Relationships with robots drive plot of novel ‘Luminous’

LAWRENCE — Yes, Silvia Park’s debut novel, “Luminous,” has a posthumanist bent. But the University of Kansas assistant professor of English rejects the label dystopian. In “Luminous,” humans, after all, have survived climate change long enough to have robot brothers and sisters. And there's even a place of acceptance for queer people in Park’s imagined future.

But life is hardly without complications, especially for Detective Jun, who is only 22% human and whose assignment in the Division of Robot Crimes in post-Unification War Korea drives the plot.

The novel was released March 11 from publisher Simon & Schuster.

Park said that in addition to the zeitgeist, there were a couple of notable wellsprings for the thoughts that led to the novel: “Peter Pan” author J.M. Barrie’s fixation on childhood and children as well as the 2003 Korean crime thriller movie “Memories of Murder” by Bong Joon-Ho.

Park, a native of Seoul, splits their time between Korea and Kansas.

“I originally began writing a cheerful, optimistic adventure story with a robot and a bunch of kids,” Park said. “And the book changed because I wanted this robot to be part of a family. And then I realized, ‘Hey, this robot has siblings, and these siblings have grown up. That must be really weird for them to have been raised with a robot that doesn't age.’ Imagine if you had one sibling who remained forever 12 years old. That's how the book ended up shifting. I realized I was actually writing a ‘Peter Pan’ story.”

Park said they were moved by stories about Barrie’s older sibling having died in an ice-skating accident while both were still children, and the boys’ mother subsequently dressing and treating her surviving child as the deceased one.

“His mother, lost in her grief, would mistake him for his brother,” Park said. “And that was the genesis for my own book, as well — how when someone dies at such a young age, they're essentially frozen in time. And, in a way, a robot is a frozen testament to something that's never going to age or change.”

It’s not so big a leap, Park said, to imagine robot children of the sort that figure in “Luminous.”

“In a lot of robot stories these days, we look into the relationships that we're going to have with robots, many of them between adults,” Park said. “We see stories about romance with robots, or being replaced by robots, or fighting off robots. And I was fascinated by the idea of what would it look like if we decided to replace children with robots, if we had robots that looked like children. Especially with this past election, birth rates was a really big topic, right? Some people were saying, ‘People are not having enough kids,’ while others are saying, ‘There are so many uncertainties, economically and environmentally, that we're just scared to bring children into this world.’ So I think that if the technology really did get to that point, it would not be much of a leap to imagine a lot of couples wanting to adopt robots as children.”

As for the “Luminous” detective story, Park said they were inspired by the early film, “Memories of Murder,” by Bong Joon-Ho, who won Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscars for 2019’s “Parasite.”

“I was fascinated by the way ‘Memories of Murder’ isn't just about solving crimes,” Park said. “It's not just about, ‘Here's the villain, here are the victims, here's justice.’ The film is special because it exposes the way we're fallible. The detectives in the film are well-intentioned, but they're really bad at their jobs. One of them is from the countryside, and he is just so out of his depth. Another one is from the city. He's very book smart, but inexperienced ... they're just not prepared at all for the sheer evil they confront. And it isn't some demonic evil. It's a very ordinary evil. It's the banality of evil, where someone who looks just like us is capable of such malice and destruction.

“And I think that's what I wanted to explore with ‘Luminous.’ Because, unfortunately, we can worry about robots replacing us. We can worry about robots getting smarter than us. But I think before we reach that point, we're going to be doing a lot of harm against robots and ourselves.”