As impressive as Kim Bo-Young's intriguing stories are, their literary provenance is equally entertaining ... Lucky readers are wise to lean in and get ready to sigh and soar ... a plethora of compelling choices seems poised to enable and encourage Kim's international acclaim.
... less a conventional short story collection and more a pair of novellas accompanied by short sequels. While neither work needed continuation because of their excellent ambiguous endings, they prove to be worthy additions, building on Kim’s impressive mix of strong world-building and deep emotion ... includes author notes on Kim’s inspirations for her stories and the initial reactions of the recipients of I Am Waiting For You and On My Way To You, which are charming but frustrating, as they reference numerous works by Kim that aren’t yet available in English. More valuable is the included correspondence between the book’s two translators, Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu.
This translation will help fill in some of the gaps in the availability of Korean sf in English, as well as please readers who enjoy lyrical, philosophical sf stories.
... expansive, captivating ... These are big questions, but Bo-Young’s attempt to bring shape to them in these stories is stunning, humbling and utterly beautiful ... The collection’s translator, Sophie Bowman, should be commended on shepherding these stories so gracefully into English. They introduce complex and ambitious ideas about space travel, philosophical and metaphysical riddles playing out in worlds inhabited by gods . . . you get the idea. But even when it’s challenging, Bo-Young’s prose is always oh-so-gorgeous ... This is some of the most beautiful science fiction writing that I’ve read recently. Not every element between the pairs of stories is analogous, but sometimes, just there, right under the surface, Bo-Young has hidden common threads. The bookended stories of lovers traveling through space in time and the feelings of longing and trust in the face of astronomically impossible circumstances are particularly lovely. Even in the huge expanse of space, the second-person voices in their letters are intimate and genuine, and the emotional power of each story’s closing moments is hefty. Grab your tissues, because you may be thoroughly moved ... isn’t just a statement of action. It’s a promise: I’m waiting on your behalf, to be with you, to experience the universe’s purpose for me through you. If only we can live up to such a promise.
The epistolary nature of the lovers’ story gives readers a chance to empathize with the characters; to feel the dilemmas, the triumphs, and the lows of the two lovers. The straightforward narrative of the gods’ featurette is a surreal swirl of ideas that weaves the reader through the tale ... This is thought-provoking science fiction that will leave readers musing long after the book is finished.
Together, the stories form not only a haunting if sentimental portrait of star-crossed love, but also a compelling vision of a decaying Earth and a sharp meditation on the hazards of both too much community and too much solitude ... If not quite a page-turner, it’s an impressive imaginative performance, suggestive of a William Blake-style visionary cosmogony, and perhaps it’s even more impressive on the part of the translator Sung Ryu. The book is rounded out by some very useful notes on the stories by the author and translator[.]
Playing with notions of immortality and toying with improbable transgressions of the laws of physics, Kim delivers a suite of stories that is at once lyrical and full of foreboding, keeping dramatic tension tight among poetic evocations of a home planet that is 'our hall of learning, our cradle of experiences, our short-term interactive training ground,' if one we have also destroyed ... Much of the best science fiction today is coming from East Asia, and Kim’s work ranks high in that emerging tradition.
