Uncanny atmospheres and heartfelt human insights strike an unlikely balance in writer and translator Bora Chung's speculative short story collection Your Utopia, translated from the Korean with concise clarity by Anton Hur. In "The Center for Immortality Research," an office worker deals with seemingly banal workplace frustrations at a company with a dark secret. Chung's deft construction of amorphous unease continues in "A Very Ordinary Marriage," when a seemingly average suburban husband discovers that his wife is not who (or what) she's claimed to be. Meanwhile, in the titular "Your Utopia" and "Seed," humans attempt to colonize new lands in hopes of finding happiness, but underestimate the capacity for love in the beings they leave behind.
Like the stories in her National Book Award finalist Cursed Bunny (also translated by Hur), these eight tales are genre-bending thought experiments, but they lean more toward science fiction than horror. In focusing on technology, the possibilities of the future, and the unknowns of the universe, Chung lingers tenderly with the emotional depths of her stories, which arise almost unexpectedly as her characters navigate surreal, speculative, and often mundanely horrifying horizons. Often, Chung's characters--whether they are human, alien, or robot--are seeking connection, stuck lingering with their own loneliness in liminal settings: the bureaucratic nightmare of office hallways, a post-human world that is not yet extinct, an elevator shaft. But rather than casting these moments of suspension as simply horrifying (although many of them are), Chung's sensitive emotional awareness reveals these as spaces of potentiality, the places and moments where anything might still be possible. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor