Review by Booklist Review
One of the two new translations introducing readers to Bo-Young this year (along with On the Origin of Species and Other Stories), this collection consists of two pairs of connected short stories. The first pair are the titular "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You," which follow a couple who go on multiple faster-than-light trips in an attempt to finally meet each other for their wedding. Each of the two stories presents one half of the couple's asynchronous correspondence. The second pair of stories, "The Prophet of Corruption" and "That One Life," are set in a cosmos ruled by the Prophets, spiritually refined beings who can split themselves up into smaller "disciples," all of whom are periodically reincarnated on Earth as a learning experience. The conflict in this pair of stories arises over the spread of "corruption," the belief that every life lived on earth is real and not merely an illusion. This translation will help fill in some of the gaps in the availability of Korean sf in English, as well as please readers who enjoy lyrical, philosophical sf stories.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
This title from one of South Korea's foremost writers features four short stories. Two focus on lovers attempting to meet each other back on Earth for their wedding day. Small mishaps ensue and create travails that the lovers must separately endure; as the centuries pass, they wonder whether they will see each other again. The remaining stories revolve around godlike beings who created the Earth. They use humankind as a teaching tool, exploring what happens when one of them begins to question the natural order of the gods' realm. All four stories feature philosophical musings about universal themes: love, waiting, and wanting; creation, destruction, and existence. The epistolary nature of the lovers' story gives readers a chance to empathize with the characters; to feel the dilemmas, the triumphs, and the lows of the two lovers. The straightforward narrative of the gods' featurette is a surreal swirl of ideas that weaves the reader through the tale. VERDICT This is thought-provoking science fiction that will leave readers musing long after the book is finished.--Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In four paired short stories, Korean science-fiction doyenne Kim imagines the vanishingly distant future. "You interstellar marrying types are all traitors." So says a colleague to a 25-year-old copy editor who is heading into the faraway stars. The round trip voyage should take just 4.5 years, since by this time earthlings have mastered travel at the speed of light. When the trip is over, a wedding awaits back on Earth. In a series of letters, the traveler describes life in a featureless cosmos, the spaceship moving too fast to take in any sights--or to stick to its schedule, so that just a couple of months into the voyage, the years as measured by Earth time have almost tripled. You can always wait another 11 years and then hop a freighter, the unconcerned captain tells another traveler, but it wouldn't be a happy return: "That Earth eleven years from now isn't a place where anyone would want to live. That it'll be uninhabitable, even for people who have been there all their lives, let alone those returning from years on other planets." The copy editor's betrothed, in a bracketing story, is on a mission of her own to faraway Alpha Centauri, and when she gets back, civil war, nuclear disaster, and climate change have ruined the planet. As for her beloved, "He must have died a million years ago." No matter, for, as the pair of stories nested between them inform us, in the future we shall be as gods, if perhaps not entirely self-aware: "Just as you can't understand your past self," Kim writes, "someday your future self won't understand your present self." Playing with notions of immortality and toying with improbable transgressions of the laws of physics, Kim delivers a suite of stories that is at once lyrical and full of foreboding, keeping dramatic tension tight among poetic evocations of a home planet that is "our hall of learning, our cradle of experiences, our short-term interactive training ground," if one we have also destroyed. Much of the best science fiction today is coming from East Asia, and Kim's work ranks high in that emerging tradition. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
