This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light will be released on April 28, 2026.
For all that I adore sci-fi short fiction, I don’t read many collections cover-to-cover unless they’re coming from authors I know and love. Most of my short fiction reading is online, at times where I don’t have an ereader or paper book with me, so collections don’t neatly fit into my typical flow. And if the author is unfamiliar, there’s always the risk of not enjoying the voice and then having to read it ten times in a row. But a book club friend picked up an ARC of Anton Hur’s translation of If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop and had nothing but good things to say, so I decided to put in a request and try it for myself.
If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light features seven stories, five of which are being published for the first time in English. I don’t have exact word counts (publishers, share your word counts for collections and anthologies!), but an educated guess based on page count and the word count of a previous translation is that six are short novelettes and one is a long short story. Seeing as how the novelette is perhaps my favorite length to read, that doesn’t bother me one bit.
I’ve read a bit of translated sci-fi over the last few years of being a Clarkesworld regular, and I’ve found (unsurprisingly) that it often feels out of step with contemporary Anglophone stylistic expectations. If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light is no exception, with a fondness for backstory and a penchant for concept-driven stories that reminds me of classic sci-fi. The prose feels somewhat matter-of-fact compared to the tight, personal perspective I’ve become so accustomed to of late, and more than half of the stories open with introductions from the perspective of someone who only hears the core narrative secondhand. It’s a pretty consistent style—said without value judgment—but it’s one that tends to prompt in me certain expectations of sci-fi that’s obsessed with the concepts and technology details, to the point that characterization can sometimes feel like an afterthought.
I knew those expectations came mostly from reading American authors, and yet I still couldn’t help but be surprised by how consistently and how thoroughly If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light subverted them. For all that the collection is concept-heavy, the true core is the way those concepts affect the people involved. The action in Space Hero is precipitated by the discovery of a strange not-quite-wormhole connecting our solar system to deep space that’s impassable by humans without dramatic alteration, but the Tunnel itself lingers mostly in the background of a story about representation and heroism. How does the lead respond when she finds that the story she knows of her heroic astronaut aunt is not entirely true? And how had the weight of representing Koreans, women, and mothers played into the true events beneath the cover story? Similarly, Archival Loss is ostensibly a story about retaining the digitized consciousness of the dead, but its heart is the way a woman’s pregnancy causes her to reevaluate the rocky relationship with her own mother and seek to learn more about the person underneath. Despite the classic sci-fi trappings, both stories do a terrific job exploring complicated people and the ways their own complications affect their relationships with the next generation.
Even the stories that delve more deeply into a particular technology tend to center the way people respond to the technology more than the details of discovery. The title story, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light delves into the way that rapid developments in long-distance travel can leave some communities cut off from the rest of the world. And The Materiality of Emotions explores the buying and selling of tangible emotions, not from a business perspective but as a meditation on the seemingly strange practice of intentionally experiencing negative emotions. I never found myself completely immersed in the mindset of the characters in these two, but they both have poignant moments and explore interesting themes—they’re still solid stories that would be well at home in venues like Clarkesworld.
That should come as no surprise, given that another in the collection, Symbiosis Theory, has already been published in Clarkesworld, albeit in a different translation. While most of the stories in the collection feature shifts between a frame story and a core narrative, “Symbiosis Theory” has the most abrupt transition. It opens with the story of an orphan who became a successful artist by painting what she insisted were visions of another world, all before abruptly cutting to research on the translation of infant thought into human language. It demands a bit of trust on the part of the reader, but when the convergence comes, it makes for a touching whole. As the opening to the collection, it played the biggest role in resetting my expectations. And as the one story with another translation easily available, it makes for a nice test run for readers unsure about whether to acquire the whole book.
The second story, Spectrum, also connects painting to science-fictional elements. It opens from the perspective of a lead whose grandmother had reappeared decades after she and the rest of her research team were thought to be lost. Her claims of first contact were dismissed as delusions of a mind gone unsound after so much time in isolation, but the reader sees not only the details of her story, but also the heart-wrenching reasons she had not shared every piece with the general public.
While “Symbiosis Theory” and “Spectrum” are very strong novelettes in their own right, my personal favorite in the collection is Pilgrims. It opens with a familiar speculative setup, featuring a girl from an isolated settlement pondering her upcoming coming-of-age pilgrimage and asking questions that no one in her community seems able to answer. I do admit to a personal love of suppressed history stories, but “Pilgrims” stands above in the way it establishes the strangeness of the setting. And while the ultimate peeling back of the layers may not answer every single question, they do reveal a world that’s much more complicated than the walled dystopia one may expect. It’s not just my favorite in the collection, it’s one of my favorite stories of the year.
On the whole, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light is a short collection that offers both consistent quality and some true standouts. The worst stories in the collection are good, and the best are exemplary. Fans of sci-fi that leads with concepts before developing true depth and emotional attachment to the characters are in for a treat.
Recommended if you like: novelettes, character-driven sci-fi, female-led sci-fi, the types of stories you might read in Clarkesworld.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Author of Color, Five Short Stories, and Translated. It’s also Published in 2026.
Overall rating: 18 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads