K-LIT REVIEW Cheon Seon-ran's 'A Thousand Blues' explores human robot connection in near future
The cover of "A Thousand Blues" by Cheon Seon-ran / Courtesy of Penguin UK
Imagine walking into your part-time convenience store job to find you’ve been replaced by Betty, a cutting-edge robot worker unfazed by long hours or rude "ajeossis" (middle-aged men). When you visit the convenience store a few months later, the robot is already past its prime, dented from bored teenage boys repeatedly kicking it as hard as they can. This is the world explored in "A Thousand Blues," the 2020 science fiction novel from Cheon Seon-ran, now available in a new English translation by Chi-young Kim.
"A Thousand Blues" is set in 2035, just 10 years from now, in a Korea that is in many ways recognizable as our own. The story centers on Yeonjae, a teenage robotics enthusiast, and her sister Eunhye, an animal lover who uses a wheelchair. When not helping out at their mother’s "samgyetang" (ginseng chicken soup) restaurant, the girls like to spend time at the racetrack. This is where they meet Coli, a robot jockey who has been damaged and slated for destruction. When they learn that Today, their favorite racehorse, is due to be sent to the knacker’s yard, they hatch a plan to have Coli ride Today in a deliberately slow race. From this unlikely scenario, Cheon has created one of the most engrossing Korean novels of recent times.
"A Thousand Blues" has many more serious themes beneath its engaging and readable surface: Everyone in the family has experienced rejection or been regarded as an outsider in some way, including Bogyeong, the girls’ mother, a former actress whose career ended after an accident left her face scarred. It’s no surprise then that this family forms bonds with Today and Coli.
However, this is more than a tale of plucky underdogs with the odds stacked against them. "A Thousand Blues" is about those who get left behind in a world focused on novelty and efficiency. Robots have taken many human jobs but technology hasn’t been used to make spaces accessible for wheelchair users like Eunhye. The world Cheon depicts recalls what writer Mark Fisher called a ‘boring dystopia,’ a world of empty appearances in which the technology that is supposed to make us more efficient is inefficient itself. Fisher described it — originally in a British context — as “California ideology without the California sunshine.” Cheon brilliantly lays bare this uncaring world without resorting to 1984-derived cliches, putting the family and their close-knit relationships at the center of it.
Cheon Seon-ran, author of "A Thousand Blues" / Courtesy of SICA, Munhakdongne Publishing
The novel also explores the possibility of robotic consciousness and of human-robot relations, showing that Cheon’s worldview is peculiarly nuanced. Though the book’s back cover tells us “it’s only when we slow down that we can truly experience joy,” the book doesn’t simplistically extol the virtues of slowness and naturalness to the detriment of speed and technology. Coli — or C-27 to give the robot its original name — is, in fact, the book’s most touching character.
Due to a mistake made by an exhausted and overworked researcher, Coli was given a more advanced brain chip and has been given the capacity of growing consciousness and human feelings. Coli’s development in this strange world is one of the book’s main strands, and Coli even emerges as narrator for some of the book’s key sections. The depiction of Coli powering up for the first time and realizing it can emit sound and simply enjoy words and their combinations for their aesthetic properties is understated and oddly moving.
The way Cheon toggles between identification and empathy with this robotic character and reminding us that it is an expressionless robot is particularly skillful. A metal hand on a teenage girl’s shoulder could be imagery from horror fiction but here it is a moment of understanding between machine and mammal, with Coli learning that Yeonjae’s joy of robotics is the same as Today’s excitement while running. As an outsider, Coli looks on with curiosity and gentle bemusement at human behavior, at one point coming to the realization that each human being experiences time subjectively due to our biological nature.
There’s an odd mix of emotions in "A Thousand Blues," but if you’ve ever felt lost in a world increasingly obsessed with narrow conceptions of appearance and efficiency, felt a strange affinity with a machine or piece of technology or even just felt over-worked, "A Thousand Blues" will be both thought-provoking and consoling.
This engaging, touching and subtly disturbing novel won the Korea Sci-fi Literature Award in 2019. The newly released English translation is a must-read, not only for fans of science fiction, but for anyone interested in contemporary Korea and Korean literature. It is available for purchase through dbbooks.co.kr.
John A. Riley is a writer and former university lecturer who spent over 10 years living and working in Korea. He has written for The Asian Review of Books, The Chap, The Dark Side, Popmatters and numerous other publications.