“Invite (you) into the world”—in Chung Serang’s Take My Voice, this lovely phrase is used to refer to the birth of a child. To borrow this expression in part, the stories in this collection could be called “stories to invite our future.”

      Even among Chung’s works, these stories feature exceptionally strong science fiction elements such as a detention center that contains people who pose a threat to other humans or a world isolated by a zombie pandemic. All these stories were first published in Korean in the 2010s, yet they seem to foresee the COVID-19 pandemic that shook the world in 2020 and the chaos that ensued. However, their real value doesn’t simply lie in their futuristic vision.

      For example, the memory-enhancing pill from the short story “Little Baby Blue Pill,” which enables one to remember everything for only three hours, is marketed for use by families hoping to treat relatives with dementia. However, its misuse soon becomes rampant; it unexpectedly boosts the success rate of acquiring one’s object of infatuation, and revitalizes the quality of scripts in the corrupt entertainment industry. At the same time, it makes the torture carried out by authoritarian regimes and in war zones even more brutal, mass-produces traffic accident deaths and suicides, and critically damages the brains of children of the next century.

      “It changed everything and, at the same time, nothing could be changed,” says the narrator. I believe this ambivalent phrase to contain both a bitter irony about our history of simplifying complexity into either zeros and ones for the sake of efficiency, suppressing the small voices of those who lived in the in-between. At the same time, it holds an  equal amount of sincere prayer.

      “Reset” stands out as a defining work. After urban civilization is devoured by a sudden horde of giant worms, the few surviving humans withdraw from the surface and build a civilization with low environmental impact in the long underground tunnels left behind by the worms. They stop eating meat and realize the cruelty of enclosing other animals; produce only as much energy as necessary; and eliminate waste by circulating resources within the city. What awaits after this literal reset is a world that seems to embody only the best solutions  for the planet and humanity. In order to maintain  population levels, reproductive behavior and even the emotional dynamics and desires surrounding it are tightly monitored. According to the younger post-reset generation, “I don’t feel like doing anything with anyone around me.” Later, the reader realizes that the very emotions and desires that have been purged from the individuals in these stories are also   the same drives that will save them from the depths of despair.

      There can be no such thing as a “right answer” in this SF vision of the world.  Whatever the justification, if we try to optimize society, then that is not rational or functional—in other words, the soft parts of the human heart—is gradually marginalized and discarded. Mechanically repeating such efficient measures offers no guarantee that a world where mutual care and compassion will still exist. That is why Chung sharply pierces our complacency to reveal the harm and violence which we have tolerated both now and in the past, while also portraying faint traces of affection and fragile connections  that carefully, delicately, and honestly sketch a landscape colored with humor and tenderness, even if only for a moment .

      A perceptive critical sensibility underpins the unexpected settings of each short story in this collection. In addition to tough, incisive insights into environmental issues and bioethics, the stories offer illuminating and constructive perspectives on gender. 

      Above all, the fantasy elements of this book expand the range of the reader’s own imagination in all directions, by revealing in a meticulous and multi-layered way the workings of human beings, which can never be reduced to numbers. This is precisely the process required to build our future—a future in which we can pass the baton from me to you, from one to another.

      Ultimately, I believe that the most important characteristic of human beings is to be “lost” within the disorientation of a dystopian world. It is telling that the final piece in this book is “The Medalist’s Zombie Years.” The tough protagonist, a former archery medalist who has survived a zombie apocalypse,  wrestles with the emotional burden of confronting her already zombified lover until the last possible moment. She is lost because she has not given up until the very end—on him as a person, on what she can do for him as a fellow human being, and on the idea of humanity itself. Chung Serang’s fantastical visions are woven to remind us to never give up on what it means to be human.

Translated by Meri Joyce

Kuramoto Saori

Literary Critic