If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light

Cho-yeop, Kim. If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light. New York : Saga 2019. Print.

First Sentences:

Ludmilla Markov had memories of a place she had never been to. 

Description:

Thus starts the first short story in Kim Cho-yeop's clever, mind-bending science fiction pieces contained in If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light. It's hard to describe the vast scale of these pieces that are so personal, so introspective, so unusual. But I loved them so will try to give you a taste of the thoughtful adventures contained within this slim book:

• An orphan girl draws clear pictures of a world that no one has ever seen. These landscape paintings when exhibited make people stop, stare, and often begin to cry. Added to this is the recent scientific discovery that human babies' babblings can now be translated and are shown to be intellectual conversations. Are these divergent occurrences related?

• When an astronaut crash lands on a distant planet, she discovers that this world contains the first known alien civilization apart from Earth. She lives among these aliens for ten years but doesn't return to her home planet for thirty years. Curiously she won't tell anyone where she has been for the other twenty years. Nor will she reveal where the alien planet is located;

• A woman and her battered personal rocket sits in an isolated space station waiting for a transport to take her to a distant planet where her family lives. She relates her story to a repair man who, hearing her tale, begins to wonder who she really is, why she is sitting there, and how long she has been waiting;

• The narrator is about to set off on the first long-range space mission to the other side of the galaxy. It's the same mission her aunt had attempted years ago, but that woman's rocket had exploded on take-off, killing all three astronauts...or did it?

• Upon dying, people in this future Earth can preserve their essence (Mind) in a public library. Friends and relatives can contact these spirits and talk or interact with the dead person. But the narrator discovers her mother's Mind no longer appears in searches on the library's indexing system, a situation no one knows how it happened or where her mother's Mind went; 

• A new hand-held devise can bring on any essential emotion desired by its owner. Oddly, the most popular emotions selected by the public for their own use are not "Happiness" or "Calm" but "Depression," "Hate," "Fear" and "Rage." Why?

Yes, it's an odd collection. But each story focuses on the people facing these difficult, challenging situations, forcing themselves to try to understand what has caused their seemingly unknowable world and how they can address it themselves personally. It's not Sci-Fi ray-guns and monstrous alien creatures. These stories are about the inner workings of people, their thoughts, fears, dreams, and actions both internal and external.

Rereading this post, I feel I'm not doing justice to these tales. But suffice to say, they have stayed with me long after finishing the book, which is not a common thing, so I wanted to share this collection with you. I hope you give this book a try and see whether the complexities in each story of the worlds and people they portray don't grab you and hold on tightly as they did me.

   

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

 Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

The author interviews experts and often personally tries out Mars-travel questions such as going to the bathroom, sex, zero gravity, isolation, radiation, transportation and more. (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

[P.S. Click here to browse over 500 more book recommendations by subject or title and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader.]