An Interview with Silvia Park

Silvia Park’s debut novel, Luminous, is a haunting portrait of the near-future where Korea has been unified and robots have fully integrated into society. Marrying heart and innovation, Luminous tells the story of both humans and humanity in a time of great change. Park talked with associate editor Kira Compton about the novel’s sweeping structure, robotics, and the vaquita.  

KC: Something I really loved and admired about Luminous is that it's got that very strong, beautiful story, but then this immersive and expansive world building. I wanted to hear more about that process for you—were you building this world and you found the story, or you had this great story idea and the world came later?

SP: Neither. I began with the characters.

Originally, I meant Luminous to be a children’s book. I had finished another long-term project that was horrible. Like, went up in flames horrible. I was burnt out and tired, so I told myself I would do something easy—which is foolish of me, children’s books are not, in fact, easy—but it refused to accept that shape. It turned into a book for adults. As I was fleshing out my character Yoyo, a robot who looks like a child, I realized that he had adult siblings who were in so much pain, who had difficulty grappling with the fact that they’d grown up with a robot, but this robot would never age.

The story really began there. It became the way I described Luminous. If the science fiction is the flesh of the body and the police procedural gives it structure, the family drama is the heart. After I had these characters, I began thinking about the world.  

Originally, the world was set in a sort of vague Pan Asia, but it became much more emotional and personal. I started drawing a lot of the setting from Seoul, where I grew up. That world-building came very easily to me because I was excavating my childhood memories.

It gave the book a texture of familiarity. Science fiction has this, in some ways, unfair reputation of being cold and remote and not character driven. But I wanted the world to feel lived in. I wanted it to feel emotional.


KC: Could you talk more about the transition from children’s book to an adult book?

SP: When I first started writing out the book, it was a mess. It was chronologically all over the place, which is not what you'll see in the final version. In the final version, the book takes place over the course about a month. It's a very contracted period of time. There are four perspectives, and I wanted the storylines to feel like they were responding to each other, living off of each other.

Initially, I wrote each storyline separately. That was really circuitous and took twenty more drafts than it needed. My agent and my editor had to be very hands on, and we focused on weaving the adult and children’s storylines together so they fall in a nice braid.

But at the same time, I enjoyed writing those perspectives separately. The adult storylines are a lot darker, while the children's perspectives have a sense of hope and tenderness. And I think writing the children in a separate chunk helped. It helped preserve that delicate feeling where these children feel protected, the darkness of the adults’ stories isn’t spilling over. A lot of that had to do with the perspective I chose because the children's chapters usually began in the omniscient, while for the adults it was in close third person.

KC: Did any of the point of views come more easily to you? In particular, how it felt writing through a robot’s POV.

SP: When did you think that the book slipped into the robot’s perspective? We never do.

KC: Really? I could have sworn it was right after the warehouse. Did I misread it? That’s very embarrassing.

SP: No, no. But we never slip into the robot’s perspectives.

KC: Well, my bad, then. I thought that omniscient perspective with the children was a collective consciousness from the robots.

SP: The children’s perspective has moments where it zooms in and out. I wanted them to have a bit less myopia than the adult perspectives. But I’m really taken by your interpretation. I think that’s fascinating. It wasn’t what I intended, but I can see the omniscient narrator working as a collective robotic consciousness. It’s all-seeing and quite protective.

On my part, it was a conscious decision not to write from the robot’s perspective.

KC: Could you talk more about that then?

SP: I decided not to write from the robot's perspective because I don't think they'll think like us, and I didn't feel up to the task of trying to imagine that incredibly alien intelligence.

Part of the seduction of humanoid robots is that we want to think they think like us, especially when we have an intimate relationship with one. We want the robot to feel the same tenderness and intimacy that we feel for it. It was important for me not to reveal the perspective, because it's giving away the game.

It’s similar to our relationships with animals. We look at animals and we anthropomorphize them. We hope they get the love we feel for them, but at the end of the day, there’s no real way of knowing. Robots are an extreme example of that. They are going to be so good at mimicking and projecting. I want us to question whether these robots were really human, or were they just very, very good at acting human. 

KC: I’d love to hear what part research played in a speculative novel like this. You mentioned drawing from real neighborhoods and childhood memories, but even the technology felt very real. Like it could happen tomorrow, or next year.


SP: In terms of technology, I did a lot of research in the present day, where we’re headed. For example, we have Japanese scientists who’ve invented a way for robots to feel pain.

KC: That’s horrific.


SP: In some ways it goes back to operant conditioning. We need to teach them pleasure and pain, but the first thing we managed to teach was pain. It’s very metaphorical.

