emissary from a planet of genderless librarians

by Lisel Mueller

Anyone who has followed this blog for a minute knows I am a huge fan of Isabel J Kim's short stories and was hotly anticipating this book. To the point I got scared I wasn't going to like it. Fear not! It's as exciting and strange as her short fiction, with more room to let the characters breathe.

Sublimation is set in a world exactly like ours—except when you step over a border with the intent to emigrate, you are split in two, leaving behind a separate self: an instance. The novel follows two pairs of young Koreans with American instances: Rose, traveling back to South Korea for her grandfather's funeral and speaking to her Korean instance Soyoung for the first time ever, and her childhood friend Yujin and his American instance YJ, who talk to each other like right & left hemispheres of the brain.

The first half of the book is deeply introspective, tracing the space between Soyoung and Rose and the legibility of each woman's desires—to her instance, but also to herself. What makes you you? What part is genetics, upbringing, the people you've surrounded yourself with? Why do you want what you want? Told in second person, it's a funhouse mirror of self-recognition and alienation.* The narrative is interlaced with reimaginings of Korean folk tales, the Odyssey, and the Garden of Eden as they play out in a world of instancing.

The second half pivots to a technothriller plot as Soyoung/Rose and Yujin/YJ's lives collide with the greater political and technological forces trying to control instancing. This part of the book is rapidly paced, complete with a naked knife fight and a big cinematic finish, but it also has some fascinating experimental writing and insights into the characters.

I've texted a dozen people I know about this book—my uncle who loves Dark Matter, my coworker who loves diaspora lit—because it's such an interesting & fresh blend of genres. For anyone interested in doppelgangers, body snatching, women with nothing to lose, the inability to return home, and strange prose.

lingers uncannily;

high level sources say

issues abound.

Death or delinquency,

government vacancy

can't be abided by

morals unsound.

Every Kentuckian

needs a congressional

rep that's alive and not

gone to the ground.

Yet still in the interim,

search for the sign that one

octogenarian's

like in the book he actually has a hard time understanding why grace does not assume rocky will perform acts of kindness, like the fuel tank fix. I will never be over the fuel tank fix so now we're talking about the fuel tank fix, they gloss over it in the movie and I really hope that was just because it was cut for time and there's a deleted scene somewhere that shows Grace trying to clean out the fuel tanks from the initial taumoeba leak on the way back to the Blip-A from Adrian (which was also cut from the movie) and he can't get one of them clean so he has to eject a third fuel bay after losing two over Adrian and now he doesn't have the space to store enough fuel to get home before he runs out of food.

And Rocky's only explanation for why Grace would assume that he would leave the system without making sure Grace was actually going to make it back to Earth okay is that Grace was literally too tired to remember that Rocky's his friend and that he knows how to make a goddamn fuel tank. Like Rocky spends so little time thinking about it he immediately jumps to ''when was the last time you slept'' after he finds out why Grace is huffing and puffing about. You know. Potentially still starving to death in space after everything. Rocky doesn't even get the idea after asking clarifying questions like with the astrophage he just immediately jumps to "uh, duh, obviously I'm going to make you more fuel tanks. The fuck did you think I was going to do, leave you here, question?"

And it's a really good dichotomy between the loss of autonomy and like, working together and being dependent on others for survival. Because we're social creatures, we're all dependent on each other in some capacity and like. Like nearly every time Rocky has to step in to save Grace's life (with the exception of the last time he has to do that but I'm getting to that) it's because Grace has lost his autonomy in some way.

Like it's the result of another living thing, it's either Stratt forcing him onto the Hail Mary, or the astrophage spinning them out over Adrian, or the taumoeba embedding itself into Grace's fuel tank.

And just like how Grace's last act of mercy decouples the idea of mercy and luxury because the thing that lets Rocky's initial kindness chain react into saving two planets isn't abundance, it's the beetles, which were solely made out of the desperate fight or flight need to survive, Rocky's last act of mercy decouples autonomy from independence/isolation.

When Grace gets to Erid he's completely dependent on Rocky and the team he puts together for survival. But he also has more autonomy than he ever did in the Earth flashbacks. He has stronger connections with other people than he did in the Earth flashbacks (connections, mind you, that aren't visibly different in nature from the ones he had on Earth: he's still a teacher, he still has no immediate family, etc, Grace and the people around him are just more open to the kind of connection Grace wants), and most importantly, in both the movie and the book, he spends the epilogue either communicating his wants and needs and having those respected ("Can we talk about the water temperature a little bit?" "Tell the biodome illumination team that it's perfect now"/"You no want it sunnier than this?"/"You know I'm a sucker for the fog" and of course the famous "Can I think about it?"/"Think about it long time" sequence) or having had those wants and needs respected for a long time (Grace uses a cane and an AAC, he explained that a day/night cycle is critical to his mood and so that's what the dome has, the taste tests for his vitamin shakes, the wristwatch)

At every turn, Rocky is meeting Grace with all of the kindness and love and friendship his five little alien crab hearts can muster and at no point is Grace ever expendable to Rocky, he is always making it as clear to Grace as he possibly can that Grace is his friend, because he needs to fix things, he cannot stand it when the people he cares about are suffering and he can help, and he cares so deeply and so fucking much. Like Rocky doesn't just love to the point of invention, he loves to the point of preparedness and of sacrifice and of accommodation and of being prepared to let go but not being afraid to tell the other person you hope they stay.

And so at the end of the fucking movie, when he and Grace are walking down the beach and Grace is safe and home and happy, and when we finally get the payoff for the foreshadowing when, right after Grace first encounters Rocky's ship and he's trying to figure out how to open the xenonite container, the camera spins and Grace lands on his feet? When the camera spins for the last time, when the ground starts out on the same side of the shot and in the same orientation as it was the last time Grace saw Earth, except this time instead of being pinned down, Grace is facing up, Grace stands up, and finally walks out of the tailspin he's been in for the entire movie?