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If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light - Hardcover

Choyeop, Kim

 
9781668049457: If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668049457 ISBN 13: 9781668049457
Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From Korean science fiction author Kim Cho-yeop, a stunning and poignant collection of literary speculative fiction stories that explore the complexities of identity, love, death, and the search for life’s meaning, perfect for fans of Exhalation and The Paper Menagerie.

In If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Korean science fiction superstar Kim Cho-yeop leads us to places we never thought we’d reach, imagining worlds galaxies away and unfamiliar lifeforms with near-dizzying humanity.

An elderly woman stranded in a defunct space station recounts her life story to a visitor as she waits for a vessel that may never arrive. A man comes across a company called Emotional Solids that sells emotions as material products—love as a piece of chocolate, sadness as a smooth stone, anger as a glass paperweight—and tries to understand why people would want to purchase any negative emotions. When an enigmatic artist reveals long-forgotten messages from beyond through her wildly original paintings portraying a planet from a time long before humanity formed, a team of researchers investigate if this planet truly existed and if so, how did this artist know of it? After a pregnant woman’s estranged mother dies suddenly, her avatar disappears from the library of lost souls where the digital minds of the deceased are stored—and the woman is forced, for the first time, to endeavor to understand her mother. In a future utopian society where gene selection has been made uniform and all those with imperfections are cast aside, one woman seeks the truth about the history of her isolated world. And when a young woman undertakes a never-before-accomplished journey through a wormhole, she must reckon with the legacy of her aunt, who vanished mysteriously days before she was meant to begin the same pilgrimage.

Traversing the bounds of imagination with an ethereal incisiveness, Kim Cho-yeop’s stories dismantle the borders between normal and abnormal, material and abstract, earthly and otherworldly. With unforgettable inventiveness and pathos, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light heralds the arrival of an essential voice in contemporary fiction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kim Cho-yeop has a master’s degree in biochemistry from Pohang University of Science and Technology. When she burst onto the Korean literary scene, her short story “Lost on Premises” received immediate recognition at the 2017 Korean Science Fiction Awards. She is also the recipient of the Minumsa Writer of the Year Award and the Munhak Dongne Young Writer Award. Her first short story collection If We Can’t Travel at the Speed of Light has sold over two hundred thousand copies in Korea alone. She is also the author of two more short story collections, The World I Just Left Behind and The Bookstore of Planetary Languages. Kim Cho-yeop’s first novel, Greenhouse At the End of the Earth, became an instant bestseller in South Korea.

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1. Symbiosis Theory SYMBIOSIS THEORY
Ludmilla Markov had memories of a place she had never been to.

It’s uncertain when they were created. A teacher at the orphanage Ludmilla was raised in later wrote:

The child was convinced since the age of five that she was from that place. We didn’t think too much of it. Children have fantasies all the time, it’s all a part of the growing-up process. Except Ludmilla had a particular attachment to this fantasy. If she caught a hint of any of the teachers not taking her seriously, she became very sad and anxious. Our unspoken rule was that we would not let on how we didn’t believe her stories. There were fewer troubles then. And everyone assumed she would outgrow them eventually.

But despite her teachers’ expectations, Ludmilla never did.

Her artistic talents were apparent from a young age. According to the orphanage’s teachers, she could draw her dreamy and ethereal world on paper as soon as she could grasp a crayon. But these drawings, considered mere juvenilia, were thrown away when Ludmilla left the orphanage, and not a trace of them remain. This institution, after all, was a place that needed more bread and cookies than colored pencils. And Ludmilla spent much more time rapt in daydreams than drawing.

When Ludmilla was about ten, a transnational conglomerate selected her for their gifted and talented scholarship program, and she moved to a boarding school in London. After that, she never had to go to bed hungry or sleep in a room where insects crawled out at night.

Ludmilla began showing her drawings of the place to others. She made her public debut in a small gallery her school rented to exhibit their students’ work, and Ludmilla’s drawings attracted attention immediately. From the very first day, people stopped in front of them and cried. Everyone wanted to know more about the artist of these extraordinary works.

Her awed teachers kept asking her, “How did you imagine such a landscape?”

Ludmilla was still a little rough in the technical sense and had much to learn. But her landscapes were always arresting, and the sure and deliberate way she drew them gave her not a moment of thought in the process. She drew without hesitation. Channeled.

Her memories of the place were, from her childhood to her death, the images that dominated her life. A world that seemed to exist somewhere, but at the same time nowhere at all. For her whole life, Ludmilla drew this landscape as if it were fully formed inside her mind, the different viewpoints perfectly continuous with each other.

Reporters insisted on asking her time and again, “Ludmilla, what is the name of this place?”

She always seemed perturbed by the question. “It has a name in my head, but I don’t know what to call it out loud.” The first few times she was asked, she said a word that did not exist in any language on Earth. But after multiple reporters expressed their annoyance at having to write down a name that didn’t fit into their languages, Ludmilla began calling it “the Planet.”

The fact that its name couldn’t be spoken added to its mystique. Some people called it Ludmilla’s Planet. A figment of the imagination to be sure, but at least it had a name now. A place Ludmilla visited in her dreams, that Ludmilla created, and Ludmilla continued to draw.

The first depictions of the Planet in Ludmilla’s early work were abstract. A palette of mostly purples and blues, some vaguely shaped life-forms roaming about. It was mostly covered in ocean, and single-celled bioluminescent organisms floated in the water, lighting up everything. Other, complex life-forms lived in the ocean and the air. There were short days and long nights where the rising and setting sun added strange colors to the scenery.

As Ludmilla grew older, the Planet became more defined. She came up with quantitative data about it as an actual place and produced detailed notes on its characteristics. The way she described its life-forms was like that of a naturalist.

She went beyond the canvases and drawings of her early works and eventually moved into simulations, easily hitching a ride on the Simulation Art movement gathering momentum at the time. Her works attained critical and commercial acclaim, praised for breathing artistic life into what was otherwise often derided as a soulless, gimmicky medium.

Ludmilla’s response to her accolades was always the same.

“I just re-create what I see.”

Audiences loved Ludmilla’s Planet. Accessible from anywhere on Earth, the simulation made people feel like the Planet actually existed and wasn’t a mere figment of the imagination. It wasn’t just Ludmilla’s original depictions that were popular; there were also movies and plays based on her paintings. Audiences could access centuries of art from around the world, but it was Ludmilla’s work that took a significant share of their attention. The influence of the Planet spread.

It was its pan-geographic aspect that was central to the appeal of her work, which might have been a result of having spent her childhood in Moscow, her young adulthood in London, and her subsequent life around the world. Ludmilla’s Planet resembled nowhere on Earth and looked as if it would exist very, very far away. And yet, her depictions stirred an unmistakable stab of nostalgia in her audience, who felt they were gazing upon something from a very long time ago that they had no choice but to leave behind. Some, not understanding why, were moved to tears. Meanwhile, critics claimed the nowhere-ness of Ludmilla’s Planet was precisely why the works brought out a place that existed in the souls of all people.

There was another series by Ludmilla that wasn’t as well known, one she had worked on her whole life. These works, titled Never Leave Me, had not been shown in her lifetime. Unlike the Planet series, Never Leave Me featured the abstractions of strong feelings but none of the figurative detail of her more famous work. They had a mournful, pleading air about them.

Ludmilla did not mention them in any interview she gave. Scores of these works were discovered in the attic only after her death, all under the same title. Art historians posited that they were expressions of her longing for a lover she had kept secret. But there was no evidence from her personal life to corroborate this, and the theory faded into obscurity.

Before she died, Ludmilla authorized the free use of all her work by anyone in any way they saw fit. Many simulations and games appeared based on Ludmilla’s Planet. Audiences immersed themselves in the nostalgia of the Planet and talked about it as their utopia, a world that could never be, but the imagining of which was solace enough. Ludmilla may have passed away, but the world she had created would surely live on forever in everyone’s hearts.

And then one day, Ludmilla’s Planet was found.

A space telescope traveling in deep space had sent back a telemetric dataset about a small planet that seemed to have an odd orbit around a multiple star system. The data suggested conditions that would make life possible, but because the planet was so far away and the technology to take an exploratory vessel there didn’t exist yet, it would take a long time to learn more.

The telescope’s operators discussed this planet for days. If the data was accurate and there was no noise from the transmission...

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Verlag
S&S/Saga Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668049457
ISBN 13 
9781668049457
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

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