If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light

"A stunning collection that lingers in the mind and heart" — Ruth Ozeki

"I've been yearning for the whole world to read Kim Choyeop and fall in love with her as I did"

— Bora Chung, author of Cursed Bunny and The Midnight Timetable

Meet the alien species that put the humanity into human beings.

Discover the fate of Slefonia III once warp travel became obsolete.

Visit the Mind Library to commune with the dead.

Purchase sadness as a stone and anger as a paperweight.

Kim Choyeop became an instant literary sensation in Korea with her debut short story collection. Each of these bitesize speculative masterpieces represents a journey into the unknown, guided by a writer blessed with a boundless imagination.

From alternative futures to distant alien planets, in the company of scientists, space explorers, and ordinary citizens in extraordinary situations, she revels in making the impossible seem not only possible but somehow inevitable.

Traversing the bounds of imagination with an ethereal incisiveness, her stories dismantle the borders between normal and abnormal, material and abstract, earthly and otherworldly. With unforgettable inventiveness and pathos, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light heralds the arrival of an essential voice in contemporary fiction.

Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur