The New Scientist Book Club’s verdict on Luminous by Silvia Park: a fascinating take on robots

The New Scientist Book Club had quite a change of science-fictional pace in May, moving from the wilds of space in our April read, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, to a much closer-to-home future in Silvia Park’s Luminous.

Like another of our reads this year, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, this imagines a world where robots are integrated into society – and explores how we might deal with this on many different levels: emotionally, spiritually, practically, sexually. Set in a reunified Korea, it’s a compelling blend of three storylines: a police procedural, in which detective Jun is out to discover what might have become of a robot girl who has gone missing; a ragtag bunch of kids on an adventure, in which Ruijie and her schoolmates find an abandoned robot boy in a scrapyard; and a tale of a dysfunctional family. Jun and his younger sister Morgan grew up with a third sibling, a robot who disappeared when they were young, fracturing their family. They’re still estranged today.

I found Luminous refreshing and thought-provoking. The various strands combine to create a sensitive exploration of what it means to love somebody and what it means to lose somebody. Park, who wrote us a great essay about how the novel started out as a children’s book but became something much darker, is a confident and elegant writer, and I can’t wait to read what they write next (they told me in our video chat – which covered everything from robot consciousness to Peter Pan – that it’s about man-eating mermaids, so that’s a definite yes from me!).

Our book club members found different things to enjoy about Luminous. For TheGosia, it was Park’s writing about disability. “I’m loving it! Really good characters and I’m immediately gripped. What jumped out at me so far was bionic modification of humans portrayed in a positive way,” TheGosia wrote on our thriving Discord channel. “Super interesting as given the opportunity I would happily abandon most of my very broken meat suit for a more functional, bionic one. But often it’s written through the lens of what you’d lose.”

Exoi was also a fan. “I find it densely packed with so many thought-provoking ideas and stances on robotics and what it means to be a valued entity on our planet. There seem to be more ideas and themes in this book than some authors use in a lifetime, making it intelligent and nuanced. I’m loving it so far.”

So was Karen Warren. “Of course this is only one version of the future, but I could see the seeds of this scenario in our current society. And it got me thinking about how humans have always anthropomorphised inanimate objects (we give names to our cars, and children play games with teddy bears) – it shows how desperate we are for connection,” she wrote. “I found this quote from the author: ‘How do we define what is real? So many of us spend most of our hours either asleep – unconscious or dreaming – or locked in a world that exists on a tiny screen. How can we say, then, that we live in reality’, which I think sums up much of the book.”

Alan_P was less taken with this latest read. “Just finished Luminous – and possibly I didn’t pay enough attention, but when enough people have read it so it’s not a spoiler, someone is going to have to explain to me what was going on,” he pleaded on Discord. “It’s beautifully realised, but as I mentioned I’ve got no idea what the ending was all about. And why were the kids so keen to hand around that damaged robot? … Why did years of therapy not help either brother or sister with their father issues?”

Matthew was also a little lukewarm. “I found it slow going and really only finished it because I was two thirds of the way through waiting for something happen. Things happen sure, but they seem to be disconnected events rather than plot. Any plot twists and turns are signalled well beforehand.” Interestingly, Matthew did find the robot identities in Luminous “better realised than in Annie Bot, where Annie was too human” – but said that Iain M. Banks’s Culture universe has “the best robots”. Well, you can’t compete with a Mind. Having read Banks’s 1988 novel The Player of Games with the book club back in December, I’m certainly finding it fascinating to compare his ideas with our current anxiety about artificial intelligence and how it is being reflected in our fiction, from Annie Bot to Luminous.