gaudior

Speaking of literary sff about how humans project out their loss and grief, Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells is sort of the opposite of Luminous -- where Luminous sprawls out into big branching intersecting plotlines and detailed, evocative worldbuilding, The Place of Shells spirals in on itself, carefully layering its metaphors on top of each other as the world echoes its protagonist's own interiority.

The unnamed narrator is a Japanese PhD student studying medieval saints in Göttingen, Germany, in the summer of 2020. The first quarantine regulations are just beginning to relax, and, as the world opens up a little bit again, she's visited by her old grad school friend Nomiya, who unfortunately died in the 2011 tsunami, and whose body was never recovered. The meeting is, inevitably, a bit awkward, mostly small talk -- it's hard to make a connection after nine years, especially when one person has been changing and moving through the world and the other has not -- but Nomiya seems to be enjoying Göttingen. He decides to stay for some time. The narrator feels that it would be rude to ask him whether he's going to return home to Japan for the Ghost Festival.

As the summer unfurls, in a series of encounters and re-encounters with friends new and old, the city of Göttingen gets stranger. The planet Pluto, which was removed from Göttingen's scale-model planet-themed walking trail some time ago, keeps intermittently re-appearing. The narrator's roommate keeps taking her dog out to look for truffles and instead the dog finds strange lost objects, all of which seem to have profound significance to somebody. Nomiya comes to dinner with the narrator's old grad school advisor and brings a friend, a nice man who appears to be experiencing the city from approximately a century previous. In fact, time is slipping all over Göttingen: and what is time, or memory, except something that lives in a landmark or an object? The narrator studies medieval saints. She understands things in terms of iconography.

I picked this up largely because it was translated by Polly Barton, who also translated Where The Wild Ladies Are and Butter (post on which forthcoming) and at this point I've decided I should probably just read everything she translates because it's clearly going to take me interesting places. This book, absolutely another data point of reinforcement.

ME, THREE CHAPTERS INTO SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: I often experience powerful sad pet emotions in books about humanoid robots so I think it's unfair for Luminous to also contain actual dead pet emotions
MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE: if it helps I don't think there are a lot of sad pet emotions in the rest of the book, I think you've hit the worst of it! the robots are not really sad pets
ME, WITH AN EMOTIONAL HANGOVER AFTER FINISHING SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: well, broadly speaking, you were right about the robots, but you were absolutely wrong about hitting the end of the sad pet emotions --

So Luminous, as you may have gathered, is a book that made me feel emotions; also a literary science fiction novel about humanoid robots; also a near-future cyberpunk noir; also a bittersweet children's adventure; also, or perhaps most of all, a family saga about three estranged siblings in post-unification Korea:

Jun, the middle child, a transmasc army veteran turned robot crimes cop whose war injuries have resulted in a VR addiction, an unsurmountable amount of debt, and a messy combination of gender euphoria and dysphoria about his new mostly-cyborg body
Morgan, the baby of the family, a successful MIT graduate with a well-paying tech job in robot design and a secret illegal off-the-books robot housekeeper-slash-personal-assistant-slash-boyfriend designed to help her get over her miserable insecurities, a task at which they are both Unfortunately Aware that he is Not Succeeding
and Yoyo, oldest and forever youngest, the advanced prototype child robot designed by their brilliant roboticist father who entered Jun and Morgan's lives as children and played the role of big brother for a few critical years, leaving them both haunted by his absence and his ghost

Where is their brilliant father now, aside from living rent-free inside his children's brains? Great question. For mysterious reasons he's decided he no longer wants to work on humanoid robots and has bounced offscreen to Boston to work on designing robot whales and tigers and so on, a project that museums love but which most serious roboticists think is rather silly.

Where is Yoyo now, aside from living rent-free inside his siblings' brains? Also great question! Two of the book's plotlines (cyberpunk noir) follow Jun investigating the increasingly troubling case of a missing child robot, and Morgan working on the launch of a new next-gen child robot, Boy X. (Crimes against robots are not illegal broadly except as theft, but crimes against child robots are illegal in the same sort of way that child porn is illegal.) In the third major plotline (bittersweet children's adventure), classmates Ruijie and Taewon -- a bright girl from a wealthy family with doting parents and the best high-tech leg braces for her advancing neurodegenerative disorder, and a bitter North Korean refugee boy more-or-less under the care of his criminal uncle, respectively -- find a strangely advanced child robot abandoned in a junkyard ...

(In this near-future Korea, btw, reunification was brought about by an event that propaganda cheerfully characterizes as "the Bloodless War" because it was mostly fought by robots. The experiences of several of the characters beg to differ with this characterization.)

There's a massive amount going on in this book, and all of it is complicated and none of it maps onto simple metaphors. For all the POVs that we get in the book, for all the fact that unexpected robot actions are frequently driving the plot, we're never in the heads of any of the robots themselves: all we can really know is what the various characters project onto them, an endless sea of human emotions about gender and disability and parenthood and childhood and societal expectations and trauma and grief.

On a plot level, I'm not at all sure it fully comes together at the end -- there's so much going on that 'coming together' seems almost impossible, tbh -- or that I actually understood all of what had, technically, happened, per se. On an emotional level, I will reiterate that the book made me feel feelings!! laudatory!!!