Memory Dismembered

Kurt Guldentops and Sungshin Kim review Bora Chung’s “Red Sword,” newly translated by Anton Hur.

By Kurt Guldentops, Sungshin KimOctober 12, 2025

• SF

SCIENCE FICTION HAS often centered on the trauma of war. Memorable examples include Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons (1990) and, more recently, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), both told through retrospection, piecing together fragmented memories. Korean SF author Bora Chung’s Red Sword (2025) rejects this retrospective mode; instead of reconstructing war after the fact, Chung thrusts the reader into a conflict that feels immediate and strangely unmoored from time.

For much of Red Sword’s first half, the visceral disorientation of the war novel obscures its science-fictional speculation. The protagonist’s situation seems straightforward: she is a prisoner forced to fight for an unnamed intergalactic empire, thrown into a war against aliens on a barren planet. Yet a deep sense of mystery pervades the setting, action, characters, and even tools of war. The planetary battlefield is shrouded in a white fog that clouds vision and sound. The loneliness of war emerges in the first engagements with the aliens, as the fog isolates the protagonist from the other prisoner-soldiers. Repeated military forays—whose purpose remains unclear—are broken only by chaotic battles that shatter her sense of time, and by strange apparitions of the recently killed.

The protagonist’s sole objective is survival. We learn little about her past, and for much of the story, we don’t even know her name. Yet Chung’s restraint draws us in: by focusing on the mundane acts of survival amid violence, she makes the character’s struggle feel strikingly immediate. The weapons of war seem pulled from different eras, ranging from the protagonist’s sword to guns to the slicing rays of the aliens. Readers should expect neither ultrasleek technology nor cyberpunk grittiness. Red Sword achieves its most profound effects not through elaborate world-building but through careful architecture. The sword and the gun recur throughout, deployed with poignant force at key moments.

The sparse treatment of time and space creates a sense of estrangement, yet the work is rooted in a multilayered historical and national context. Chung’s story collections have already marked her as one of South Korea’s most distinctive voices in speculative fiction. Originally published in Korean in 2019, Red Sword is her first novel to appear in English, in a translation by Anton Hur. The position of its protagonist—forced to fight for an empire in a war not her own—points toward the national predicament of South Korea. Such a sense of in-betweenness may be as fundamental to Korean historical consciousness as the more familiar issue of national division. Hemmed in by larger powers, questions of collaboration and survival have recurred throughout Korean history.

In an afterword to the Korean edition, the author reveals the historical text that provided Red Sword’s initial inspiration: the mid-17th-century chronicle of Shin Ryu. At that time, Korea occupied a precarious position between China and the Northern Steppe. Shin Ryu was the commander of Korean tributary troops, conscripted to fight for Qing dynasty China in the far north. Under the impression that they were being sent against steppe nomads, these Korean soldiers instead encountered and defeated the outposts of an expanding Russia. As Chung observes, the Russians must have seemed almost alien to the Koreans.

Just like the Russians, the alien targets of the empire’s military expedition in the novel turn out to be human, or at least an offshoot of humanity. They are distinguished only by a pale appearance and the fact that they communicate through vibrations. Still, this minimal otherness offers a fleeting glimpse of the possible. Fredric Jameson once remarked, in a discussion of the alien body, that science fiction invents new sensory organs to perceive what we cannot yet grasp. For most of Red Sword, such organs are conspicuously absent—the alien world remains opaque, its meaning withheld. Only late in the novel do we get something resembling a genuine alien encounter, when the protagonist infiltrates an enemy base. Managing to overhear the aliens’ vibrational speech, she is moved by their palpable sense of community and dignity, which stands in stark contrast to the cultural attitudes of the side she has been compelled to fight for.

While Chung’s fiction has long engaged with traditional Korean storytelling, the historical inspiration here remains subtly encoded, and without the author’s afterword, it would likely escape notice. Chung describes how the distant past of Shin Ryu’s chronicle fused with her own experience of popular activism and solidarity, in particular the protests that followed the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. That tragedy, in which over 300 died, most of them high school students, exposed the callousness of the conservative government, provoked widespread outrage, and ultimately sparked mass protests that contributed to the downfall of President Park Geun-hye (not to be confused with the more recent impeachment of yet another conservative South Korean leader). Indeed, the spaceship in Red Sword is no vehicle for planetary adventure; rather, it becomes the site of a painful struggle for dignity. Likewise, the protagonist does not resemble the morally ambiguous heroes of contemporary Anglo-American science fiction but embodies a kind of unheroic courage.

