In 'The Center for Immortality Research,' a glorified executive assistant works to plan an anniversary event for the titular research center. The story takes place in 2010 and seems, at first, to be a workplace satire: The narrator, who wears her lowly status like a hair shirt, is consumed with making countless iterations of invitations, altering a word on the invite to appease one board member, only to change it back at the behest of another. Novelty-chasing tech gurus and politicians who make a fetish of long life also come in for a roasting. A candidate for the National Assembly pledges to his constituency that if he is elected, he 'will make everyone in our country live forever' and speaks in neologisms like 'thoughtified.' When the anniversary gala rolls around, micro mortifications turn into a mudslide of macro ones. It appears that several typos have been introduced into the invitation copy and, as a coup de grace, the narrator is implicated in the theft of some DVDs after she is caught on surveillance footage. The twist is that she can't be fired, since she and everyone else who works at the center is im...
Working again with Anton Hur, who translated her first story collection Cursed Bunny into English, Chung now scares up scenarios set in both the near past and near future. If the expertly crafted stories in her prior collection revolved around what M.R. James called the 'malice of inanimate objects,' the stories in her new collection are more tightly focused on surveillance and the perils of advanced technology.
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