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language: Korean (English tr. Anton Hur)
country: South Korea
year: 2019
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 22.3.26-26.3.26
In war, the ones who survive are real. The surviving ones are the real ones.
Chung Bora’s Red Sword (translated by Anton Hur) is a weird, pensive sci-fi novel following a woman dispatched by a nameless Empire to fight in a war over a seemingly empty, alien world.
this is a disorienting book, intentionally so: the woman and her fellow soldiers are (they believe) prisoners of the Empire, made to fight its battles on the promise of freedom. the men are armed with guns — which quickly prove basically useless against the armor of the alien soldiers they’re fighting — and the women are armed only with swords, explicitly there to be human shields. on the ground, however, the Empire’s lines, such as they are, quickly fall apart, sending the woman and a group of her companions on a series of chaotic treks across the surface of the planet.
but running through this is the novel’s central weirdness: they are not alone, in the sense that there is more than one of each of them. a man dies and emerges from the Empire’s ship the next day with no memory of his death. the woman meets another woman who shares her childhood memories and looks exactly like her, except that she is badly wounded and riding on the back of one of the bloodthirsty giant birds that appear to be the only life on the planet other than the Empire and its alien enemy. as the novel progresses we come to understand more of this, both through the main plot and through a series of interludes exploring the history of the planet, such as it is.
this is a book about imperial biopolitics, the management of colonized and colonizing populations. the exact extent of this is difficult to discuss without spoilers, but fortunately another core aspect of the novel is easier: this is a book about imperialist war. it’s apparently based on the Korean soldiers who fought for the Qing against Russia (I think in the 17th-century border conflicts, rather than the 1900 invasion of Manchuria), though I think it might be more accurate to say “loosely inspired by” than “based on” as such. the specific history isn’t really there, but the sense of disorientation is. the woman and her fellow soldiers do not all share a common language; none of them know what they are fighting for (besides the vague and dubious promise of “freedom”); and it quickly becomes clear that the Empire will not hesitate to summarily execute any of them if they become mildly inconvenient. from the Empire’s perspective, there are always more bodies it can throw at the problem, and sometimes it’s easier to start fresh.
I’m talking around the question of whether I liked the book because, while I did — quite a bit! — I wanted to like it even more. part of the issue, I think, was the very odd formatting: the chapters are broken up into little chunks, each of which is a few paragraphs long (typically between half a page and a page and a half) — except that the breaks between chunks are not, you know, breaks. the narration is continuous across chunks except for a small handful of cases where two chunks are separated by an actual section break with an asterisk. this made for a kind of bumpy read, because the space between chunks that would normally signal a break or a shift of perspective or some kind of discontinuity between sections simply…wasn’t that. I assume that this is mimicking some aspect of the book’s formatting in Korean? but I found it a bit baffling. I also found the pacing a little bit odd; I can’t put my finger on just what it is, but something about the interludes, I think — they simultaneously explained more than I needed or wanted and didn’t explain enough.
(compounding this is, again, my sense that, while Anton Hur is basically a good (very good, even) translator, he’s also just a little bit sloppy — inevitably, I suspect, given that he’s published at least three translations a year since 2021, including six in 2024, when he was presumably working on Red Sword.)
notwithstanding the weird formatting, though, I found the sparse narration compelling. I was particularly interested in the novel’s relationship with names: the woman is only named about two-thirds of the way through the book, and even when she learns the names of some other characters, she still thinks of them based on their clothing or gender. there is the (older) man, there is the young man, there is Light Green Skirt (named Atung), there is Light Green Skirt’s lover Indigo Skirt (named Tumina), and then there are they white-clad, white-skinned aliens and the grey-clad Imperials. this gives the novel both a dreamy feel and a strong sense of purpose, focusing it sharply on imperial violence and dehumanization and the possibility of resistance thereto.
it is, all told, a gripping, unsettling book, and definitely worth a read, even if my recommendation has some caveats.
moods: dark, mysterious, tense