I looked at a lot of existing or developing technologies and then took them to their completion, imagining that they were successful and integrated into society.

I was particularly interested in the way academia, the military, and commerce interact. A lot of times, we think of technology as these smart guys in a garage, whipping out their computer. But actually, most of the time technology is funded and developed in a military space. We’re already seeing so much funding of artificial intelligence within the tech industry, but we're also seeing a lot of discrete things going on with the military. Particularly in the way it’s started to bleed into the Ukrainian war. Some soldiers are saying that there’s no point in carrying a gun, since it’s all about outrunning these drones, these mobile snipers.

These wars are extreme testing grounds, and we are going to see this kind of technology escalate to a terrifying degree. That's what I imagined for the Korea setting. I figured that if I'm writing about Korea and I'm writing about Korea in the future, I have to think about reunification, and I have to think about the possibility of reunification, but also how that reunification might occur. The way that reunification might involve bloodshed, might involve insurgencies, fighting. I envisioned a reunification war that incorporated robot technology. A bloodless war. A completely automated war where robots were at the forefront instead of people.

KC: A lot of your fiction is very open to exploring forms, like your short story Poor Unfortunate Fools . Earlier, you mentioned that science fiction can sometimes feel cold, and I don’t feel that at all with your fiction. I wanted to hear more about what that openness to the speculative, to strange forms, does for your fiction, and what it can do for a story.

SP: I love short stories. I love that you can just kind of mess up, give yourself permission to scrap it and start over. You don’t have to agonize the way you do if you’ve worked on a novel for five years. A sense of play really has to guide you with short stories.

There are some stories that write themself easily and there are some that don’t. Poor Unfortunate Fools came very easily even though the form doesn't seem like it. I finished it in a week and revised it just a little bit. I knew I wanted to write a story about… have you heard of the vaquita?

KC: I have not.

SP: The vaquita is a Mexican porpoise. It's like a small dolphin, and very, very rare. It’s beautiful and small and has like a little smile on its face constantly. But it's critically endangered and nearly extinct. There’s only a dozen left in the wild.

Scientists launched this huge last-ditch rescue effort to capture the vaquita and try and breed them. It took them months to finally find one, a female. The moment they tried to bring her on the boat and into a tank, she just stopped breathing. They panicked. They tried to put her back in the water, but she’d already died.

It was just so devastating for them. There were people crying on the scene. When I read about it, I could just see the way their hope died.

That was what pushed me to write Poor Unfortunate Fools. I wanted to write about these well-meaning scientists who want to do good but unknowingly cause so much damage. That’s our relationship with nature, with technology.

Because I had such a crystal-clear impetus for writing the story, the form came naturally. It needed to be scientific and cold because scientists are trained that way. They’re trained not to anthropomorphize. They're trying not to let emotions get in the way, but they’ve devoted their entire lives to these creatures. Of course it's going to be deeply emotional for them.


KC: Any advice for writers early in their creative careers?

SP: Good luck.

KC: (laughs) That would be an amazing way to end the interview.

SP: (laughs) That’s my honest advice.

But if they want something to give them a bit more hope, here’s something that’s been useful not just for me, but for a lot of my peers. I call it the rain and the drought.

There are periods of your life where you are incredibly productive. There’s water welling out of you. Nourish it, use as much of it as possible. But when the water fades and drought sets in, that’s fine. We all go through that. We’re allowed to give ourselves that grace.

You are not just a productive machine. You are not just defined by labor or output. You’re allowed to nourish yourself with companionship, and inspiration, and reading.

This also applies for the external. So much of your life and your career is out of your control, and it should never be seen as an indictment of who you are not just as a writer, but as a person. There are going to be people around you that it sometimes seems like everything is happening for them. They’re getting stories published, awards, funding. They’re getting book deals. It’s great. It’s fantastic for them. But it’s also their rain period, and I don’t think anyone is able to live a life full of rain. They’d drown.

If you’re feeling down about yourself, or are in a drought, just know it cannot last. As long as you are working, writing, learning, and reading. At some point, the drought will lift and the rain will come for you. If you haven’t prepared the soil, there will be nothing to take the water in. I’m using a lot of gardening metaphors, but that’s how I feel about writing. It’s like a tide. We need to accept it for its rhythm.  


Silvia Park’s stories have been published in Black Warrior Review, Tor, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA from NYU and attended the Clarion Science and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. They teach fiction at the University of Kansas and split their selves between Lawrence and Seoul. Luminous is their first novel.

Buy Luminous here, or anywhere books are sold.