Blog tour: Luminous by Silvia Park

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘In a near-future reunified Korea, robots have integrated seamlessly into society. They are surrogate servants, pets, children, even lovers – but never equals.

‘Deep in a Seoul junkyard full of abandoned robots, 11-year-old Ruijie sifts through scrap metal for anything that might support her failing body. There she discovers a robot boy: life-like, strange and unlike anything she’s seen before.

‘Siblings Jun and Morgan Cho haven’t spoken since the loss of their brother, Yoyo. As children, they believed him to be just like them: human. But their father, a celebrated robot designer, had concealed the truth about Yoyo. In reality, he was very different from his human siblings, and bound for a much darker purpose.

‘It takes the disappearance of another child-robot to unite Ruijie, Jun – who now works as a detective in the lowly Robot Crimes Unit – and his sister. What Jun’s investigation reveals will send all three on a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, to unearth deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family.’

Luminous, by Silvia Park, is set some years from now. North and South Korea have reunified, nominally at least. Robotic technology has advanced significantly, with lifelike robots fulfilling roles everywhere, from homes to workplaces and public services.

Biomechanical engineering has also come a long way. Due to a medical condition, 11-year-old Ruijie uses detachable robowear to get around, and her enthusiasm for science prompts her to search the scrapyard next to her Seoul school for parts that could help her keep her gear apace with her body’s decline. There, she befriends a robot boy who looks and functions very differently to any product on the market.

Police detective and army veteran Jun suffered such extensive injuries in the War of Unification, his reconstructed body is more bionic than organic. The disappearance of Eli – an older woman’s antiquated, but much-loved robot girl – brings him to the doorstep of his estranged sister Morgan, who works as a personality programmer for pre-eminent commercial robot producer Imagine Friends.

When the pair were in teenagers, the bottom fell out of their world when Yoyo, the robot boy they thought of as a brother, vanished without explanation one day while they were at school. Yoyo was a one-off prototype designed by the pair’s aloof roboticist father with an end goal that wasn’t companionship for his children – and a commission he came to regret accepting due to its far-reaching consequences.

In just a few days, Imagine Friends will be launching Boy X, their most advanced robot boy yet – created by Morgan in Yoyo’s image. Suddenly, Jun and Morgan are forced to wrestle with their family’s past, as well as philosophical questions concerning the uses of robots. Meanwhile, Eli is still missing, and Ruijie is desperately trying to help her new robot friend, who’s coming to end-of-life.

Luminous is a great read. I initially found it challenging to get to grips with the characters’ backstories and the switch of storyline each chapter, but then something clicked and I became absolutely absorbed.

Park has done a magnificent job of realising a world where robots and automated appliances are the norm, considering how robots might be physically constructed and maintained, as well as programmed with different personalities and levels of autonomy depending on their intended use.

They’ve also thoroughly considered the implications of the presence of robots that could possibly be mistaken for humans. For example, robots are required to display distinguishing features when they’re out in public; the police have a dedicated Robot Crimes team (a robot cannot be held accountable for a crime, but crimes against robots are generally considered property offences if they’re adult units, and interpersonal offences if they’re child units); and there are certain men who are very angry that some women choose robot partners over human ones.

Even so, we’re invited to contemplate where human ends and robot begins. Jun occasionally has to clarify that he’s human because so much of his body is mechanical, while Morgan has built herself a romantic partner, Stephen, who comes across as extraordinarily human. There’s also the question of at what level we start to anthropomorphise automatons – one of many funny moments in the book is when Jun tells an anecdote about breaking a smart toilet that appeared to have taken against him personally.

There are two things that do separate robots from humans, though: a pre-set purpose, and (with a few exceptions) an attachment to one particular human. This causes huge glitches in Stephen’s system, though. As Morgan designed him to be a romantic partner for herself, when she realises that’s not what she wants after all (asexual spectrum rep? I like to think so!), he can’t reconcile his programming with her new instructions – organic brains being far more accommodating of change than mechanical ones.

Memory is another theme that emerges on both human and robot sides. Due to the ages they were when Yoyo came into their lives, Jun and Morgan have differing memories of their robot brother. As Jun was older, he had clearer memories of the more dispassionate behaviour that betrayed Yoyo’s true, chilling purpose, and had outgrown Yoyo by the time he was taken away, whereas the younger Morgan’s brain protected her from trauma by suppressing and rewriting bad memories, and she was still very much attached to Yoyo when he disappeared.

While robots faithfully record everything they “see”, they’re not infallible either. Damage to their hardware can not only knock out their memory, but – in the case of pre-owned robots who’ve been refurbished – it can bring back memories from their previous iterations.

Thus, the robot Ruijie finds in the scrapyard (and I don’t think this is a spoiler) both is and isn’t Yoyo. He knows he once lived with Jun and Morgan, but also that he’s not the Yoyo they remember. I did ponder whether the pair would be able to pick right back up with a human sibling they hadn’t seen since they were children either, though – maybe the gap between humans and robots isn’t so wide in that regard.

Ruijie’s story, meanwhile, explores what it’s like to grow up at a time when robots are the norm, and you’ve never known any different. Intellectually, she knows the robots she encounters, including Yoyo, the missing Eli, and the rabbits kept by her school aren’t “real”, yet she still feels a great deal of empathy for them, and you feel it right alongside her.

What’s more, Ruijie’s involvement with Yoyo helps her develop friendships with three of her human classmates, through whom we gain further insight into what a reunified and open Korea might look like, and the problems that could remain. It also helps her come to terms with her own bleak prognosis.

Luminous is enthralling, multi-layered, and thought-provoking.