Luminous is a sweeping debut, and as soon as I read the summary I knew this was going to be right up my alley. Silvia Park's writing did not disappoint; the prose was delightfully unique and engaging. I really appreciated the way that this work explores the ethics of a humanoid robot society from multiple interesting lenses. I've unintentionally consumed two other pieces of media (AnnieBot and Companion) that deal with the exact same topic in the last month, and I was relieved and excited to explore a side of this dystopia that did not deal exclusively, or at all, with robot sex girlfriends and their abusive human male partners. I enjoyed all four of our main characters and found them all wonderfully complex. The reason I docked this down to 4 stars is because I felt vaguely confused during a large chunk of this book and wanted a couple more answers. Primarily, I wanted a better explanation of Jun's gender & PTSD, and I wanted to know more about Yoyo's childhood with his siblings. I felt like those two things would have given me a better understanding of Morgan and Jun's actions. Regardless- I really enjoyed this book, and I can't wait for more people to read it!

I want to both sit with this and turn this over in my head forever and immediately go back and re-read it. It's really one that unfolds, revealing more and more as it does in a way that makes it hard to remember that this is a debut novel. It's so well-steeped in thoughts on humanity and memory and identity (we've got robots, bionic humans, trans identity, cultural identity, codeshifting, just to name a few) but still paces itself and weaves all of the different throughlines together so well that you become more and more drawn in.

It's the sort of novel that small asides by a character later spiral into such importance that you flip back to re-read the /exact/ wording because it makes that much of a difference. The concept of memory - paralleled by an artificial intelligence as one that can never forget - is constant companion to all of the characters and their growth. How memories shape us, how fallible memory can be, how trauma can rewrite memory, how people can take on the emotions of another's memories as if it were their own - and of course, their robotic parallels and what it means for our main robot characters and their humanity. The idea of a ghost in the shell is never explicitly called out, but it hovers around every time we see a broken robotic shell, every time a human talks about rebooting or refreshing a robot's memory, and honestly everything about Stephen and Yoyo. In an increasingly automated world, the book also digs into the idea of what it means to love and be loved and how memory and choice plays into that (and somehow addresses a lot of my issues I didn't even knew I had with reincarnation romances where they have previous lives' memories).

It's also so important to note that this is a near-future unified Korea, and the geopolitical situation and lingering trauma over both the separation and unification is so present in every interaction even when it's not explicitly about the war(s).

In writing this, I just keep finding ways that all of the themes are woven throughout all of the characters and scenarios and I keep being in awe that this is a debut novel.

A Near State of Transition

“Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman. The world made a promise to her: death is a problem that can be solved.”

Silvia Park’s 2025 near-future novel, "Luminous”, set in a recently united Korea, imagines a world with multiple stages of personality development existing side-by-side in human, robotic and integrated human-robotic forms. Their lives appear simple but, below the surface, more complex with unusual twists and implications for biological life as we experience it.

After a brief prologue, the story opens with the Seoul Robot Crimes unit investigating the disappearance of a young female robot, Eli. Quickly, the situation moves into a deeper exploration of a society with seemingly traditional crimes that has more dynamic issues: will humans outlast their transitional and post-human forms in a more programmed world?

The storyline follows three groups of people as they come to terms with converging situations:

• Liu Ruije, an older woman who uses a mechanical support vest to aid her declining body and her robotic companion, Yoyo; and a group of younger human companions, Taewon, Wonsuk, Mars and Amelia, exploring the robot cast-off wastelands of earlier models
• Detective Cho Jun, a human member of Robot Crimes, with restored mobility through robotic aides due to a prior accident and whose assignment is to track down Elisha or “Eli, child version of Sakura, the popular “girl next door” robot from Imagine Friends and
• Morgan, Cho’s sister, a personality programmer for Imagine Friends who is launching a new release of robotic companion designs, Future X Children, with Boy X, her design, to be the star of the launch and her own robotic companion, Stephen

Additional shadowy personalities are Cho Yosep, Morgan and Cho’s father, and his deceased partner, Kanemoto Masaaki, founder of Imagine Friends.

Just imagine Barbie, Ken and their many iterations larger, mechanically smooth enough to pass for human forms, including intimate physical contact, and programmed to anticipate their human companions’ needs and desires with the devotion of pets.

But are they devoted as they are redesigned with new physical and behavior traits while storing previous learned memories, good and bad, that carry to the next design generation through a visible “luminous” cloud transfer?

And will they ultimately outlast humans and learn to self-program their own future replications?

The story takes time to unfold and can be frustrating to sustain interest due to various diversions and getting familiar with names and local references to places, food, etc. Like a Dickens novel, the plot is dense but a rewarding speculation.