Chung’s ability to insert the emotional register of popular activism into a narrative adopted from a traditional military chronicle might surprise readers. It is made possible by an intellectual context in which the idea of the nation, shaped by a period of colonial subjugation, retains a discernible left-wing inflection. The deaths of the innocent Sewol ferry victims haunt South Koreans much like the ghosts of soldiers who perished in wars that were not their own. It is in this haunted atmosphere that certain moments in the novel take on their force. A memorable scene—in which a deceased trickster figure, who used to spy on the prisoners, is nonetheless mourned—reminds us how the text is shadowed by historical ghosts, from the victims of the Sewol ferry disaster to Shin Ryu’s fallen soldiers, whom he insisted should be buried according to Korean rites.

It is all the more surprising, then, that a work so deeply inspired by history ultimately rejects the sanctity of memory. In its latter half, the story transitions to a more explicitly science-fictional mode, previously foreshadowed in short interludes. In the Korean original, the shift is marked by a formal division into two parts, but this division is omitted in the English translation. The perpetual present of the battlefield gives way to a revelation: both the prisoners and their imperial masters are clones, distinguished only by the memories implanted in them. For the prisoners, there is no personal history preceding the war; generations of them might have been deployed in the fighting. Their memories of home are probably centuries out of date. Since the empire lacks the capacity to invent new memories and can only recycle old ones, these memories are not exactly false. But the promises built on them are a deceit. Following the mutilations of the battlefield comes a dismemberment from memory itself.

The premise is undoubtedly bleak. Science fiction has long employed the utopian promise of longevity, through medical intervention or hibernation, to explore long arcs of historical change. One of the novel’s brief interludes recalls the dream of eternal life once pursued by the kings of antiquity. Yet the cycle of clones evokes not transcendence but damnation. This is felt most acutely, and perversely, by the imperial masters who, unlike the prisoners, retain their memories across iterations. “The one who remembers,” burdened by the accumulation of time, emerges as a grotesque figure—although this character’s torment is something we might call a First World problem, compared to the way outdated memories are used to control the prisoners. The clone of a long-dead woman, whose children had been abducted by the empire, remains shackled by the loss that happened ages ago. Her hope of getting the children back “trap[s] her in a prison better guarded than any other in the empire.”

Red Sword is a novel of subtle distinctions. How does one relate to one’s imperial clone(s)? What distinguishes the individual from the series? Hauntingly, it is the grievous wounds suffered in the war that come to define individual characters. At the same time, the narrative resists the logic of dystopia. As a war novel, it puts its central cast—mostly women, plus one man—through ordeals that create some sort of group identity. Can belonging to the “primary group,” studied by military specialists to improve combat motivation, become a new type of solidarity? And there’s another crucial fact to consider: the empire deploys its clone-prisoners in batches, culling survivors after each battle. As one of the imperials wryly explains, they want to prevent survivors from “turn[ing] into philosophers” who begin asking too many questions. This does introduce the potential of generational rebellion. Those who share the protagonist’s predicament, stripped of both past and probable future, begin to matter to one another. At the moment of revelation, when everything can be questioned, an imperial officer clarifies to the protagonist and her comrades that only they are fake, while the planet, the aliens, and the starship are real. Yet by the end, the so-called fakes have journeyed together long enough to become real to each other. Love and rebellion flash up together in Chung’s pages.

The space polities populating science fiction often function as distorted reflections of the capitalist world system—from Dune’s allegory of carbon imperialism to the titular meta-empire of Banks’s “Culture” novels, which imagines itself beyond imperialism even as it intervenes in less “developed” regions. The mirror of Red Sword reveals an empire defined by the paralysis and impasse of stasis. It not only appropriates the bodies of its victims but also relies on the endless manipulation of their recycled traumas and hopes. In such an order, one is indeed doomed to see history repeating itself.