Month: January 2026

Transmentation | Transgression, by Darkly Lem

This is the second novel in the Transmentation series, also known as The Formation Saga, by “Darkly Lem” – which is a pseudonym for a group of five science fiction writers: Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm. Of these writers, Turnbull is the only one whose solo-authored works I have read. I wrote about one of his solo novels here. I also wrote about the first Transmentation novel last year, on Goodreads. In addition to their collaboration, “Darkly Lem” forms part of an even larger grouping, the Many Worlds consortium, who are all writing stories set in the same multiverse. This aggregation of worlds is called “The Simulacrum”, and (instead of space travel as in so many other science fiction narratives) the people are able to transit instantaneously from one universe to another, which also seems to mean from one planet to another. So far, I get the sense that each universe consists only of a single planet.

When you move from one universe/planet to another, your mentality is embedded in a different body each time. When you leave, apparently the bodies continue to exist and have an ordinary social and working life, although without the je-ne-sais-quoi that is individuated personality. It is not uncommon for people to jump from one world to another, and then back to the previous one; when you do that, you re-enter the body you had before, which apparently hasn’t done anything unseemly that would disrupt your status or general sense of identity. This is the weirdest aspect of transit between worlds/universes, and it saves the novum of transit from being merely a Cartesian separation of mind from body. When you go to a planet/universe you have never visited before, it seems that a new body is created for you, but retrospectively woven into the history of its world, so that it is apparently the same age you are. This is what is called retcon (short for “retroactive continuity“) in speculative storytelling; it is not new to the Transmentation series, but it is interesting that the series makes this into an ontological feature of its metaverse, rather than merely a feature of how the narration works.

So much for the framework of the Transmentation series. (I have not yet read any of the other stories in Many Worlds, of which there are quite a few already available online). In terms of storytelling, I have found the Transmentation books to be rich and multifarious. (I have no idea how the five authors split up the task of actually writing the texts). The effect of the multiversal structure is that you get a wide range of characters and narrative threads. Many of these are interesting and compelling in their own right, in addition to what contribution they might make to the overall narrative. There are 12 worlds/universes among which we shift in the course of reading the novel. I think that the overall narrative situations continue closely from those of the previous volume, but I was able to follow everything without having to re-read the previous volume in order to pick up the details I might have forgotten in the year since I read that earlier volume. In any case, the effect is a kaleidoscopic one of shifting back and forth between the different localities/worlds/universes, and it is only slowly over the course of the novel that you start to get a sense of how it all fits together.

Some of the worlds are more powerful (economically, technologically, and militarily) than others, and eventually I realized that we were seeing the outline of a cold war or undeclared war between some of them. The most powerful world, Burel Hird Prime, is an imperalist power. It already controls hundreds or maybe even thousands of other worlds, and it is striving to increase this number. They are worried about all the world where they have some influence, but where the world/society as a whole is not “advanced” enough, by some standard that is not entirely clear, to be fully incorporated into the Burel Hird imperium.

There are many worlds that are entirely insular, i.e. they don’t send people into other worlds/universes, though they all seem aware of how the Simulacrum (the multiverse) works, and know of visitors from other worlds to theirs. Burel Hird has decided that the main obstacle to their success in annexing other worlds is that they have competition from several worlds (such as Firmare, Withered Stem, and Of Tala) that also travel a lot. What the Burel Hird agents try to do, over the course of the novel, is to kick out all the travelers from other universes, so that they are the only outsiders remaining on the worlds that they want to annex.

There are other issues in play — in the first volume, a leader of Burel Hird was assassinated by agents of a different world, and in this volume some of the Burel Hird people spend their time trying to figure out who set up the assassination, and punish them. By the end of the novel, it seems that we have a slowly moving cold war between Burel Hird and Withered Stem, with Of Tala primarily supplying mercenaries to Burel Hird. You might think of Burel Hird as roughly analogous to the USA, and Withered Stem as roughly analogous to Russia or China, but this is a narrative that is committed to the multiple points of view, rather than allegorizing a struggle between good and evil. Often the other worlds, which are being contested over by the major powers, have their own distinct points of view as to what their chances and possiblities are. On one world, Withered Stem agents warn the locals that they will not like falling under the control of Burel Hird; and on of the locals answers that such colonial dependency would still be better than the current planetary situation, in which two vicious totalitarian systems strive for control, and the people in general suffer from both sides. In any case, there are no final resolutions here; a third volume is promised.

What I liked most about the novel, and about its predecessor, was the way you get absorbed into individual details of the various worlds, each of which has its own vividness and complexity, its own particular cultural traits, while at the same time the meta-narrative of the larger struggle looms in the background. The novel features richness and multiplicity over large narrative strokes, and that is a good thing.

