You’re going through airport security, rolling a suitcase behind you. You wish you’d packed a snack. You’re nauseous, smelling someone’s too-strong perfume in the line ahead. You’re definitely dehydrated. You wonder: Why did I pick a flight this early in the morning? You make it to the front of the line. A security officer waves you through the machines—beep beep—and you find your radiated shoes and luggage on the other side. You sanitize your hands.
You keep walking, find your gate, pay too much money for a granola bar, and then wait. Finally, you stand with crowds of people jostling to board the plane, thinking of the new country you’re moving to—perhaps permanently—feeling a twinge of exhilaration and already some homesickness, and suddenly, behind you, a different version of yourself appears.
You are now split into two human beings, with separate thoughts and lives: the you who is going ahead to a new place and the you who wanted to stay behind.
This is the Severance-like premise behind award-winning writer Isabel J. Kim’s debut science-fiction novel, Sublimation. (This is also largely the style of the book: It is, rather daringly, written in the second person. Reading it, you sometimes wish it weren’t.)
Kim’s novel, an expansion of her 2021 short story, explores the Korean American immigrant experience, including alienation, discrimination and cruelties across international borders, faltering family ties, and a longing to inhabit two worlds and be wholly present in each. Readers who are immigrants may resonate with the what-ifs the book raises. In Kim’s fictional world, her characters’ ability to become two or more people (depending on how many borders the character crosses in a lifetime) means they can literally belong in multiple places. But Sublimation’s characters never seem fully present in any of them, nor do they find much peace or contentment in searching for fulfillment elsewhere.
Kim’s protagonist, Rose, left behind a version of herself when she and her mother immigrated to the United States. Returning as an adult to South Korea for a funeral, she meets her other self, Soyoung. Together, the bifurcated selves bittersweetly reflect on the past, yearning for a childhood innocence where lack and death are strangers. Soyoung secretly wants to reintegrate, too, so she can have Rose’s American memories.
Sublimation is among the most-anticipated speculative fiction novels of the year, due to Kim’s success in writing short fiction. The book has its touching moments, and Kim is a talented writer, but a disquieting cynicism underpins it. Whether intentional or not, the story exposes how spiritless our modern, hyper-online world can be by showcasing (in painful detail) how we can fritter away our days, endlessly interrogate ourselves for self-discoveries, and perform for other people’s approval—while we remain blind to the marvel of existence itself, in ourselves and others.
Imagine accidentally creating another self. Instead of falling on your knees in wonder, in Kim’s world, you’d be more likely to look back at the new you behind you in the airport with a shrug and a headache throbbing in your skull. This is inconvenient. This will create logistical problems. Now one of you will need to file a report with the government and get a second passport. Also, you really need coffee. You need to post a picture of the coffee on Instagram so your sort-of friends can know you’re the kind of person who drinks coffee that looks good on Instagram.
Kim’s narration exposes modern anxieties—how we are obsessed with how other people perceive us and our own satisfaction. This fictional world, despite its entirely different way of creating new people, looks almost exactly like ours. There’s still Starbucks (the characters are always going to Starbucks), stock market–addled tech bros, The Atlantic, work chats on Slack, social media, and the young professional’s gut-deep fear of having children. There is even some variant of Emily Wilson’s rendition of The Odyssey. (In this world’s epic poem, Odysseus, a “complicated man,” splits into two.)
The book’s too-real trappings are often suffocating, and Kim—no stranger to cultural critique—may mean for it to be so. Her characters move through concrete cities and glass skyscrapers; constant food takeouts; work calls; surface-level friendships; casual, meaningless hookups; and professional angling—and, across 350 pages, we watch them try to grapple with what it means to be human, with existence, with whether it is good to be, seemingly without deeply considering anything higher than themselves and what they want in the moment. The closest the book comes to grappling with transcendence is near the end, when a series of scattered theological asides cast God as a villain, instead lauding rebellion and choice as modern virtues.
This novel shows our cultural malaise and self-obsession as petty, banal, and self-consuming as they really are.
Almost all of Kim’s characters are in despair, in the Kierkegaardian sense: They have not become a self before God. Rose and Soyoung both want to morph into some version of themselves that will bring them joy and peace, but they try to grasp at it through clumsy, merely human means, a hopeless effort for anyone. Only Christ can bring true peace and joy. Grasping at illusions of happiness leads Kim’s characters to view other characters as less than fully human. Soyoung sees Rose not as her own person but as someone to be used for selfish gain. Rose, too, sees almost everyone around her as irrelevant, as an inconvenience, or as someone who can help her with her problems.
Reading the novel, I was reminded of the prophet Isaiah, who responds to being in the presence of God’s glory by lamenting, “Woe to me! … I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isa. 6:5).
Our uncleanness does involve our idle curiosity about others, our cold maneuverings for earthly promotions, our profane gossip, and our everyday self-centeredness. When we stand before God, will we remember every time we treated other people who are made in God’s image as a means to an end? Will we recall our dismissive thoughts about those for whom Christ died?
C. S. Lewis reminded us that humans are eternal. In The Weight of Glory, he wrote there “are no ordinary people.” “You have never talked to a mere mortal,” he continued. “Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
Viewed from a Christian lens, Kim’s novel puts our modern failures in stark relief, as we fail both to recognize the image of God in others and to treat others as fully human. As we seek our own self-fulfillment and actualization like her characters do, as we stare at our screens instead of looking people in the eye, I worry many of us—particularly those who are primarily work-focused and live in cities—are numb to the wonder of life. The songwriter John Mark McMillan identifies the problem in his song “Christ Jesus,” where he asks, “Are we asleep inside the miracle of it all?”
Kim’s characters certainly are, at least for most of the novel. They acknowledge their selfishness at several points, and Kim has described her protagonists as making “exactly the wrong decision every single time.” I’ll confess this selfishness is a bit wearying, given the book’s length. While the end offers a glimmer of hope that Soyoung/Rose wants to change to be “a person who is able to understand when there are more important things than what you want,” we are left without much optimism that she can.
The best science fiction draws us in, questioning what it means to be human, what life may look like in unrecognizable settings, and how we should treat others. Often, too, it offers warnings.
Sublimation is a warning against being asleep inside the miracle of life—and it left me hoping we will soon wake up. Until we do, I can only sing the next line of the song along with McMillan: “Christ Jesus, would you think of us in your everlasting heart?”
Haley Byrd Wilt is a writer based in the DC area. Her reporting has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and NOTUS, among others. Her poetry has been published in Mere Orthodoxy.
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