The literature of Bora Chung is both easy and uneasy: easy because her clear and direct writing allows us to enter the story like a knife into a block of tofu, uneasy because her stories scrape like a punch on a block of ice. Watch out: it’s fascinating. Her readers in Spanish already have significant proof of it in Cursed Bunny—whose English translation by Anton Hur made her a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022—and the recent Semilla (Seed), a collection of stories selected and published by the Colombian publisher Vestigio in 2023.

    Seed is composed of a dozen stories. The last three break with the rest: they have continuity and form a brief trilogy; they almost seem like a nouvelle in three parts. [Known as the “Princess, Knight, Dragon” trilogy in Korea.—Ed.] Here Chung adapts the classic medieval fairytale, the one that begins with “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after,” the plot unfolding among castles and forests, red-lipped damsels and knights in shining armor. The author apparently likes this format, having used it previously in the story “Ruler of the Winds and Sands” in Cursed Bunny. It offers her the opportunity to reformulate the archetypical figures of kings, queens, dragons, fairy godmothers, princes and princesses. As Vladimir Propp outlined a century ago in his Morphology of the Folktale, in all such tales, myths elaborate tropes such as spells upon the princess of virginal beauty, kisses from the prince to awaken her, wishes and betrayals. The author shows some of her cards—fantasy, spells, terror—in this sort of tarot deck that opens the doors to the earthly world and the underworld, but also to the classical and contemporary sentimental worlds. 

    In “A Very Ordinary Marriage,” for example, Chung transforms an activity as routine as talking on the phone into something extraordinary. The story considers how enigmatic we become the closer we get to our significant other. It is an observation of the codes of discretion that married love requires. It is about treating the framework of the couple with horror and humor, an invincible combination when it comes to defining the sociological, or even anthropological, gaze. “The End of the Journey,” a science fiction story, further elucidates Chung’s view of human behavior. There is a ship like a modern Noah’s Ark filled with doctors, biologists, chemists,  and pharmacists. There is a sick planet, a cannibalistic epidemic spread in a rural town in Iowa. And there is a protagonist, a survivor and expert in deciphering texts. 

    In line with the last element of “The End of the Journey,” it is interesting how Chung slips reflections on language into her plots. In “Seed,” the title story, vegetal language is the backbone of some of the themes that interest the author: environmental crisis, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (a topic that is also present in “Goodbye, My Love,” Cursed Bunny) and vegetal intelligence. Here, trees speak through their dense networks of roots, as they perhaps also do in real life. Pollen as word, word as pixel, Chung emerges victorious in this complex exercise of endowing humanity to plant-characters in a story about the smallness of the world facing the plague of civilization and the hugeness of macrocorporations. 

    Technology is the key to all of this, as we find out in “Maria, Gratia Plena,” where a consciousness-scanning machine, the PAM-21, becomes the protagonist of a violent noir story that serves as denouement for a settling of scores in the gender struggle. Neurology, consciousness, and technology in the style of Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. LeGuin, this is a story where Justice and Technology end up being presided over by the same ministry. 

    Machines are happier than human beings—or, as the author ventures, at least some of them are. But beneath the dystopia shrouding her stories bears the deepest and most committed ethics: that which is perceived without any apparent complaint but swells in our consciousness after reading. As the author confesses in a closing note for her Spanish-language readers, before science fiction (although she prefers to speak of speculative fiction), all these stories are ultimately love stories.

Translated by Lucina Schell

Bruno Galindo

Writer and journalist