Although short stories are often sites of some of the most intellectual and formal experimentations in literature, their authors must still possess the skills of more conventional storytellers. The short story is a fickle form, challenging our ideas about narrative, psychology, catharsis, and character.
The masters of what may be referred to as the classic short story — Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor — condensed reams of literary exploration into unbelievable compactness, managing to fit the complexities of novels into a handful of pages. More experimental writers, playful artists like Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and Garielle Lutz, employed many of the same techniques to make their stories work.
The stories seeming to gain the most traction now are ones that engage with ideas about living via high-concept premises or science fictional conceits, from authors like George Saunders, Ted Chiang, Nafissa Thompson-Spires — and from Kim Choyeop, South Korean author of If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, already a bestseller in Choyeop’s home country and recently translated into English by Anton Hur.
The stories in If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light land readers on planet sci-fi, but keep them grounded within a galaxy of humane realism. Choyeop’s collection is delightful, profound, and emotionally resonant because, in addition to the creative and intellectual range that make her stories her own, she also has, in spades, those necessary abilities displayed by the masters to propel the less fanciful ones. The primary driving forces of her fiction are the ideas, which are anchored by characters instead of the other way around.
Still, Choyeop has an uphill road to climb — in order to catch and sustain a reader’s interest, she has to explain her collection’s sci-fi setting and place characters into it before she can get on with the business of telling a story. It requires a mastery of exposition, which Choyeop deftly deploys in the opening lines of “Spectrum”: “I once saw a photo of Grandmother when she was young. She wore a white space suit with a helmet so large it looked like she was about to tip over.”
This is a dexterous set-up. Choyeop signifies the temporal relationship between the narrator and her Grandmother, the capitalized ‘G’ suggesting both intimacy and reverence, as well as the distance of generations. There is also the casual mention of her space suit, which implies we’re in a world where space travel is common. The idea that the helmet was comically large suggests that the tech supporting interstellar tourism has improved in the interim. That’s a lot of narrative information packed into 31 words.
Choyeop also demonstrates a keen ability in this collection to make the speculative seem plausible. The title story deals with light-speed travel as an industry — what would it be like for a capitalistic world to develop this technology? Would there be competing approaches? Would some techniques gain and lose favor as new ones emerged? Historical terminologies like “Age of Spaceflight” and the “Second Revolution of Space Colonization” appear, which have the banality of textbook chapter headings, anodyne and right-on-the-money convincing.
Choyeop further succeeds in finding poignant ways to connect the more fantastical plot elements to the human beings caught up in them, so that her stories are not mere intellectual play but genuine commentary on the profundities of life.
In “Archival Loss,” a woman named Jimin goes to a Mind library to visit the uploaded consciousness of her dead mother. This service creates simulations that “mimicked the dead with uncanny accuracy.” Jimin and her mother didn’t have a close relationship when her mother was living. Her mother never recovered from postpartum depression after giving birth, about which Jimin felt partly responsible. This affliction made her mother harsh and distant, but it also made her difficult to know as anything deeper or more individual than “mother.” Jimin had yet to visit her mother’s Mind in the library, even though she died three years earlier. Now she is told that her mother’s Mind has vanished, its indexing materials deleted.
Jimin, it turns out, is pregnant and experiencing some confounding emotions regarding her baby. In fact, when she first hears its heartbeat, “she [feels] nothing.” Suddenly, her relationship with her mother is profoundly relevant to her life.
She wonders: “Was it because she had never been loved as a child that she was unready to love one?”
Such questions are as deep as anything explored in any art. Choyeop elevates the sci-fi trope of uploaded consciousness by tying it to vital aspects of existence that come from more specific events.
Throughout the collection, Choyeop also focuses again and again on familial legacies and how invented tech affects them. Jimin and her mother are but one pair of family members divided by time and technology.
There’s the narrator and her Grandmother in “Spectrum,” and in “My Space Hero,” an astronaut’s chance to traverse a mysterious tunnel near Mars is threatened by her relationship with a friend of her mother’s, who she always referred to as her aunt. “If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light” features an old woman waiting for a spaceship to a faraway planet to be with her family, who’d left Earth decades earlier. The space terminal where she waits is out of service, but for her, the waiting is the point. The innovation that had allowed her husband and son to relocate to a very distant planet is no longer in use, meaning she’s cut off from them.
“This isn’t what parting meant before,” the old woman says. “Parting still meant we were under the same sky. On the same planet, sharing the same air. But now, we’re not even in the same part of the universe.”
She asks: “But if we can’t go at the speed of light, what difference does it make if we’re in the same universe?”
The future has often been a source of hope and wonder for humanity. But the progress that has been our central focus sometimes seems at odds with the ideals we once envisioned for the coming centuries. If our inventions aren’t working to bring us closer together, Choyeop seems to ask in this collection, then what, really, is the point of it all?