Review: Luminous by Silvia Park in Locus

One of the problems with reviewing for a venue like Locus, which has a relatively long lag time, is that months can pass between my reading a book and finally getting to talk to a wide audience about. Such is the case with Silvia Park's debut novel Luminous, a book I've wanted to rave about since reading it at the beginning of the year. Set in a unified future Korea in which robots are ubiquitous and increasingly human-like, it feels like a direct follow-up to classics of the genre like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Not to mention, an early contender for one of the best science fiction novels of 2025.

The more we learn about Luminous's world, however, the more this distinction between robot and human feels more like a social convention than a concrete fact. Jun himself is a case in point: Catastrophically injured during his military service, he is now mostly robotic ("They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic"). For Jun, a trans man who was saving up for gender confirmation surgery when he joined the army, this produces a different form of dysphoria. His new body looks more masculine than he could have achieved through medical treatments, but nevertheless feels alien. When he's incorrectly clocked (often by other robots) he likens it to being misgendered.

This slippage persists in the novel's other subplots. Jun's sister Morgan, a robotics designer, observes that the women she sees in clubs are competing not with each other but with the latest female robot model ("The early July release of the Yuna·X had already upended plastic surgery trends. Monolids were en vogue again"). Privately, she has opted out of the dating world by building her own robot, Stephen, who is part-butler, part-boyfriend, but whose inability to strike the correct balance between independence and subservience leaves her frustrated. Ruijie, a young girl who suffers from a degenerative illness, dreams of the day when she will be given her own bionic body, and will no longer have to rely on a mechanical exoskeleton.

Jun and Morgan are united (but also torn apart) by their pain over the loss of their older brother Yoyo, an experimental robot designed by their visionary father. Yoyo disappeared, it is eventually strongly hinted, when the military became intrigued by his capabilities; like the loss of any child, this has shattered his family. It is at the root of both siblings' careers, as they attempt, each in their own way, to repair an irreparable loss – though, in a twist that is perhaps emblematic of the family's brokenness, their efforts end up running at cross-purposes. When Jun learns that Morgan has modeled the latest robot boy model on Yoyo, he cries out in despair: "when he ends up in a junkyard, I'll be the one to find him."

There's also a distinct cyberpunk flavor to Luminous, which feels appropriate since I've had that genre on the brain recently. I've been saying for years that cyberpunk has been staging a stealth comeback, in the work of authors like Tade Thompson and Lavanya Lakshminarayan. More recently, I saw a thread of cyberpunk running through Ursula Whitcher's mosaic novel North Continent Ribbon, which carries some of the subgenre's key tropes to a far future, colonized planet setting. And, of course, the podcast Shelved By Genre has been reading through William Gibson's sprawl trilogy, which has been a great opportunity to revisit these books and consider the ways in which this mode—which can so easily be reduced to an aesthetic that is almost self-parody—actually has interesting, relevant things to say about the key issues of our present moment. Luminous, with its focus on a society that erases the boundary between humans and machines in order to justify treating one like the other, is a reminder of just how relevant those ideas are.