The questions raised were anticipated by Czech science fiction writer, Karel Capek, in his 1920 groundbreaking novel and play, “RUR, Rossum’s’ Universal Robots”, introducing the world to the now familiar term, robot.

A speculative-fiction story that contains a little bit of everything, from robot siblings to childhood trauma and forbidden romance; not to mention the rather in-depth and candid discussions on grief and what it means to really be human.... again, this book has it all! Now, in light of this, does it stick the landing? For the most part, yes. At least to me, anyway. I enjoyed the prose but did find it a bit stilted at times (as in, it felt like it flip-flopped back and forth, but maybe this was done on purpose?). Either way, I thought the story was engaging and unique enough to ignore those inconsistencies, and ultimately would definitely recommend this one out to all my SFF lovers (and everyone else too). PLUS— just look at the cover!!! Absolutely captivating.

I am once again emotional about fictional robots. This is such an emotionally gripping story, and even though the characters are messy and sometimes awful, I loved them so much. The things that the narrative has to say about what it means to be human, and what it means to love someone and be loved in return, regardless of if you are actually a human or a robot, had me in tears. The prose was a little jumpy/choppy at times, so it wasn't a full five stars, but I still loved this to pieces.

For my fellow Person of Interest fans, reading this book constantly reminded me of this interaction between Arthur and Harold:

"Your child is a dancing star."
"It's not a child. It's a machine."
"It's a false dichotomy; it's all electricity. Does it make you laugh? Does it make you weep?"
"Yes."
"What's more human?"

I wanted to love this one so bad but I had such a difficult time connecting with the writing style. It felt really all over the place. I know this will work for some people but it was a miss for me. I love the idea behind it so I can see myself recommending it to people who would be interested in this story but I felt like I was dragging though the entire book.

This is my Klara and the Sun. Literally has everything and more in the slog that Ishiguro presents. Not only is humanity found throughout siblingship and the ethos of Korean life and living, but in sentimental hypotheses of the future.

This novel is complicated and beautifully written. The world building was heavy, even for speculative fiction, which caused me to take things slow at the beginning. But I am glad for that because as I reached the halfway point I couldn’t stop reading.

I think the blurb does a good job covering the major themes of the book, but I did find this to be primarily an emotional journey. The plot exists as a stage for Park’s characters to be explored. I found each of them heartbreaking in their own way. That being said there is plenty of action throughout the book. I found the portrayal of a trans character to be honest and not shoe horned in any way.

And this is without a doubt the most beautiful cover I have seen in years. I am excited for everyone to read this one. Thank you Simon & Schuster for the ARC.

I think there might be a good story here but it's written such a nonmusical clunky style that I couldn't engage with it. People who read for story only may have a better experience.

This is going to be huge. I was so obsessed with this book from the summary, and was hooked just a few pages in. Other futuristic books sometimes fail to hold emotional weight, and this one is so spectacular. Set in a unified Korea and following three estranged siblings (two human, one robot!!) this will have you in love right away.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the arc of this book. All opinions are my own.

I really loved this one! I am not the best at writing reviews sometimes, but sometimes books take you by surprise and this one did just that. I got invested a few chapters in and couldn't put it done. It was so good! I highly recommend this one.

Imagine a near future in which there is a unified Korea, supposedly achieved without violence, though that appears to be an comforting lie. In this near future, huge leaps have been made in robotics and bionics. Jun, a policeman, is a trans man whose transition was aided by the new technologies. His estranged sister, Morgan, is a striving designer at Imagine Friends, a company that makes robots to act as domestics, workers, and pretty much any imaginable personal need (yes, including the one you’re thinking of).

Jun and Morgan had a sibling of a sort when they were kids. Yoyo was a robot invented and made by their father, a visionary in the field who suddenly gave it up—and just as suddenly removed Yoyo from their home, even though Jun and Morgan loved him.

Young girl Ruijie has an illness that attacks her limbs, but she manages well with a bionic suit. She’s obsessed with the robot junkyard next to her school and regularly combs the site, as do many other scavengers who sell robot parts at weekend markets. Ruijie finds Yoyo in the junkyard, operational except for a missing lower leg, and she and Yoyo quickly become friends. So that’s your world-building, which is well done, making it easy to visualize the lives of these characters. The first half of the book is a little confusing at times, and has too much going on, but things improve greatly in the second half, as the action builds toward events that bring the separate characters together, with surprising and intense results.

An imperfect, but thought-provoking, touching and even heartbreaking story.

A dystopia set in a united Korea about a society conflicted over whether robots are family or disposable.

