'Do you think it’s emotionally equivalent to murder?' So begins Sublimation, the remarkable debut novel by Isabel J. Kim ... Kim performs this high-wire act with preternatural storytelling skill ... The lush intricacy of this imagined world is not matched by Kim’s everyman characters ... Even so, Sublimation finds resonance in the poignant differences between its Korean and American instances.
A tantalizing novel about immigration, desire, regret, and our struggle to know ourselves ... Kim’s ability to track her world building into ancient times and modern politics, the emotional rawness of the characters and their many-faceted flaws and choices, and Soyoung/Rose’s quest to untangle herself from herself, all make for deeply compelling sf.
Has a fascinating premise but a frustrating execution and dispiriting conclusion ... It is, rather daringly, written in the second person. Reading it, you sometimes wish it weren’t ... Sublimation is among the most-anticipated speculative fiction novels of the year, due to Kim’s success in writing short fiction. The book has its touching moments, and Kim is a talented writer, but a disquieting cynicism underpins it ... Kim’s narration exposes modern anxieties—how we are obsessed with how other people perceive us and our own satisfaction. This fictional world, despite its entirely different way of creating new people, looks almost exactly like ours.
The concept Kim is working with is deceptively simple and philosophically vertiginous: emigration literally splits a person in two ... It’s one of the top five best high-concept speculative premises in the 2020s. Easily, and not for lack of competition ... A debut that’s smart beyond its years, more ambitious than it is fully realized, and still more worth reading than most peers ... Kim is the real deal. Watch this writer.
Nebula Award winner Kim debuts with a strikingly original work of speculative fiction that brilliantly uses an audacious conceit ... The gorgeously rendered and deeply unsettling second-person narration enhances the intense and emotional reading experience. The result is a sharp, deeply felt first outing from a writer already at the top of her game.
