"The Seashell Within"
By Kim Cho-yeop
Rabbit Hole
Another leading voice in South Korean science fiction, Kim Cho-yeop is set to make her English-translation debut next April with "If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light," forthcoming from Simon & Schuster and already sold to more than 10 countries.
Her first story collection, a stunning and poignant work of speculative fiction, established her as a bestseller and helped bring Korean SF into the mainstream, with more than 400,000 copies sold here.
In Korean, Kim has now released a new collection of seven stories set across oceans and outer space — a sweeping inquiry into humanity from multiple angles. Each story introduces a new world and new beings, and with them, unfamiliar conflicts.
In “Subdani’s Summer Vacation,” an android who once underwent a humanization procedure yearns to return to its metallic skin. The title story, “The Seashell Within,” follows an alien divided between two selves, while “Sweet and Lukewarm Sorrow” envisions a post-apocalyptic humanity living inside a quantum computer.
In the author’s note, Kim writes that she turns to the unreal to challenge our sense of what is normal. “Humans categorize everything. The brain dislikes complexity. But boundaries are rarely clear. When we look between black and white, that’s where stories begin.”
hwangdh@heraldcorp.com
