Book Review: Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim

 Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim

368 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: June 2, 2026

Of the most anticipated science fiction novels of the year, this debut is on many radars. This novel didn’t have the standard struggles of a debut. Isabell J. Kim, for one, has won the Nebula, Locus, BSFA, and the Shirley Jackson Awards, and she has a well-earned reputation for really good short fiction, including several you can read for free over at Clarkesworld, including the story that was expanded into this novel. The novel went to Tor in a bidding war and has already sold TV rights to Universal. All amazing things, but there is only one downside. 

Major hype puts more pressure on the novel. As I write this review, the official release is months away. I was a little worried that the novel would not live up to the buzz.

The good news is that, yes, the novel is fantastic.  Another thing about the buzz, because of the timing and the marketing, which is constantly comparing this show to Severance, it might be easy to dismiss this novel as chasing Severance vibes. Let's keep in mind that Kim first explored this idea in this short story…

The OG short story

More than a year before Severance, you can’t blame Tor for going there, as the Apple TV show is great watercooler SF. That being said, Sublimation and Severance share some conceptual DNA, the tones are very different. Sublimation is not a mystery box; the concept makes it an alternate history in a way. I wish I didn’t have to compare them, but that is the fate of this novel when it is marketed as such. 

The more natural comparison for me was last year’s top read, Luminous by Silvia Park, an SF novel by a Korean American author, whose work was shaped by both cultures. Luminous, of course, is a robot novel, but both novels are about immigration, although this one is much more direct. 

Sublimation is high concept SF that skirts with Twilight Zone-ish off beat just barely fantasy vibe. I say this because the process of an “Instance” process is almost magically fantastic, but treated in the novel as just the natural way of the world. In the universe of this novel, immigrants who cross borders split into versions of themselves. One that stays home, and one that changes and grows, are separated in a new country. Much like PKD’s Counterclock World, it is more of a surrealist concept than SF, but Kim commits to world-building.

Soyoung Rose Kang became an instance when she traveled across the border. It is an interesting element of the theme that borders become essentially magical portals. Much like PKD’s Counterclock World, it doesn’t help to overthink it. This idea is excellent for exploring themes and not one for readers who nitpick or ask lots of questions. 

Rose and her mother left Korea as children. When they crossed the border, they split into two copies, and the old Soyoung stayed behind, living a separate life. Did she become Rose in America, or was Soyoung created to stay in Korea? As Dickian, I love the questions about what is real, who is human, and who is not.  Who is living a REAL life?

 The story kicks off when Rose is asked to travel back to Korea for her Grandfather’s funeral. She hasn’t been back since she was ten.  Rose has become American, but at ten, a version of herself continued to grow up in Korea. Her relationship with her Korean mother is very interesting; it looks and sounds like her mom, but of course, she is different. Rose has some memories of Korea, but America is a mystery to Soyoung. You might be able to guess where this is going.

One way to tell this story might have been to have a person at an agency overseeing multiple cases, but smartly, Kim tells a focused story based mostly on two experiences. It is enough to really highlight how immigration is a part of our fabric. “Instancing is written into America’s blood, into the story it tells itself. Here is where instances immigrate. Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry,  give us your copies and let them be fruitful and multiply, let them homestead, let them become titans of industry, let them and their non-instanced children build cities, towns, and railroads.”

The surreal existence of the instance gives the novel a chance to explore with and play with themes that are part of the American experience, high concepting the issues doesn’t exactly bury the issue either. This novel has a point of view. 

Much of the narrative tension comes from Soyoung/ Rose dealing with the weird ways their lives are forced into drama by the splitting of their lives. They were one person, now they are two, the same childhood and family but after ten years old two very different people. “It’s not clean,” she says. “I want the sort of clean, perfect separation like we pretend that these last months never happened, with all my memories sectioned off into the right person who needs them.”

It is on the back cover, so it is not a spoiler, but Soyong tries to steal Rose’s life. The parallel stories are much of the story's driving force. The POV shifts often, but it slips gently into second person in certain chapters. 

