I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories

By Kim Bo-young

Translated by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu

(2015, 2017, 2020, translated 2021)

Harper Voyager

Kim Bo-young’s I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories includes the science-fiction and science-Buddhistic thought experiments I’m Waiting for You, The Prophet of Corruption, That One Life, and On My Way to You. The first and last stories in the collection are paired and frame the entire endeavor, the former is a collection of letters composed by a man to his fiancée and the latter are her responses. I’m Waiting For You introduces us to a problem of space and time and the trials of interstellar romance. The lover is aboard a ship bound for Alpha Centauri. The passengers are businessmen and traders. The vessel will eventually slow down and fall into a tight orbit around the sun, from which it will accelerate to the point where workers will be able to slingshot themselves into any point in time. From the lover’s point of view, from the moment he said goodbye to his future wife, their families, and the wedding planner, approximately four months have elapsed, and he has now received leave to celebrate with his wife and begin their new lives together with an on-Earth wedding. For her part, her beloved bid farewell to him took place over four years ago. Her company and his company have finally made the routine calculations needed to reunite them at the same time and place, and the lover has already begun his journey in a small, one-man vessel when true love encounters its first snafu: his wife messages him, explaining that her company’s ship came across an interstellar transport in distress and was compelled to perform a multi-day rescue. This is the first of many obstacles and setbacks that will impact the lovers’ meeting, and send them across time to witness eras and epochs and test their limitless love for one another. The protagonists in The Prophet of Corruption and That One Life are god-like figures who created the world and humankind and are having second thoughts about their projects. In the former, the creator assesses the progress of his creation in what we call the early 21st century.  As the being analyzes what its creation–humans– have wrought, it comes to think that this project has introduced a virus into an otherwise perfectly balanced sealed biosphere, well-suited to be contemplated for eternity. In the latter, the creator is an anxious parent to a rebellious child. Should it punish its creation, crippling it, causing it to fear the creator’s wrath, or will it allow the child to mature without hobbles?

“The streets of Seoul were covered in red Jörmungandr vines. Their thick, woody stems punched through the concrete and climbed to the tops of skyscrapers, using the buildings as a support. The buildings crumpled like paper inside their iron grip but were still inhabited by people. Robots, which might be called the last remaining “organism” on Earth allied with humanity, stood watch every night and patrolled the buildings’ perimeters. The Jörmungandr fed on ozone or ammonia and their flowers spewed venom. They were immune to every poisonous chemical invented by humans… 

People said this was the end of the world. I disagreed. It was simply the end of the human race. People said the gods had abandoned the world. I disagreed. Divine attention had simply shifted from us to other creatures. Every new species was superbly resistant to pollution and germs. They multiplied alarmingly fast in environments where oxygen was scarce but ozone and ammonia abounded. They grew from plastic dumps and conquered oceans beyond human reach, bided their time, and finally crawled onto land after cities had been destroyed several times over. At first people tried to find ways to eradicate them, but once any pesticide or toxic gas was used on them, the next generation was born immune to it and began propagating swiftly again.” –from That One Life