LUMINOUS by Sylvia Park

5 stars

This sci-fi mystery opens in a future world where North and South Korea have been recently reunified, increasingly humanoid AI robots abound but are still treated as disposable objects and bionic implants on humans can repair wounds. Both robots and Northerns have become the embodiment of second-class citizens by the Southern Koreans. This thought-provoking and norm defying novel centers on human/robot relationships and what constitutes sentience, gender, and humanity.

Jun Cho works as a lowly detective in Seoul’s robotic crime unit — lowly as most humans don’t truly care about crimes in which robots are the victims. Jun’s tasked with finding Eli, a beloved older model robot who served as a life companion child to a wealthy woman, and who’s disappeared while out running an errand. In his search, Jun inadvertently stumbles upon his estranged sister Morgan, who’s a personality programmer for the world’s leading robot manufacturer and has been tasked with creating the perfect male child robot. Morgan had distanced herself from Jun when he got seriously wounded as a military soldier in the reunification war and was healed by most his body becoming bionic. Morgan not only has a live-in boyfriend AI lover but has used the personality and prototype of their very human like robot “older brother” Yoyo to form the basis of the new boy robot she’s developing. Yoyo was a special creation of Jun and Morgan’s brilliant Dad who specialized in robot design before abandoning everything to only study biology.

Yoyo has somehow found himself surviving in a robot junk yard, missing a leg, and constantly at the risk of scavengers looking for robot parts. He becomes befriended by a ragtag group of schoolchildren that includes a girl with robotic exoskeleton legs and a young North Korean refugee whose uncle is leading the scrappers’ hunt of valuable robot parts to sell. Yoyo also faces danger from robot traffickers who kidnap and resell robots, as well as human out to abuse robots physically or sexually.

Yoyo comes to embody all that is fraught in human/robot relationships, as well as the emergent humanity of robots, along with a mystery that emerges about YoYo’s larger mission that led the leaving of Jun and Morgan.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.