planet like Earth. Then they, too, may have had narcolepsy, which was then passed on through the generations.

In “Stars Shine in Earth’s Sky,” as in other stories, Kim creates a society that could plausibly have descended from our own, albeit through a time so long as to be impossible to calculate. “Last Wolf” takes place in a modern-day Seoul that has fallen into ruin after an apocalyptic event. Amid its crumbling infrastructure live tribes of humanoid wolves—the result of mutations in the evolutionary process—and, towering above them, a ruling class of enormous dragons. More conventionally realistic is “Between Zero and One,” whose characters are concerned with such rigorous yet ordinary Korean pursuits such as studying, making money, and street protesting, but with the added dimension of time travel.

In “Between Zero and One,” we encounter a time traveler who tells an unhappy teenager that grownups came/have come from a different era. The time traveler points out that everything about them was antiquated/old, their values and their teaching methods. That they looked down on younger people, pretending to be mentors. “They had forgotten that they were people who’d come from the past,” the time traveler says. This resembles many complaints heard in Korea today, especially by students who rail against the country’s educational and economic systems as well as their representatives. But Kim turns this generational gap into a scientific premise: when a student says her teachers “came from the 1970s,” she means it literally; other teachers, she says, come from the colonial period (1910-1945) or the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). 

Though Kim’s work often incorporates elements of Korean society, culture, and history, On the Origin of Species’ central story—more a novella, not only in length but also in ambition—looks past the specifics of the nation to deal with the existence of humanity itself. In it, Kim posits a dark, airless future Earth populated entirely by robots who owe their survival (if “survival” is the right word) to the black layer of pollution filling the atmosphere. This robot society grinds along uneventfully until a rogue group of robot scientists discovers a way to create life: organic life, that is, of the kind thought to have been driven into permanent extinction long before. Robots were created in the image of man, which leads to man being re-created in the image of robot. Most science fiction asks where humans are going, not where we came from, but in Kim Bo-young’s conceptually and temporally capacious imagination, those become two inseparable aspects of the same question.

Colin Marshall

Essayist