A LOVE STORY FROM THE END OF THE WORLD

Stories explore love amid climate disasters.

Novelist Kim combines themes of climate catastrophe and love in her first collection of short fiction. Some of the 10 stories have a futuristic bent, like “Biodome” and “Bioark,” in which characters search for love while living, respectively, in a protective dome in a future Seoul or on a nouveau ark sailing the blood-red ocean. The plots are clever riffs on class and capitalism, revealing diverse reactions to the environmental disaster, from hoarding resources and seeking clout to dreaming of escape. Other stories can be didactic, as in “Notting Hill,” in which a character spells out the environmental stakes in casual conversation: "So, you do realize the world’s best scientists have testified that Earth’s average temperatures have risen to levels never before seen in the history of humanity…” On occasion, Kim resorts to stereotypes or caricatures to make her points about the global reach of climate disaster. In “KwaZulu-Natal,” the mixed-race Zulu and Afrikaner protagonist speaks entirely in dialect: “When it’s blimmin hot like this in August...I always think on my elephant.” It’s an awkward choice given that every other character in the book—whether Korean, Argentinian, Norwegian, American, or even British—speaks in standard American English. “Mountain, Island” is a tonally strained satire of poverty tourism featuring a child living on a remote island used as a dumping ground who attains fame by imitating K-pop dancers. “Older Sister” unironically recycles model minority tropes, namely a perfect 1600-SAT-scoring daughter of hard-working Korean immigrants whose store is attacked during the riots following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. It’s potentially rich material, but the characters are flat. Kim details her own environmental activism in an afterword: “If you’re an artist, it is not conscionable to use our ecological catastrophe as material for fiction and not personally do something to help.” While Kim’s sincerity is never in doubt, the collection has a hasty feel to its construction.

Uneven writing gets in the way of environmental plotlines.