Silvia Park Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Silvia Park is a published American author.

Her stories have been published in such places as Tor, the Black Warrior Review, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and other places.

Silvia holds an MFA that they received from NYU. Silvia has also attended and participated in the Clarion Science and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Park also teaches fiction at the University of Kansas. They often split their time between Lawrence and Seoul.

Silvia Park teaches fiction at the University of Kansas. Luminous is the first novel from this author.

Luminous is a 2025 novel from Silvia Park. This is a sweeping debut novel from a fresh voice in fiction that is set in a unified Korea. This is the story of three siblings who are estranged, two of them human and one a robot, who collide against the setting of a murder investigation with the intention of settling some old scores and trying to make sense out of their shattered childhood.

In a Korea of the future that is completely unified, robots have become a complete part of society. They function in many different roles, serving as servants, surrogates, children, and sometimes even lovers. As a result, the boundaries that are between bionic and organic life forms can often blur. But make no mistake, even though they are sometimes taken as a standard part of society, robots are still seen as being second class citizens.

Jun and Morgan are siblings who have been estranged for a long time. They are constantly thinking of their lost brother Yoyo, who displayed many positive traits of being sensitive, being warm, and in their eyes nearly being human even though he is not.

Jun is a veteran of the war and has since taken a job on working as a detective for the Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul. When he is given an investigation that ends up reconnecting him with his sister Morgan, he ends up starting to be consumed by it. Morgan has now become a prominent designer of robots who works for a top firm. But his sister is also hiding a secret since she is dating one of her robot creations without disclosing it to anyone.

In another part of Seoul, there is a junkyard that is filled with robots who have been abandoned. There Ruijie sits at eleven years old, sifting through the random scraps searching for robotic parts that she might use to support her body, which is failing.

Then she finds an unexpected discovery when she finds Yoyo, a robot boy who has been discarded there among the many heaps of trash. Together the two share something unique and form a bond. Yoyo seems so true to life and Ruijie has never seen anything like him before.

Morgan gets ready to launch the most advanced robot boy that has come out in her career while Jun’s investigation takes him on an adventure that will lead him through the darker parts of Seoul to its underbelly, while also digging up even deeper mysteries not only about his own family but about the history of the country itself.

Now the three siblings have to find their way back to each other, and along the way, deal with their pasts while also considering the future that they have ahead of them. In a world where robots and humans share space, what does it really mean at the end of the day to be human? Find out by picking up a copy of Luminous by Silvia Park and following along with this story for yourself!