Sublimation is the novel-length exploration of an idea that Isabel J Kim first grappled with in her 2021 short story Homecoming is Just Another Word for Sublimation of the Self. In this world, people can split during traumatic periods of separation leaving behind an “instance” of themselves in their original location. In the short story the “instance” of a woman from Korea, who split off when she was 10, returns from the United States for her grandfather’s funeral. The story explores the relationship between the version of the character who left and the version who stayed behind. The book retains this framing, expanding it slightly but essentially retelling the original story for its first part before moving on from its ambiguous ending and expanding outwards.
The main characters of the original story are Soyoung and her instance Rose. Rose and her mother left Korea twenty years before, leaving Soyoung and a copy of her mother behind. Now their grandfather, who himself escaped from North Korea and may well have left an instance behind, has died. Before his death her grandfather urged Soyoung to reintegrate with her instance (reintegration can be achieved through physical contact which remerges the two separate instances back into a single body and consciousness but with all the memories of both) and has left Rose a bequest to try and encourage her to agree. Kim also introduces Yujin and his instance YJ. They split when Yujin went to America to study in his 20s. Yujin stayed in Korea while YJ had become successful working for a company that markets instancing tech including a device that can, in most cases prevent instances from reintegrating. YJ becomes the face of a secret project that his company is running that can reverse integration and prevent instancing. He learns that the company is possibly up to no good but can offer him everything he wants if her just toes the line.
The short story that Sublimation is based on is a clever and mind-bending idea: What if when we travelled we leave a version of ourselves behind? What does it mean when you then come back to the place that you left? It takes the sliding-doors idea and makes it tangible – with both the life lived and the potential life left behind both being realised. In order to extend this idea to novel length, Kim has to add a little more plot and so creates the corporate conspiracy which Yujin, YJ, Souyon and Rose all get tangled up in. In doing so she takes her characters into different ethical territory – around questions of who should control migration and personal autonomy. All of which are interesting but tend to bog down the second half of the novel.
Similarly to the short story, Kim intersperses her narrative with historical and mythical explorations of the process of instancing from the Bible, through the Odyssey to the Korean story of Arirang and others. All of this though highlights that, as a result of this reality, by the 21st Century the world should look substantially different than it does. But it doesn’t. It looks just like our world but with instancing.
When focussed on the key issues of individuality, agency, homecoming, legacy and a contemplation of nature-versus-nurture Sublimation fires most successfully. Because Kim does this most effectively through her two split main characters and how they are both the same but different, shaped as they are by different experiences and environments. And world-building quibbles aside, Sublimation is big idea sci-fi that is well worth dipping into.
(And as with all interesting scifi and fantasy ideas at the moment Sublimation has also been picked up for development as a TV series.)
Sublimation by Isabel J Kim
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