— Overview
The notes name the book and follow Lily and Daisy, and they stop before a later table of other stories.
— Contents and key concepts
A book, and a year
The notes cite the book as Kim Cho-yeop, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Seoul: Hubble, 2019, and they read it with an eye to its social and technical setting.
Future science, they write, can take people into a strange and various world: even a human embryo can be designed, one can exchange with intelligent life beyond the earth, and by a data simulation one can meet a family already dead. A utopia one might someday reach can be dreamed there. But the future in the book, they say, is not so far off. The worlds it draws point sharply at social problems of the present.
Lily’s village, and Daisy
Lily would have wanted to build a utopian world of people with only beautiful, perfected bodies. Ironically, once embryo design has made a severe hierarchy between the fully redesigned and those who are not, she founds, off the earth, a “village” made only of children who have flaws, so that discrimination and exclusion will not exist there.
That village ought then to have been a utopia filled with happiness. But Daisy comes suddenly to know that when the children of the village, grown to adulthood, leave on a pilgrimage to earth, there are always pilgrims who do not return.
What the notes will not take further
Discrimination against women and unmarried mothers, against disabled people and migrants and other minorities, remains clear, they write; in a system that privileges results and performance, non-economic value is set aside, and lives that do not fit a standard of normality are dropped from the historical record. They want to ask whether the world people have reached with advanced technique is in fact a better one to live in.
The notes leave the book there, before a later table that turns to other plots and devices. The same Korean report, in a longer form, is on CampusDown.
Sources
- The notes, a student reading of Kim Cho-yeop’s If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, staying with Lily and Daisy.
Last updated: 15 November 2026
Frequently asked questions
How do the notes name the book?
They cite it as Kim Cho-yeop, If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Seoul: Hubble, 2019, and they read it for its socio-technical setting.
What story do they stay with?
Lily had wanted a utopia of beautiful, perfected bodies. Once embryo design has produced a hierarchy of the fully redesigned and the undesigned, she founds, off the earth, a “village” of children who have flaws, so that discrimination and exclusion will not exist there. Daisy comes to see that when the children, grown, leave on a pilgrimage back to earth, some of those pilgrims never return.
Where do they stop?
They also say the worlds in the book are not so far off: they point sharply at present harms to women and unmarried mothers, to disabled people and migrants, and at a system that drops what cannot be measured as economic value. They stop before a later table that turns to other plots.
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