'Your Utopia' considers surveillance and the perils of advanced technology
The best of Bora Chung's new stories impart a feeling of disorientation, evoking worlds that seem at first like utopias only to disclose, upon deeper inspection, dystopias.
As concepts go, "utopia" is a spectacularly Janus-faced one. The word itself is encrusted with opposing meanings, signifying both an ideal place and no place.
Every utopia also encodes a dystopia; an imagined ideal defines itself against antipodean values, lightness against darkness. Korean writer Bora Chung thoroughly embraces the term's quirk of contradiction in her new story collection Working again with Anton Hur, who translated her first story collection into English, Chung now scares up scenarios set in both the near past and near future. If the expertly crafted stories in her prior collection revolved around what M.R. James called the "malice of inanimate objects," the stories in