We also get the story of an ambitious instance named Yujin, whose two separate halves work together with separate educations, with the intention of becoming one person later. Yujin’s story is the perfect parallel because Rose and her Instance want nothing to do with each other. Yujin explains his desire to be one, while Rose sees integration as theft.

“So, it’s like – I want to remember being home. Living at home. And Yujin wants to remember ten years of being here. And Yujin wants to skip military service, if he can. And I can’t go back without potentially getting flagged for my own military service. Or becoming him and having to do his- ours?- and this way we get everything. All of it.”

Soyoung nods. “Yujin wants your life. He wants your life, he wants your life. Soyoung wanted Rose’s life.”

Yujin however, was strategic. 

“You had gotten the science degree, and Yj had gotten the business one. You agreed to this to maximize your abilities later, after you reintegrated.”

The novel explores plenty of corners presented by the concept. Enough to feed a TV show, but also enough to give the novel plenty of dynamic corners. 

“Imagine a world without instances. A world where leaving is a perfect absence, where there is no ghost left behind. Imagine knowing the parallel, leaving the past in the past, a world where desire doesn’t matter, where there is knowledge of the implicit truth of the human heart.”

This is wonderfully opinionated science fiction. The Severance comparison negatively affect readers who are looking for a workplace satire, and since I am the PKD guy, I think Philip K. Dick fans will enjoy the concept. The prose is excellent, and Kim plays with tense and form in many interesting ways. The characters are well drawn and will pull you into the end world enough that you will just go with the more surreal elements.  This is a great modern SF novel that deserves attention.  

 

Book Review: The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner

 

The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner 

 343 pages, Hardcover
Published 1969 by Ace Books

 Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1969), 

British Science Fiction Association Award for Novel (1970)

 I know that, as a PKD guy, it might be assumed that my favorite science fiction of the new wave would always come from him. Although today we are talking about a novel that PKD himself blurbed. Anyone who knows me knows that several of my favorite SF of all time came from the mind and fingertips of John Brunner. I have written extensively about Brunner and his impact on the genre. The Jagged Orbit was an important one that I was saving for a special occasion. A while back, I had a bonus Friday off, and we decided to take the train up to LA just to get lunch and have a bit of a train experience. So I thought it would be nice to read this one, since I could certainly read it all in one day of train travel. Normally, this would probably take me a few days or even a week. 

 

I thought this would prove to be a better experience given the novel's experimental narrative style, which we can explore further as we go.  I think it did improve my experience. Experimental style...

 

The Jagged Orbit is the second of the Club Rome Quartet, a sorta unofficial series of Brunner's four masterpieces of Future Shock style novels. All four portrayed a nightmare-like 21st century that is far more predictive than many more highly regarded classics. The Sheep Look Up, the third of the series, makes McCarthy’s The Road feel like a Disney movie. While Bradbury is taught in schools, I consider Stand on Zanzibar the towering achievement of SF in the entire 20th century. 

It is almost as brilliant as SOZ, but The Jagged Orbit, coming directly after the masterpiece, might have set up impossible standards; it doesn't seem quite as brilliant at no fault of its own.  TJO, taken on its own, is a staggering work of Science Fiction. Sure, if you are looking for an exact prediction, no SF is going to come close, but a Brunner Club Rome book is always FILLED with eerily similar things to reality.  

Set in 2014, almost half a century in Brunner’s future, this book might not have anything as stark as the mass shooting in SOZ, but it hits on the gun culture more directly. Weapons manufacturers stir up racial tensions to sell weapons, including the demonization of immigrants, including one who is the focus of a media campaign. The news media, which is AI-slop distributed on the ¨commwebs.¨  Regions around the U.S. are divided into corporate and racially segregated mega-cities, and the wealthy have grown into a ruling class.  If you take the hit rate on the Club Rome books, a staggering amount feels close to things that have come true.  The reality is the series could've been called It Can Happen Here if Sinclair Lewis hadn't taken the title.

So we don't have computers called “desketaries,” but honestly, how different are these technologies in the book from smartphones? One of the most powerful parts of the book is a short chapter from a paper written after 2014, which shows how dependent American culture became on computers and how this failed to control the population.

¨For once, it is perfectly clear why they´ve had this swift and resounding success. Our society is no longer run by individuals, but holders of offices; it’s complexity is such that the average person’s predicament compares with that of a savage tribesman, his horizons bounded by a single valley, for whom knowledge of the cycle of seasons is a hard-won intellectual prize…¨

It is hard not to see Brunner writing this in the sixties, predicting computers, and the influence was pretty impressive. 

 ¨…The data which might enable them to be issued over vu-beams are jealously guarded by priests serving up corporation gods, and outsiders are compelled to put up with the physical consequences of mysterious incomprehensible seasons. Take a vacation; you come back to discover that the urban landmark has vanished completely as an earthquake has felled a mountain.¨

It is subtle, but the mention of corporation gods here is important. He is making a bold statement about something as traditional as how we see the seasons as intuitive knowledge. We all see this coming true in our lives. The first example I give is the people who can’t navigate their own cities they live in because the GPS does their navigating. We are on the verge of corporations forgetting they need consumers and moving that mountain over us by turning over huge amounts of jobs to AI.

"Idol of the computer, in which the less imaginative now tend to invest their surplus of otherwise valueless faith."

We have computers designing cities, selecting bomb targets, fighting wars, doing almost any job that requires thinking. Younger students in higher education are putting their faith in software to write papers for them, and it leaves them with less skill in the end. What is amazing is that most Golden Age SF writers could envision moon bases, space travel, etc., Brunner actually saw a more realistic future, and it is funny because at the time readers were them considering nightmares or dystopian. Sure, your pocket computer can give you answers and connect you to the world, but it didn’t bring about a golden age. 

“What drove the fail nail into the coffin of that particular hope, however, were the black insurrectionists of the eighties, which demonstrated that the federal authorities were incapable of controlling large sections of their own cities up to and including Washington D.C.”

Brunner was British but his short visits to the US in the year of the Civil Rights Act and just after it had become law had a profound enough of an impact that he set much of this series in our culture, and to be frank, he tore it to shreds. TJO is about race and not at all feeling optimistic in light of the new Civil Rights Act. Brunner saw the country becoming a near apartheid state. 

Our view of this dystopia is spun through various experimental narrative techniques. Real articles, fake articles, multiple points of view, and chapters with titles longer than the chapter. Chapters that contradict each other and more. Our POV characters include a Stoolpigeon, a former journalist who now oversees the distribution of AI slop, Lydia, a Pythoness who is a cross between a stripper and an ayahuasca guide. A shady Doctor named James, and eventually we get a time traveler sorta….

The Gottchalk Cartel is an amazingly predictive element, too. The Trump kids, Eric and Don Jr. announced just weeks after Dad starts a war as president, set to make $750 million in Drone sales. The different racial, and political systems of this novel have gone from a Science fiction author’s nightmare to our daily reality, so how do we survive it in the novel. That is a spoiler so tread light here…

Spoilers for the very end…

What seems like Dues ex machina ending with a super computer from the future time-traveling back to change the racially inspire self-destruction of society these elements were hidden in plain sight.  You see this supercomputer is given the task to maximize profits of the arms dealer, but it realizes that to be super effective, it will eventually run out of customers. Because everyone is kinda sorta you know, dead.

There is a hilarious reveal of this set-up by the many chapters that are set up by the many chapters that have longer titles than the actual text. Chapter 92 is a detailed sales report for some super weapon that ends with “Desirability rating 97.6%, Salability rating 0%”

Chapter Niniety- three is called  “A Good point.” The entire chapter is  “A product estimated to be desirable for 97.6% of the population should not display a salable rating of zero.”

End spoilers

The Jagged Orbit, compared to the output of most SF writers, is a knock-down, drag-out masterpiece. In the case of this author and this series, this amazing novel is the least powerful of the four books. It is, however, genius and should be rated, reviewed, and thought of as a stand-alone work of amazingly speculative fiction. Brunner saw our nightmare, but we have dues ex Machina to get out of it. Perhaps folks should start listening to the SF authors.

