On a hot Sunday evening in Seoul, Jeong-su leaves his home for a walk and a smoke. Everything seems normal until a mysterious black orb appears and begins to absorb people. Kicking and screaming they disappear into the pure black mass. Terror engulfs Seoul as the orb slowly and methodically stalks its residents, and fear heightens as the orb multiplies. Jeong-su hurries south to find his parents, but he soon finds himself fleeing for his life from the ever-growing menace of the orbs. Can he escape, or will he ultimately succumb to despair?
This is the peril facing our protagonist in Ewhan Kim’s The Black Orb, originally published in 2009 but only recently translated into English. Despite being well over a decade old, the book feels just as relevant as ever, almost as if it were a commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic. The similarities with zombie films will also be apparent to readers familiar with the genre. Just like zombies, the orbs are a seemingly mindless, inexorable horde intent on consuming the living. They too move slowly and can be outrun; their horror is in their numbers and the fact that, ultimately, the orbs are unstoppable. As in zombie films, once the crisis spreads and sheer panic ensues, the veneer of civility that we regard to be a hallmark of human society rapidly dissolves, leaving a desperate struggle for survival in which nobody matters but oneself. On a deeper level, the unreliability of media is another common theme in zombie films, and in The Black Orb as well the inability to deduce which sources of information can be trusted leads to widespread fear and suffering.
On the other hand, the orbs are quite different from zombies. They do not fall into the same chasm between human being and monster. And while a zombie apocalypse usually has an explanation such as a virus outbreak or supernatural activity, the orbs are a total mystery. They are utterly foreign and inexplicable in terms of logic and motivation. This makes them even more horrifying, but that allows them to better serve as a metaphor for the gnawing anxiety and despair of modern society, the feeling, as the author puts it, that we are “on the run from something, without ever knowing exactly what [we] are running from.”
The Black Orb is — like most good science fiction — a commentary on and criticism of society. As a book written by a Korean author and set in Korea, it naturally deals with certain aspects of Korean culture, such as the culture of mandatory military service and the toxic masculinity that it engenders in Korean society as a whole. But the questions it asks are ultimately addressed to all humanity. Whom do we believe in a crisis? Will we behave with integrity when everything starts falling apart? And what exactly is it that we are running from? With its surprising ending, The Black Orb will leave readers asking themselves these questions and more, as they re-examine their own values and their understanding of society.
한국국제교류재단
