To face the real in a world full of fake news.
The novel is set in a world where smart devices called ‘agents’ have become commercially available. As the title of the novel suggests, the Agent is a device that delivers only the world that the user wants to see, whether it’s pure, glorified, or completely distorted. The novel raises the ethical issues raised by people who wear agents and believe that the world they want to live in is ‘real’.
Many of the elements of the novel are not so different from what we are facing in our society today. Many people are still deluded by fake news, believing it to be real, and even developing conspiracy theories based on it. To them, only their world is right, and all other arguments are false propaganda that should be discarded. Why do people fall for fiction, and can we ever be sure of what is really right?
“Reality is not a single world, seen through the eyes of a single person, but a dynamic event that emerges in the course of intense communication between many worlds. When someone else’s universe is born, my universe is also born.” (Dae-won Noh, literary critic)
Source: Blurb on Kyobo website run through DeepL