 

 

Book Review: The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (Edited by Frederik Pohl)

 

 The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (Edited by Frederik Pohl)

Hardcover
Published 1976 by Taplinger Publishing Company, New York

 Had I read this in a different year, when I had less going on, I would probably have written a much longer review of this book, which had waited for me on my shelf for years. Growing up in New York City, CM Kornbluth, Cyril to his friends, was a member of the famous first SF club in New York, the Futurians. Lots of famous voices in SF came from that circle: Fred Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Don Wollheim, and Judith Merrill. 

Kornbluth might have been the most naturally talented writer of the bunch, who worked with Fredrick Pohl on two novels, including the classic Space Merchants. He wrote under the name Cyril Judd with Judith Merrill, and still published fairly prolifically on his own. Many short stories, some interesting (in hindsight), like Takeoff, which is a moonshot novel from the fifties. He had double digit number of pen names, including Cecil Corwin, S. D. Gottesman, Edward J. Bellin, Kenneth Falconer, Walter C. Davies, Simon Eisner, Jordan Park, Arthur Cooke, Paul Dennis Lavond, and Scott Mariner. Some early issues of Stirring Science Stories, edited by fellow Futurian Donald Wollheim, would have three or more stories by Kornbluth under different names.

His S.D. Gottesman's story Dead Center was a massive influence on my man Philip K. Dick when he was a young reader. He wrote seven non-SF novels, including political thrillers like Presidential Year, crime like the Naked Storm, and a pulpy erotica called Sorority House, which I am sure is a lost feminist classic. (it was under a pen name for a reason)

That all being said, CM Kornbluth was a working writer who excelled at short science fiction and wrote several all-timers. After reading the Little Black Bag for the Science Fiction Hall of Fame series on my podcast, I decided I needed to finally read this collection from start to finish. I read The Marching Morons a few years back, and it felt like a new read in that light. 

Kornbluth is a fascinating writer, and I consider him the Charles Beaumont of the East Coast, one of the most talented of a group of tight-knit writers who left a short but powerful catalog of work. His friends, like Beaumont on the West Coast, thought he was the best among them. A Jewish writer who was also a decorated hero of the Battle of the Bulge. A machine gunner who fought fascism in Europe but several times wrote about the folly of war. Two Domes - one of the best stories in this collection was an early tale of the Axis winning, written by a machine gunner just a few years removed from the battlefield.

This is a must-read collection for anyone interested in vintage SF, and while many of these stories are solidly golden age, the influence on the New Wave is clear. Politically sharp (for the time), creative, experimental in style, but with delicate prose that doesn't waste a word.  Kornbluth is capable of expansive ideas that can be described as wild and weird, but he creates characters and settings that ground the stories that some of his friends just couldn't do.

 Every single story in this collection had something worthwhile in it, and the stand classics earned their rep. The Little Black Bag is a truly great story that deserves a spot in the SF hall of fame. The Marching Morons, a tale about failed eugenics, is a 1950s take on Idiocracy, and sadly turned out to be very predictive as we currently watch morons lead the country (as I write this) into a war with Iran. This story was written to be the inverse of The Little Black Bag, with a man waking up in the future. I mean, it is about a future overrun by morons, a real estate guy declares himself a dictator and uses Nazi propaganda methods to maintain power…Impossible eh?

My favorite was “The Luckiest Man in Denvu” a socio-economic-based Sci-fi story that has folks in the future living in towers based on wealth and status, written twenty-three years before JG Ballard’s High Rise. This story is a great example of Kornbluth's economic style. 

The mindworm might be the best horror or dark themes story in the collection, but the most powerful story of them all was Two Domes, which uses the alternate history setting to explore what could’ve happened if the U.S. hadn’t won the arms race. I am not entirely sure I agree with the point of the story, but it is a powerful one nonetheless. 

CM Kornbluth’s place in the history of the genre is one increasingly lost to the march of time. His importance is obvious to anyone who studies the era or just takes the time to read his work. I would hate for it to take a movie to make him important again.  

In other words, this should be on your shelf and read.