Synopsis:
Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal, and the harsh permanence of the border: Sublimation is a thrilling and provocative debut for fans of Severance that asks what you’d sacrifice for a different life from award-winning author Isabel J. Kim.
The border cuts you in two.
When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.
Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.
She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.
How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?
Review:
Last year I read the short story Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim. It was simultaneously a sequel to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and a unique social commentary all on its own. I found her writing style with the short story engaging and her take on LeGuin’s ideas thought-provoking. So, when I saw that she was working on a full-length novel, I was thrilled to be able to read and review it. In Sublimation, Kim again takes some societal norms and issues for a ride, imagining a world where life is almost completely identical to today while fundamentally altering it on a cellular level. It doesn’t always work and left me with a lot of unanswered questions, but the philosophical and ethical questions are still bouncing around inside my head.
Kim’s novel approaches identity in an innovative and unique way. What if…we literally become two people when we leave our home, but are conflicted about it? She doesn’t call this cloning or anything similar, but instead calls this an instance. And in the world of Sublimation, this isn’t a recent phenomena — it’s been around as long as humanity has existed. Snippets of the book even allude to the Adam and Eve story in the Bible where an instance of Adam and Eve stayed behind in the Garden of Eden while the ones who ate of the tree left and were banished.
It’s a fascinating concept in theory. Let’s take a look at how it would have worked in my own life. My family moved around a good amount when I was younger. I don’t remember the times we moved when I was a baby and toddler, but I remember moving from Michigan to Arizona before 3rd grade and then from Arizona to Illinois before 7th grade. When we left Phoenix, I really didn’t want to leave. I loved living there and I had a great group of friends. It took me a while to get settled into my new life in the Chicago suburbs, so based on the concepts of Kim’s book, I might have created an instance of myself heading into junior high where one of me left with my family to go to Illinois and another stayed behind in Arizona. It’s interesting to think about, but for me, the longer I thought about it, the more issues and problems such a life would create.
The credulity of the idea of instances stretches…a lot as you discover that basically history stayed the same. The Greeks were still the Greeks, complete with Homer writing The Odyssey and the history of the world wasn’t noticeably different than our own. Kim folds the ideas of instances into that talking about how Odysseus was not instanced on his journey home, signifying his complete desire to get home to his wife. But one could go through history and poke hole after hole in how it would have worked with any number of events and stories. I didn’t want to get hung up on things like that, but my mind kept wandering there as I read. Like…if a man was abducted as a slave from Western Africa in 1609, would there have been an instance that stayed behind? And if the Spanish and Portuguese traders saw that instance happen, would they just keep on abducting that same man over and over and over again, creating an infinite loop of just one slave?
The story that Kim overlays on top of her sci-fi concept is both personal as well as corporate in nature. For immigrants and for those that are first- or second-generation families, I can see the appeal to having one of you in the new place with another of you staying behind, following tradition. The characters were likeable and sympathetic as they navigated their lives as instances and the process of reintegrating later in life.
Kim has a lot to say in this book about identity, bodily autonomy, government and corporate overreach, immigration and so much more. If you can discard the historical issues with instancing, you might really enjoy it. For me, I loved the ethical and philosophical issues at play, but just couldn’t quite put it over the top as a five-star read.
Kim does some interesting prosework in the latter half of the book, parsing the ideas of two people in one body. If you read the audiobook, the passages are disconcerting and dizzying, but to great effect. As narrators, Michelle H. Lee and Major Curda do a great job portraying the same, yet different characters that are at the heart of Sublimation.
Thank you to Tor Books and Macmillan Audio for providing this book and audiobook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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