The extent to which award-winning Korean novelist Hye-Young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red (originally published in 2010, now translated into English by Sora Kim-Russell) is science fictional is entirely debatable. You can read it as science fiction, perhaps. But it’s a very literary sort of science fiction. Although the majority of the novel takes place in a city referred to as City K, in a country known only as Country C, there’s else nothing to suggest a futuristic or fantastic setting. Given that the novel’s main figure is nameless, called only “the man” throughout, and that one of the main themes winding its way through the narrative is anonymity, atomisation, anomie, the choice to refer to places by letters (and to districts by numbers) feels more like the past literary convention by which certain Victorian or Georgian books referred to such figures as “Lord M–, the Baron of C–” and “Mrs. S–“—the creation of plausible deniability, slight distance from the real person mentioned, rather than the creation or evocation of a specific new place.

Though the author previously won the Shirley Jackson Award for her The Hole, City of Ash and Red belongs in the literature genre, I feel, rather than in the SFF one. It’s involved in an entirely different project than the usual run of speculative fiction novels: its concerns and its tools are literary ones. It’s a well-constructed, elegant novel whose translator has done an excellent job: the prose is deft and eloquent, the sentences compelling, the voice distinctive.

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