Park, Silvia
Entry updated 28 April 2025. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) Korean teacher and author, latterly part-time in US, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Poor Unfortunate Fools" in The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project) for November 2018. More Real Than Him (7 August 2019 Tor.com; 2019 ebook), about the construction of a Robot lover in the image of a film star (see Media Landscape), is a hectic story-length early version of what became her first novel, Luminous (2025), which is told at a graver, considered pace that sanctions its title. The full tale, set in a unified Near Future Korea, shifts from initial Young-Adult heatedness to a more measured adult presentation of a complex world that justifies its clear filial relationship to the elegiac closing sections of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021), though Klara is about to be disassembled in a scrapyard, and Park's characters scavenge successfully for parts. The protagonist, seeking for prosthetics to combat a degenerative disease, comes across a Robot boy, wired like Klara to love with insatiable obedience. His family – a Cyborg and a full-body human designer who has modelled her manufactured lover on a film star – provide a complex mulch through which to examine the future of human-AI communities. [JC]
Silvia Park
born
works
- Luminous (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2025) [hb/]
collections and stories
- More Real Than Him (New York: Tor.com, 2019) [story: ebook: first appeared 7 August 2019 Tor.com: na/Dion MBD]
links
previous versions of this entry