First and foremost, thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an eARC for an honest review.

What. A. Book. Honestly, I was expecting good and what I got from Silvia Park was well beyond anything I could've have expected. Set in a reunified Korea in a future where robots are commonplace, Luminous takes you through the journeys of three characters with writing so engaging that it feels as though you are right alongside them as they go about their lives. Park's prose takes a hold of you in a way that I have not had the pleasure of experiencing very often. I wanted to be in this world, to know the depths and intricacies. It was so well built as a world that the characters could've been completely one-note and I still would have enjoyed it. Thankfully, the characters are not one-note, and all provide different insight into what the meaning of being alive is, and how we are shaped by and shape the world arounds us as we move through it. I was surprised in the best way by this story, and highly recommend it a relatively meditative piece of speculative fiction on the nature of existence itself.

Luminous is an ambitious story of a post-war unified Korea, where humanoid robots have fully integrated into society, as workers, citizens, and family members. The narrative follows Jun, a transgender war veteran turned robot crimes detective, his sister, Morgan, who works for the largest and most impressive robot design and manufacturing company, RuiJie, a young girl with a degenerative disease, and Taewon, her friend from summer school who is a North Korean orphan living with his criminal uncle.

Park’s story is impressive in its scope, intellect, and vulnerability. She manages to ask all the important questions: what makes a human a human? What makes a robot a robot? And how do they, as individuals and a society, manage to overlap? How and why do they use each other?

A large portion of the plot centers around a child robot named YoYo, Jun and Morgan’s childhood sibling, gifted to them by their father, a famous roboticist, who was then given to the war effort without their knowledge. Years later, YoYo ingratiates himself with RuiJie and Taewon’s group of friends from their summer school program, just as Morgan’s robot company is launching a new product she designed to mimic YoYo.

The plot was in-depth and enjoyable. Most all the characters (even the robots) were relatable and the integration of robots into society was multilayered and quite interesting. Some of the scientific and robotic minutiae was lost on me, but overall, a very solid novel.

This sci-fi mystery opens in a future world where North and South Korea have been recently reunified, increasingly humanoid AI robots abound but are still treated as disposable objects and bionic implants on humans can repair wounds. Both robots and Northerns have become the embodiment of second-class citizens by the Southern Koreans. This thought-provoking and norm defying novel centers on human/robot relationships and what constitutes sentience, gender, and humanity.

Jun Cho works as a lowly detective in Seoul’s robotic crime unit — lowly as most humans don’t truly care about crimes in which robots are the victims. Jun’s tasked with finding Eli, a beloved older model robot who served as a life companion child to a wealthy woman, and who’s disappeared while out running an errand. In his search, Jun inadvertently stumbles upon his estranged sister Morgan, who’s a personality programmer for the world’s leading robot manufacturer and has been tasked with creating the perfect male child robot. Morgan had distanced herself from Jun when he got seriously wounded as a military soldier in the reunification war and was healed by most his body becoming bionic. Morgan not only has a live-in boyfriend AI lover but has used the personality and prototype of their very human like robot “older brother” Yoyo to form the basis of the new boy robot she’s developing. Yoyo was a special creation of Jun and Morgan’s brilliant Dad who specialized in robot design before abandoning everything to only study biology.

Yoyo has somehow found himself surviving in a robot junk yard, missing a leg, and constantly at the risk of scavengers looking for robot parts. He becomes befriended by a ragtag group of schoolchildren that includes a girl with robotic exoskeleton legs and a young North Korean refugee whose uncle is leading the scrappers’ hunt of valuable robot parts to sell. Yoyo also faces danger from robot traffickers who kidnap and resell robots, as well as human out to abuse robots physically or sexually.

Yoyo comes to embody all that is fraught in human/robot relationships, as well as the emergent humanity of robots, along with a mystery that emerges about YoYo’s larger mission that led the leaving of Jun and Morgan.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

"If his body was the vastness of the universe, his rage was infinite and luminous."

I'm a sucker for a sad robot story. Add noir elements, and I am hooked.

Reading the description, Luminous sounds like a fairly standard near-future speculative sci-fi. If you're a regular sci-fi reader, you've likely seen these themes explored many times before. But the meticulous execution positions this as a true standout.

There's a raw internality to each of the characters you inhabit as the reader. You're anchored in their perception. You feel claustrophobic in their heads, which adds to the slow build of tension.

The interwoven stories are complex. It would be easy for them to get muddy. But the use of common tropes of the genre makes it easy to follow. A children's summer adventure. A war-hardened detective on a case. A tech employee, searching for self-worth in a soulless megacorp.

