Red Emma’s

“I once had a family. At least, the earliest version of me had a family.”

In a reunified Korea of the near future, the sun beats down on a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, broken down for parts. Eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through the scraps, searching for a piece that might support her failing body. There among the piles of trash, something catches her eye: a robot boy—so lifelike and strange, unlike anything she’s ever seen before.

Siblings Jun and Morgan haven’t spoken for years. When they were children, their brother Yoyo disappeared suddenly, leaving behind only distant memories of his laughter and near-human warmth. Yoyo—an early prototype of a humanoid robot designed by their father—was always bound for something darker and more complex. Now Morgan makes robots for a living and is on the verge of losing control of her most important creation. Jun is a detective with the Robot Crimes Unit whose investigation is digging up truths that want to stay buried. And whether they like it or not, Ruijie’s discovery will thrust their family back together in ways they could have never imagined.

At once a thrilling work of speculative fiction and a poignant exploration of what it really means to be human, Luminous is an unforgettably brilliant debut.

Silvia Park grew up in Seoul and split their time between Korea and America. They received a BA from Columbia and MFA from NYU, in addition to completing the Clarion Workshop in 2018. Their short fiction has been published in BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW, JOYLAND, REACTOR, and reprinted in the 2019 BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY. LUMINOUS is their first novel.

K.C. Mead-Brewer is an author and editor living in Baltimore, MD. Her fiction appears in ELECTRIC LITERATURE’S RECOMMENDED READING, STRANGE HORIZONS, THE RUMPUS, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and is included in both 2019’s Best Small Fictions and 2019’s Best Micro Fiction. Her short story “The Hidden People” won _CUTBANK MAGAZINE’s 2020 Montana Prize in Fiction, and her short story “The Daddy Thing” was one of ELECTRIC LITERATURE’_s 32 most-read stories of the decade. K.C. is a graduate of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction.

Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the University of Oregon’s MFA program and has attended workshops through the Clarion Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Tin House, where she was a 2021 scholar. Her fiction can be found in publications such as ONE STORY, WITNESS MAGAZINE, PASSAGES NORTH, and LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE_ _and has been nominated for anthologies like the PUSHCART PRIZE and BEST OF THE NET. Nic has also written essays and articles for AUTOSTRADDLE, BREVITY, REACTOR, and THEM. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.