Luminous A novel

Sinister charm exudes from this android-filled mystery by debut author Park. In a near-future, unified Korea, Jun works as a detective in Seoul's robot crimes unit. He's searching for a missing AI when he's reunited with his sister, Morgan, a hotshot "personality programmer" for the robot manufacturer Imagine Friends. The two became estranged after high school when Jun enlisted in the military and was maimed in an accident, requiring much of his body to be replaced by bionic implants. Uneasy with the new Jun, Morgan tries to hide from him that she has a live-in android lover and is modeling Imagine Friends's next big release after her and Jun's missing older brother, Yoyo, a humanoid robot. Meanwhile, the broken-down original Yoyo hides out in a junkyard where he befriends a pack of wily schoolchildren, among them a North Korean refugee. Told with mordant wit (Morgan "had lived under the belief that she could be preemptively forgiven for the uniquely monstrous selfishness that preceded genius. But only if she had a cock"), the narrative takes a wide-angled approach to the theme of human-machine convergence. With Ishiguro-esque precision, Park dissects sentience and reality, as well as love and death. This lustrous, challenging work will reward readers who stick with it. (Mar.)

DEBUT Park's debut is a sci-fi detective novel set in a future reunified Korea, where personal robots are ubiquitous. The main characters are all enmeshed in robotics in some way; Ruijie the schoolgirl has robotic exoskeleton legs, detective Jun is more than half cyborg, and Jun's sister Morgan designs robot software. The mystery surrounds a kidnapped robot "child" and underground robot trafficking and abuse. The most fascinating and effective part of the story is that the essential question, if robots have humanity, is ostensibly ignored. Robots are accepted as things that people have, but also as adopted siblings, as children, as beings to live with, to love and to mourn. The essential nature of these robots slowly emerges as the enigmatic central robot, Yoyo, reveals his interconnection with all the main characters. Yoyo is both a sympathetic companion and an avenging angel. VERDICT This momentous tour de force overtops existing works on robots by leaps and bounds, approaching the subject with a subtlety that allows readers to focus on the effects robots are sure to have in the future; a meditation on and an illustration of human and robot relationships in which it is difficult to distinguish between them.--Henry Bankhead