Klara and the Sun meets Ghost in the Shell, this is an excellent slow-burn sci-fi and an accessible meeting of literary and speculative fiction.

(ps. it's queer)

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book of science fiction that take place sometime in the future, where Korea is united, robots are in demand, parents and siblings can drive one crazy, and love can take many forms, but will still break one's heart, either real or processed by logic chips.

I grew up reading science fiction, but fell away as I found that science fiction wasn't really growing up. For a while science fiction was like a parody of that old United States Army slogan: Join the army, travel to new countries, meet new people and kill them. There were still some authors I followed, but a lot of it did nothing to catch my mind, even though I could see numerous titles daily working in bookstores. Within the last few years science fiction has grown up with bigger ideas and better stories, and grown out including more people into the genre and letting them tell stories that are different. And different in American publishing is anything outside our shores. Many of the books that have made me think the most the last couple of months have come from Asia, especially Korea. Luminous by first time novelist Silvia Park is one of those books that I will be thinking about for quite a long time. This is a story about a possible future, where Korea is united, robots are as accepted as pets, families still have issues love is still confusing, and people can still be toxic.

A young girl escapes summer school, climbing into a vast dumping ground of broken robots, her legs encased in braces to keep her moving. Ruijie is eleven, her life has changed as her body starts to break down, and she seeks solace in understanding robotic parts, for that might be her future. Ruijie finds a robot with a broken foot, but one that seems different from anything she has come across. Yoyo is his name, and soon they are having adventures, making new friends, and finding trouble. Jun has never been comfortable with their body, and after being blown up in the war unifying the nation, is uncomfortable in the new one the army presented them with. Jun works a police officer, working crimes against robots, and their latest case, a missing robot, brings Jun back into contact with their sister, Morgan. The two have been estranged for years, problems starting with the disappearance of their older brother, a robot named Yoyo. Morgan is a developer for a company making new robotic companions, boy robots that look very much like Yoyo.

There is so much going on in this book that any seasoned author could easily go off the rails, into the sea and down into the bedrock. For a first time novelist, Silvia Park does everything right, crafting a story that is interesting, fresh, compelling, and thought provoking. There really is a lot of ideas, ideas that would make some authors create whole series, but Park is full of them. The book starts strong and doesn't let up, the story told through a few characters eyes, that never misses, never slows, and constantly unfolds. Little bits add to big bits. There are discussions about the fallibility of memory, and how a wrong rememberance can change one's life. I really can't stop thinking about this world, how everything is crafted, and even though it is the future, the ugly thinking of the past still shadows many achievements and ideas.

I can't praise this book enough. The characters are well-developed and interesting, the story, like life goes to strange places, and yet as a reader I felt a strong mix of emotions at the end. Mostly that I wanted to know more about this future. A book for people who love what science fiction for what it can do, make us want to see the future. And know more.

This was a very interesting book taking a deep look into human robot relationships. The plot(s) were woven nicely together by Park to give the reader a wide lens into what this future could hold where AI and robot technology meet.

The family at the center of this story is made of a human mother, father (ex-human trailblazing robot scientist turned animal robotics scholar) and three offspring - 2 human and one AI/Android robot. The robot is referred to as a sibling. One of the siblings is also at one point in a romantic relationship with another robot which she created in the likeness of a celebrity she admired. Other characters include curious kids, grimey salvage yard workers and a myriad of humanoid robots.

Part missing robot mystery, part story about family struggles and part story about how humanity is using robotic humanoid tech in everyday life, this story was a fun look at what a slice of Earth could become and definitely made this reader think about the pros and cons of it all. Personally I saw more drawbacks in this future. Park drew up something that felt rather sterile, yet very grungy.

I felt the book was drawn out in some areas. The prose was nice and the atmosphere Park created added a lot to the experience of this read.

Thank you to Netgalley, Silvia Park and Simon & Schuster for the early e-copy of this book and the opportunity to provide honest feedback.

Luminous is a solid robots-in-the-future sci-fi read. It deals with the usual moral/practical questions around this kind of technological advancement, but only seems to scratch at the implications. It’s like a meandering river with not many depths or rapids. Usually I enjoy such slower reads but it somehow didn’t fit the theme of the novel. I wish the author would have gotten more into the philosophical/moral parts of the robot thematic. How it is now it’s more of a family story despite the members of it interacting way too little with each other and a general reflection on how to cope with loss (even here the idea of using robots to cope with it is only dealt with very briefly). In the end I had the feeling the book should have started around 3/4 in and should have evolved from there way over its end. I also wished Yoyo would have been explored as a character more. We see his actions but rarely get to know anything about his motivations or opinions.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the earc!