Science fiction in translation, then, is fertile ground for revelation and for the breaking of boundaries. In its three-and-a-half stories, I’m Waiting for You by Kim Bo-Young, translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu, exemplifies these mind-expanding possibilities as it centers the space travel narrative around two points: romance and spirituality. These loci create two distinctive ways of looking at space as a concept, with one emphasizing the inextricability of space and time and the other calling their very essence into question. This perspective not only gives rise to the collection’s creativity but also makes it an imaginative and worthwhile use of sci-fi elements.
The creativity of I’m Waiting for You begins with its idiosyncratic structure, in which two linked but distinct stories sandwich an unrelated third, creating a juxtaposition that deepens and contrasts each narrative’s thematic elements. The two “outer” stories recount the narrative of a couple who keep missing each other as they each travel forward in time to find an era in which they can be together—the first from the husband’s perspective, the second from the wife’s. Thanks to a brief note that contextualizes the story, we learn that the inspiration for the title story is exceedingly cute—an acquaintance commissioned Kim to write it so that he could use it to propose to his girlfriend. It is a romantic and optimistic story, one in which love conquers all, even as its narrator catches glimpses of an increasingly desolate world outside his spaceship.
When this title story begins, the narrator is writing a giddy letter from a spaceship that will, by traveling at the speed of light, bring him four years into the future in just two months. He takes this journey to hasten his reunion with his fiancée, the letter’s recipient, who has been forced to travel to Alpha Centauri and back with her family, whom she would prefer to never see again. The narrator’s ship is full of other “grooms-to-be,” “interstellar marrying types” completing the same circuit for the same reason. In her translator’s note, Sophie Bowman cites an early reader of her translation responding to this moment as insufficiently masculine, saying this criticism led her to work on constructing a voice that would “make him sound like him, a man, but this particular man.” The sincerity of the romantic feelings anchors the story onto a human scale even as the action remains extraplanetary.
The narrator continues to write letters to his fiancée as his journey slowly goes sideways. Small delays and missed connections turn into leaps through time. He moves from a large ship to an isolated, individual-sized pod, spotting scenes of civil unrest and climate collapse as he continues to propel himself forward toward a reunion that seems increasingly improbable. Over the course of this one-sided correspondence, we observe the narrator losing touch with reality and the outside world, unaware of what exists beyond him. We begin to wonder if he even sends these letters, if his partner is even still around, or if, hundreds of years into the future, his quest for love has propelled him into complete solitude. But, even in its darkest moments, the story’s hopefulness shines, with the narrator constantly buoyed by his love for his fiancée. As he envisions her telling him, when he’s on the verge of giving up: “We’re not apart. We’re living in the same time stream. [. . .] Just like when we lived on that spaceship called Earth.”
The final story in this collection, “On My Way To You,” is the counterpart to “I’m Waiting For You.” Narrated by the fiancée, this story is made up of her response letters to him, illuminating the title story’s gaps and building on its themes.
As she experiences the same delays and setbacks that affect her fiancé, she is subjected not to the torment of isolation, but to the hell of other people. Enduring increasingly cramped quarters and hostile treatment from fellow travelers whose desperation grows every day, she is forced to be crafty, to plot and scheme her way into the future she envisions. Whereas isolation dulls her fiancé’s senses and tests his physical limits, she is trapped in a precarious society aboard her final spacecraft, where she must navigate mutiny, factions, and rebellion with ingenuity. In keeping with Kim’s subversion of gendered expectations, this story’s narrator is active where her fiancé is passive, searching while her fiancé is searched for. Though her story has more of the trappings of the seafaring tale/adventure transposed into space so often found in science fiction, it is still anchored by romance. Her very survival depends on her unwavering faith in the love she shares. “Thank you for being with me,” she writes to her fiancé in a letter she can never send, long having passed the point of hopelessness. “Thank you for giving me this reason to live.”
These stories’ shared epistolary form is particularly suited to Kim’s conception of circular travel through space alongside forward travel through time. Although the protagonists’ journeys span centuries and take them into the stars, their physical movement is incredibly contained, circumscribed by the bounds of the station, the city, the spaceship, the church where they planned to be married. The narrow scope necessitated by telling their story through correspondence, the individual scale of communicating from one person to another, provides a snapshot-style temporal framework that helps to balance these elements, allowing Kim to let this intimate story shine even while framed by something as massive as space-time itself.
Indeed, what both separates and links the different parts of the collection is a sense of scale. “I’m Waiting For You” and “On My Way to You” make the cosmic personal while “That One Life” and “n / n+1 / n-1” make the personal cosmic. In these two “central” stories, Greek mythology, the Buddhist cosmos, and Korean folklore all converge in the narrative of godlike beings whose ideological differences are played out on Earth. Sung Ryu, these stories’ translator, describes it in her notes as “worldbuilding on cocaine,” and the frenetic inventiveness of its universe bears this out.
“That One Life” introduces us to genderless, godlike beings known as Prophets, who inhabit the bardo beyond the plane of human existence. Life on Earth is their school, a training ground where they can amass knowledge and test their principles. Every living thing on Earth is a facet of these beings. In fact, the unity of all life—the rejection of individual difference in favor of the belief that all matter is fundamentally united—is a key animus of all the Prophets’ philosophical schools. One Prophet, however, has rejected the school of unity, and instead spreads the gospel of individuality and respect for life—an ideology the remaining Prophets deem to be corrupt. As Naban, one of the oldest and most powerful Prophets, pursues these corrupt entities and attempts to tamp them down by merging them back into the folds of oneness, Naban themself must come to terms with the ramifications of their ideological position on the beings that surround them and the universe they love.
In this story, Kim finds fertile ground for sci-fi inventiveness not by looking toward future technologies or hypothetical innovation but by repurposing ancient spiritual tenets—reincarnation, the bardo, hell—in an unerringly contemporary way. Moreover, amid the adventure, she renders these formless deities human and specific, exploring their identities, selfhoods, and existence as they wage war over the very existence of these concepts. We see Naban grow, change, and shift, at times literally merging into other beings. Not only is the very foundation of their identity at stake, the notion that they even possess an identity to begin with is called into question.
Ryu’s clear translation allows this story’s complex moral and narrative web to shine. She chooses the singular “they,” for instance, to refer to each of the Prophets, an elegant solution for genderless expression that has the added benefit of emphasizing the multiplicity of each character. In her note, she states that, rather than retaining the repetitiveness of Naban’s meditations found in the Korean text, she attempted to convey a hypnotic tone through voice. She doubtlessly succeeds. When Naban, beginning to doubt themself, puts on a brave face to give orders to their students, they think: “[The students] believed I had a profound plan in mind. But I had nothing, save for pain.” Equal parts despairing and elegant, poignant and measured, Ryu has captured the human spirit of an inhuman creation.
Throughout I’m Waiting For You, Kim’s inventive fiction finds its match in Bowman and Ryu’s impeccable translations. They convey complex concepts and wild speculation by capturing the tonal nuances that lend this work its depth and humanity, even as it embarks on an interstellar journey into the nearby depths of the human experience.
