Silvia Park's LUMINOUS

Thanks to partners NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the digital ARC of Silvia Park’s Luminous. The book will be published next week, on March 11.

I love fiction that confronts a classic question posed by sci fi: what does it mean to be human? Silvia Park’s Luminous lives vibrantly within this question, diving into the lives of characters who are robots, characters who are largely bionic, characters who require robotic support to survive. The question of where the line between robot and human lies is one with which the novel wrestles, a thought-provoking conundrum that becomes less answerable as the book unfolds. More important, the novel confronts whether that line really matters: do we owe compassion and empathy to “mere machines”?
While I often wished that the novel was more propulsive, I was nevertheless fascinated by its array of characters who are wrestling with their place in the world, with what they owe to others and to themselves.

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