Source of book: borrowed from the library
Your Utopia was a recommendation on NPR last year, and ended up on my list. It checks several boxes of books I like to mix into my reading: short stories, science fiction, female author, person of color, in translation, LGBTQ characters.
But this is no mere box-checking read - it is a thoughtful collection of stories that imagine a range of futures. It is often dark, but in unexpected ways. At the end of each story, you have to pause and ask some difficult questions.
The stories vary wildly in genre and style, with each one quite unique and memorable.
As I sometimes do for collections with manageable numbers of stories, I will say a little about each one in turn.
Bora Chung is a writer from South Korea. In addition to her writing, she also works as a translator of works from Russian and Polish, and teaches slavic languages. She is also a social activist for feminism, workplace safety, and LGBTQ rights, and this inspired a pair of the stories in this book.
I will warn that there might be some spoilers in this post. I will try to avoid them, but it may not be entirely possible.
The Center for Immortality Research
This is one of the lighter stories, and is wickedly funny. The narrator works at the Center, which is underfunded by a drug company. The event in the story is a big party celebrating the 98th anniversary of the founding of the Center. Why 98? Nobody really knows, but the decision was to celebrate that anniversary.
The narrator is a low-level employee, but she, like all the employees, have job titles of “supervisor” or above. Or, as the saying goes, too many generals, too few privates.
As you might imagine, the whole story is a bureaucratic hell, the constant passing of the buck, with nobody wanting to do the actual work.
Which in this case is convincing “Movie Star B” to headline the event. And designing the invitation, with all the upper management changing things to make it worse. And then the party itself goes a bit sideways. It’s all a glorious mess.
And also, the political candidate who constantly uses “Thoughtified” while promising to make everyone immortal if elected.
I won’t reveal any of the twists at the end, but definitely recommend this one for the humor.
The End of the Voyage
What to call this story? It is kind of a post-apocalyptic zombie space travel thing, I guess. A plague hits Earth, where otherwise normal humans start eating other humans, seemingly not realizing this will kill them.
A carefully selected group of researchers is sent away from Earth, with the hope that they can solve the mystery of the illness without becoming infected themselves.
But things go wrong, of course. The narrator is the odd woman out: she is a linguist, not a medical or science related person. Her only friend on the ship turns out to be a mechanic who is far better educated than he seems.
The twist in this one is pretty dark, but the tone is campy enough to make this a weirdly fun read.
(Related: Colson Whitehead wrote a similarly engaging zombie novel, Zone One, which I highly recommend.)
I do want to quote one line from this one.
Most of the people on the spaceship were doctors or scientists or spaceflight engineers. I was, in other words, a very exceptional case among them. Every time I attempted to converse with them, I would retreat after concluding the STEM mind not only thought differently but was probably structured differently to begin with.
A Very Ordinary Marriage
Actually, the marriage is not ordinary, and that is the point. The narrator in this case is a man who suspects his wife is cheating on him, because she sneaks out of bed in the middle of the night and calls….someone, who she speaks to in a very foreign language.
When she finally confesses the truth - that she is an alien sent to study human ecology - he does not take it well. I won’t reveal where the story goes from there, but it is pretty creepy.
Maria, Gratia Plena
This one is a pretty wild story. In this possible future, memories and dreams can be read, and used as evidence in a criminal case. In line with the 5th Amendment (as we Americans would understand) the evidence cannot be used against the person who is dreaming, just against others.
The problem is the issue of figuring out what is an actual memory, and what is just the fantasy of a dream.
In this story, a woman who is comatose and dying is being read by the narrator, who is the specialist able to read the dreams. We see flashbacks of the dreams, but there is little enough to truly make sense of.
Was the woman part of a drug ring that distributes strange hallucinogenic pills? Or are the scenes just part of her nightmares? Or are they a revenge fantasy?
The one thing that does seem to be real is her memory of childhood, where her mother attempted to escape an abusive husband, but because he was a cop, he was able to get away with it, track her down, and murder her and her children.
In the story, it appears the girl survived and became the woman whose memories are being searched. The event, however, is not fiction. Chung based it on a real case in France, which she retells in the Author’s Note at the end of the book. As she notes, while France is not particularly tolerant of domestic violence, and has little gun violence, there is a problem worldwide of cops getting away with spousal abuse. This is well documented - cops have really high rates of domestic violence and yet are less likely to be prosecuted - or lose their guns.
Your Utopia
This story is narrated by a self-driving vehicle, which is already an interesting literary device. The vehicle lives in a post-apocalyptic world, where humans appear to have disappeared, left, or something. The world keeps on going, however, because everything is solar charged, robots do all the repair work, and so on.
The narrator has some other robot in the back seat who is his (its?) only companion. This robot apparently worked for some corporation, but its function is unknown. It keeps asking “Your utopia is?” over and over. The car responds.
Meanwhile, all this quasi-living mechanical stuff has started to evolve, amalgamating into larger organisms, more or less.
The whole story is a trip, and very imaginative.
A Song for Sleep
Another story narrated by a machine. In this case, the sentient elevator in an apartment building that becomes attached to an old woman who lives there. The elevator ends up practically stalking the woman, because she is so disconnected from the interwebs that he can find out almost nothing about her. He searches the available data, but comes up with little other than a favorite song, which he plays for her.
Themes in this one include aging and isolation.
Seed
I wonder if this story was inspired in part by Isaac Asimov’s classic story, “Each an Explorer.” In both, the idea of pollination and seeds are central to the plot.
In this one, earth’s economy has been reduced to full exploitation of nature by two corporations, who are so in collusion it is as if there were only one, focused only on profit.
Humans have largely left the planet, and just use it for monoculture for food and other resources.
But, as the book says, nature still existed. And evolved. At some point, humans and plants fused, making a sort of hybrid that communicates largely by pollen.
Corporations can pretend they control life, but they ultimately do not.
“The sun doesn’t rise because you people gave it a permit. The rain doesn’t fall because you people gave it a permit, either. Long, long before you created your corporations and became obsessed with profit, nature existed. We are simply living by it. You people think nature is a passive nonlife and whoever gets to use it up first is the owner, but that is a false belief. Nature is alive all on its own, and it works in its own way. One reaps what one sows - this is one of nature’s ways, a very real and accurate expression.”
To Meet Her
This final story is based loosely on the case of a transgender soldier who was removed from the military due to bigotry, and later committed suicide. As I noted, the author is an activist, and this is one of the issues she protested against - and she has been arrested as a result. She describes some of this in the Author’s Note as well.
The story is both about a terrorist attack by a right-wing bigot who hated transgender people, and about the work of an author to tell the story and work for positive social change.
Perhaps the most interesting moment in this story comes when the fans finally get to “meet” the author. Because of security concerns (see: terrorist attack the last time), the meeting is virtual. The fans are not allowed to actually see what the author looks like (again: security), but they instead see the face they each imagine the author to have.
For the elderly narrator, she sees an ordinary woman’s face. But for another attendee - one with bad intentions - they are shown the monster they project onto transgender people. As the author puts it, “What that person saw was not my real appearance. What they saw was themselves. What they wanted to see.”
Chung notes that hate exists in our minds, and that is what the screen showed, the monster this person had created in their own head. Whereas the elderly narrator, injured in the terrorist attack, realizes that looking into her own psyche actually was rather nice. This is so true in real life. As George Bernard Shaw said about pessimists, “A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.” This is doubly true for bigots.
Your Utopia is a worthwhile read, whether you are in to science fiction or not. It is well written, and imaginative and thoughtful.
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