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Bora Chung takes readers on a journey to the unexpected in her latest short story collection, Your Utopia. In her 2022 collection, Cursed Bunny, Chung showed us many types of monsters in stories ranging in varying degrees from speculative fiction to supernatural to horror. In Your Utopia, the narratives are decidedly more science fiction than fantasy, and while there are still monsters, they take a backseat to internalized conflicts and the faults inherent in humanity.
In place of monsters, Chung delves into broad themes related to technology and the future of humanity. Technology is not necessarily the enemy, but serves as an omnipresent force throughout the stories. Central to the collection is an exploration of loneliness and isolation, but Chung is far too complex a writer to simply blame technology for these shortcomings.
In the story “A Very Ordinary Marriage,” the protagonist, Seonhyuk-ssi, finds himself estranged from his wife, Park Jiyoung. He suspected she was having an affair because of her late-night phone calls. It turns out his assumptions are wrong. She’s not having an affair, she’s just an alien. Her people have dispatched her to the planet to make observations of human behavior, and her late-night phone calls used to relay the reports. Seonhyuk-ssi walks out when she tells him this.
Park Jiyoung and her alien handler both beg Seonhyuk-ssi to return to the house. Should the mission fail, Jiyoung’s life will be in danger. If Seonhyuk-ssif doesn’t return home, the mission will have failed–placing her life in his hands. He is reluctant. But when he finally returns, he knows she isn’t the same person. Read straight, the story is a tight science fiction story about aliens infiltrating a marriage. As an allegory, it’s about the distance two people can find themselves in even when they are ostensibly intimate.
Seonhyuk-ssi ultimately determines his wife has been replaced when she starts calling him the pet name “Oppa.” She’s never used such affectionate terms. The story ends with him embracing her and observing, “I must surely look like an ordinary husband now, the kind of normal that they want me to be.” The sentiment is shared by many of the characters in the collection, they yearn for normalcy, to belong.
The title story, “Your Utopia,” also reflects on belonging. It’s a standout story in the collection for its point of view and protagonist. The narrator is a self-driving car. The humans have all left the planet. They have abandoned the detritus of their civilization, discarded pieces of technology, artificial intelligence, and their robot bodies while taking all the energy, batteries, and generators. There’s nothing for the machines to plug into. Luckily, the narrator is self-charging.
The car’s solar cells can keep it alive, but just barely. Energy is a constant concern. Even when it powers down at night, the car’s artificial intelligence still burns through battery reserves by thinking. That’s when the car acknowledges, “Here I am in the dark, having thoughts about having fewer thoughts.” Its existence depends on this energy, and throughout the story the narrator provides updates on its battery capacity reminiscent of our contemporary dependency on our phones and their reminders of low battery. We can relate to this car because so much of our lives are tied to the batteries in our devices.
The car must also salvage wheels from other vehicles who were not quite as lucky to have solar panels. To survive, it must literally cannibalize its peers. But what it also longs for each day is to find other artificial life, to have a companion to interact with. Where Chung is most successful is in building up this machine with the emotions and qualities of a person, to create a connection to this car where we can understand how it feels. Imagine feeling empathy for a Tesla.
The car is ultimately faced with a choice of sacrificing its autonomy for the comfort of proximity to other intelligences. A building’s artificial intelligence makes the offer: handover the solar cells, and be allowed to live in the community recharging when needed. The narrator must decide whether having community is worth giving up its freedom. The freedom it has also isn’t real, though. It’s been enslaved by the foundational commands of humanity – to obey humans and ensure no harm comes to them. Even long after the humans have vacated, the car is still beholden to that programming.
There are also stories that merge science fiction with horror, like “The End of The Voyage,” a nod to the many zombie tales of recent years. Humanity has been infected with a plague. The disease causes people to want to eat other humans, to see them as food and nothing else. It all begins in Iowa with a family chowing down on each other and rapidly spreads. Then, governments of the world unite with the common goal of sending uninfected humans into space to find a cure.
The disease obviously has other ideas. It’s highly communicable, impossible to detect, and the first symptoms are victims eating their companions. This result leads to fairly humorous visuals: “He has already eaten his left hand from the wrist down and was halfway through eating his right hand. As he licked the blood coming out of his left wrist as if it were a scrumptious ice-cream cone.” Chung demonstrates adept comic timing throughout the story.
Ultimately the narrator and her companion, a mechanic, survive the fatal outbreak of the disease by escaping the ship and returning to Earth. Unfortunately, there isn’t too much left back at home for them and they might very well be the last two humans on Earth. The mechanic proposes they should become like Adam and Eve and repopulate the world, but the protagonist puts an end to that by eating him.
Chung has crafted another weird and surprising story collection. She plays with our expectations of the future, experiments with the possibilities of what could be, and sprinkles in elements from other genres to keep the stories fresh. Technology’s ubiquity throughout the collection only serves to better highlight the humanity depicted and examined within it.
FICTION
Your Utopia: Stories
By Bora Chung
Translated from Korean by Anton Hur
Algonquin Books
Published January 30, 2024
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