Author: Kim Cho-yeop
Translated by: Anton Hur
Publisher: Saga Press, expected Mar 2026
Original title: 우리가 빛의 속도로 갈 수 없다면, 2019
What makes us struggle to live in a world full of hatred, discrimination and contradictions?
Kim Cho-yeop, a science student who makes biosensors, is now a writer who writes novels. Depicting an imaginary world that seems to exist somewhere but nowhere with a unique atmosphere, her first collection of novels, If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light, which constantly questions the boundaries between normal and abnormal, success and failure, and mainstream and non-mainstream.
You can meet the story of the author, who won the Grand Prize in the Medium Fiction category of the 2nd Korean Science Literature Awards in 2017 for Lost in the Hall and an Honorable Mention for If We Can’t Go at the Speed of Light. This is the first collection of novels published in Contemporary Literature, Literature 3, and Effie in just over a year, which is rare for a new novelist, and contains seven works that go one step further than the imagination that depicts a wonderful world and ask questions that make us reflect.
The characters who live in a world that is beautiful but not naïve, nowhere but seems to be somewhere, each of them embraces the impossibility and struggles, and through these characters, the author struggles to find an impossible answer without a correct answer. Through this, he asks questions that make us look back on ourselves, such as whether wanting to know others is another way to love them, and whether there is no way to fully understand the other person who cannot be understood perfectly.
Source: Kyobo Bookstore blurb / Microsoft translation tool.
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