“I’m here. Actually, I’ve never left. Can you come where I am?”

A man receives a holographic message from his wife who died two years ago and enters the unknown space called “Yonder.”

The novel delicately depicts various emotions related to love through a man’s sorrow of loss, his longing for his deceased wife, and his courage to take any consequences as long as he can see her again. 

The Seoul of the 2040s is a ubiquitous world where reality and cyberspace are mixed together and mankind dreams of a new evolution in harmony with machines. Kim Hol, the protagonist, lives in grief after his wife Lee Hu died of cancer. Two years later, he receives a holographic message. It says, “Hol, it’s me, Hu. I’m here.” His wife looks just the way she was when she was alive. Hol learns that her entire memory is stored in cyberspace called “Yonder” and begins to find a way to get there, dreaming of his reunion with his wife.

In the novel, Yonder is described as a city of the dead whose existence is maintained by their downloaded brains. Since the space is composed of stored memories, it is a sort of “artificial heaven,” where there is neither pain nor death. Furthermore, the allegory of the Greek mythology used in the novel adds to the depth of the story unfolding in the future time and space. According to the author, Hol and Hu can be likened to Orpheus and Eurydice, and Yonder to the home of the dead ruled over by Hades.

The judges of the Korea New Wave Literature Award praised that “Goodbye, Yonder reveals the fictitiousness of the “artificial heaven” created by a future civilization by reflecting on happiness and sadness, remembrance and obliviousness, and eternity and death” and “shows the paradigm shift in the criticism of civilization from ‘machines more human than humans’ to ‘life worse than death.’ That is why for all the futuristic technology and machinery in this fictional world, the story has a lot of warmth and humanity to it.”  

Excerpts

What should I do at home without Hu? Should I go home and face the fact that she’s no longer around? Although I already reported her death, it still didn’t feel real. How could someone who had always been there and should definitely be there disappear so abruptly? Nothing in the world disappeared in an instant like that, just like the switch flicked off. (P. 18) 

Such things were actually what stirred me up at that very moment. It wasn’t the avatar looking and speaking startlingly like Hu. It was the fact that she’d planned all this out before she died and that what she had designed, chosen, and prepared for me could still enter my life and influence me that moved my heart. (P.108) 

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“For everything. For not coming to see you, for leaving you home alone, for having to see you here, and for saying the harsh things last time.”

“Don’t be sorry if you can’t help it.

“…”

“I mean you don’t have to be sorry for things you have no control over. (P.206)

“Now, listen to me carefully. I’m gonna go there by any means. You can invite me, though that probably isn’t what you can do… Anyway, I’ll find a way to get to where you are. I must be there and see you with my own eyes.” (P.210-211)  

I sat at an empty table. Before me, a big, bulky man was sitting with his back against me. I saw a huge titanium spine along his back from the neck down to the sacrum. It must be set deeply under the skin and connected to the artificial nervous system and censors in his body. Across from him was sitting a cyborg equipped with a telescope where an eye should be. It was looking around, occasionally extending the eye to its full length and then pulling it back. (P. 236)

Kim Jang-hwan was born in Seoul in 1962. He studied philosophy at the University of Oregon, US. After graduation, he returned to Korea and ran a small publishing house focusing on, among other things, fantastic and imaginative works by foreign authors including Jerzy Kosinski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Neal Stephenson. He also translated The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and introduced it to Korean readers. Since childhood, he had been drawn to the unlimited imagination of fantasy novels, science fiction in particular, and creating his own story was his long-cherished desire. That dream, however, had to wait until later because making a living was a priority for him. While teaching English at a private institution, he never let go of his literary aspiration. After he immigrated to New Zealand with his family, he finally decided to write a story, using the deep and vast “boredom” of the country’s environment as an opportunity to give his imagination full play. His long-cherished desire came true when Goodbye, Yonder won the 4^th Korea New Wave Literature Award. The judges praised that by combining the sci-fi elements of future time and space with mythological plots, the novel created the most advanced high-tech world that can be imaginable while still making it full of humanity. Since its first release, Goodbye, Yonder has been steadily loved as an SF classic, and in 2022, it was made into the TV series Yonder by film director Lee Jun-ik. Having successfully created his own story at last, the author strolls along the “boring” beach of New Zealand every day these days, waiting for a new story to knock on his mind’s door.