Kim Choyeop

Kim Choyeop is a South Korean science fiction writer. Her first collection of stories, IF WE CANNOT GO AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT, was published in Korea in 2019, and will soon be released in English translation. I read an advance copy that I got through Netgalley, which provides early access to books in return for writing reviews.

The book contains seven short stories, all of which combine scientific extrapolation and speculation with all-too-human dilemmas. The overall tone is more melancholy than manic, but Kim takes seriously the ways that extreme possibilities (as Fox Mulder called them) can result from technological advances; rather than either visionary utopianism or bleak dystopianism, we get stories about needing to cope with situations that we cannot possibly be prepared for. I don’t know how to generalize beyond this, so instead I will say something, however brief, about each of the individual stories.

In “Symbiosis Theory”, a new technology allows us to access what is sometimes called the ‘language of thought’: ideas, feelings, etc. that animals and people have before they are ‘translated’ into language or (in animals like dogs) into other forms of indicative behavior. This leads to the discovery of sophisticated thoughts in babies who should not be capable yet of such feelings and articulations. The explanation turns out to be that, at early ages, human beings are symbiotically linked to alien intelligences that initially evolved on another planet in another solar system, and who came to Earth when their home planet was destroyed. Such a scenario could easily lend itself either to horror — we are controlled by alien parasites! — or to wonder — we receive visionary amplification from these guests! — but in Kim’s story, leads instead to neither. The aliens are simply there; and they leave us as we grow older. The scientist who discovers all this is left at the end of the story with “a longing for something she had never laid eyes on, for something that she could barely name or imagine”. One might think of this as the start of a Wordsworthian meditation on departed glories, but such a thing never develops: it is the end of the story, not the beginning. Kim just leaves us there. The sheer facticity of this situation is itself the point.

In the second story, “Spectrum”, the narrator recounts the story of her grandmother’s having spent ten years on a distant planet, among the sentient and vaguely humanoid inhabitants of the planet. Such an idea is frequent in science fiction; but again Kim rejects conventional fictional structures, by turning the “sense of wonder” we expect from science fiction into something that is charmingly mundane, rather than being apocalyptic or Earth-shattering.

The third story, “If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light” (giving its title to the volume as a whole) gives us a whole history of developments in interstellar travel (whether through cryogenics so that passengers can survive the immense time it takes to fly to other solar systems and worlds, or through wormholes), but puts this in the framework of disappointment, since the changes in technology mean that an elderly woman, formerly one of the inventors of such technology, will never get to the planet where her husband and son live, waiting for her to join them.

Next, “The Materiality of Emotions” recounts a commercial invention that allows various emotions to be physically materialized, and thereby owned by individual — the emotion takes the form of a brighly colored and aromatic pebble that you can hold in your hand. This leads to another history of disappointment; people do not strive for positive emotions, but prefer to purchase negative emotions, leading to a kind of aesthetic contemplation of disillusionment (which people enjoy at second remove, in the same way that we/they enjoy tragedies and melodramas).

In “Archival Loss”, when people die their personalities, ideas, and emotions are tranformed into data and stored in vast libraries. You can see and talk with a dead person, but nobody knows whether these preserved dead people are somehow still real, or only simulations. The story both asks whether this makes a difference, and dramatizes how recovering the dead in this way is related to our ambivalent or even sharply negative feelings about our parents and other people who influenced us in the past.

“Pilgrims” is a complex and resonant story about genetic engineering that makes it possible to eliminate human flaws and imperfections (of character as well as of physical traits), and ambivalently considers the psychic costs of such rearrangement of human life. I have mentioned ambivalence in most of my story descriptions at this point, and I would say that the insistence upon ambivalence, and the refusal to resolve it, is perhaps the key motif of all of Kim Choyeop’s fiction.

The last story in the collection, “My Space Hero”, is again about radically re-engineering human bodies (and, inevitably, minds as well) in order to permit us to travel through “The Tunnel” (again, a sort of space wormhole) and access distant points in the cosmos. As in the other stories, the real emphasis is upon whether such radical changes are worth it or not — will the other end of the galaxy really be different from our own solar system and galactic neighborhood?

So these stories by a relatively young author (she is now 33, and was only in her mid-twenties when this book was initially published in Korean) all express various modes of disillusionment, which necessarily attends the radical innovations and the “sense of wonder” that characterize science fiction as a genre, and that are particularly relevant to our own contemporary societies, which are (as Marx and Engels said) engaged in “constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”.