After android jockey and vampires, Cheon Seon-ran turns to zombies

"Where No One Comes" by Cheon Seon-ran (Hubble)

"Where No One Comes"

By Cheon Seon-ran

Hubble

From the android jockeys of "A Thousand Blues" to the vampires of "Midnight Shift," Cheon Seon-ran, one of Korea’s leading voices in science fiction, has explored the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, loss and survival, salvation and care.

Now, she returns with a zombie apocalypse.

“The most tragic apocalypse is the zombie,” she writes in the opening lines of her new three-part novella.

Here, Cheon’s undead are not the mindless monsters of horror flicks.

Instead, she reimagines them as beings who, even in the ruins of memory and decay, cling desperately to love. Some of her zombies are startlingly tender; not the feral, flesh-ripping undead, but creatures who struggle not to harm those they once loved. The result is less a spectacle of terror than a question into the persistence of affection and the ethics of care when everything else is lost.

Each of the novella’s three parts unfolds in a different time and space, tracing the evolution of a plague and its aftermath: from an evacuation ship choosing what and whom to save, to survivors on Earth building meaning beyond endurance, to a post-human world where beings neither human nor zombie remember what it means to love.