[A Sip of Books] Director Bong Joon-ho's Next SF Film Original Novel 'Miki 7'

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart, creating a connection with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

This is the original work of director Bong Joon-ho's upcoming SF film. It centers on the seventh life of Miki, a clone who is resurrected with the memories of the predecessor even after death. It is a novel praised for well capturing the fun of SF and philosophical themes. The author weaves various philosophical topics, intriguingly explored in numerous SF works, into the story, while presenting a space exploration history based on human history, diverse future settings beyond imagination, and storytelling that appropriately blends tension and humor. In the novel, the protagonist Miki, a historian, reveals the plight of pioneers struggling with resource shortages and the harsh pioneering environment, conveying to readers a worldview where an extreme occupation called 'Expendable' exists.

"Listen. The ration is sufficient. If we haven't done anything stupid since the last upload, the two of us can consume 2,000 kilocalories a day."

"Yeah, you're right."

"If we split it in half, we can survive for a while. We won't be comfortable, but we won't die either."

Dating on a pioneer spaceship is difficult. There are few options for activities. You can eat together, but it's very hard to expect romance when you're tied to cables to avoid bumping into others who are also sucking food from plastic bottles in a market-like place. You can walk together, but the only place to walk is the carousel, and you end up focusing more on dodging people doing squats than on dating.

The bullet operation avoided these problems because there was no need to decelerate. When an object moves at 0.97c, the mass required to shatter a planet like cracking an egg is not that large. Moreover, there is no way to defend against an attack approaching at the speed of light, and the light wave signaling the incoming object arrives just a fraction of a second before the object reaches the target, so there is no way to even know if an attack is coming. The bullet operation had an effect equivalent to firing 200,000 nuclear fusion bombs at Golt's ecosystem in about one trillionth of a second.

Miki 7 | Written by Edward Ashton | Translated by Bae Ji-hye | Hwanggeumgaji | 412 pages | 15,000 KRW

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.