Kim Choyeop became an instant literary sensation in Korea with her debut short story collection. Each of these bitesize speculative masterpieces represents a journey into the unknown, guided by a writer blessed with a boundless imagination.
From alternative futures to distant alien planets, in the company of scientists, space explorers and ordinary citizens in extraordinary situations, she revels in making the impossible seem not only possible but somehow inevitable.
Traversing the bounds of imagination with an ethereal incisiveness, her stories dismantle the borders between normal and abnormal, material and abstract, earthly and otherworldly. With unforgettable inventiveness and pathos, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light heralds the arrival of an essential voice in contemporary fiction.
Kim Cho-yeop has a master’s degree in biochemistry from Pohang University of Science and Technology. When she burst onto the Korean literary scene, her short story “Lost on Premises” received immediate recognition at the 2017 Korean Science Fiction Awards. She is also the recipient of the Minumsa Writer of the Year Award and the Munhak Dongne Young Writer Award. Her first short story collection If We Can’t Travel at the Speed of Light has sold over two hundred thousand copies in Korea alone. She is also the author of two more short story collections, The World I Just Left Behind and The Bookstore of Planetary Languages. Kim Cho-yeop’s first novel, Greenhouse At the End of the Earth, became an instant bestseller in South Korea.
Read: Symbiosis Theory, Clarkesworld
First lines:
Ludmila Markov had memories of a place she’d never been.
It was unclear when those memories established themselves inside her. The memoir of one of her teachers at the orphanage where she’d spent her early years contained the following recollection: “Somewhere around five years of age, she began saying that she’d come from ‘that place.’