Niniko Laciupunta
Knocker
Everything that could happen
How to save energy
Q's Requiem
Movement and emotion
Commentary | Lee Ji-eun (literary critic) The World With-IN
Author's Note

“In this world, whatever happens
Are you saying you can't get up?
Isn't that right?

The first novel that opens this book is "Ninicolacciupunta."
This novel, which has already captured the hearts of critics to the point of winning both the Kim Yu-jeong Literary Award and the Kim Seung-ok Literary Award for Excellence, is set in a near-future South Korea where the median age has reached 61 and the cost of elderly care has become a social problem.
Elderly people who spend the rest of their lives in nursing homes.
The narrator, who works as a special effects makeup artist, hears from his mother, who suffers from dementia so severe that she cannot even recognize her own daughter, that she wants to meet an alien she met as a child.
Is the alien with the long and strange name "Ninikoraciupunta" that exists in the mother's memories truly real? This story, which begins as a mystery, gradually takes unexpected turns, and by the end, it is a remarkable work that illuminates the dark underbelly of our society while simultaneously leaving a deeply moving impression.


In "Knocker," there are mysterious beings called "knockers" who cause anyone who sees their face to lose the ability to speak.
'Da-jeong', who chases after someone who bumped into her and left without even an apology, and sees his face, is overcome by an inexplicable shock and falls into a state where she is unable to use any language, including speaking, writing, or gestures to convey meaning.
As the number of victims who have lost their language increases, the basic systems of society are in danger of collapsing, and distrust begins to spread among people.
This work, which vividly and quickly depicts a deadly disaster situation, does not simply recreate the disaster situation, but also poses fundamental questions about human communication.

But when were words ever a tool of communication? We can never truly understand each other, and aren't they more a tool of misunderstanding than understanding? A weapon, a weapon for throwing stones at anyone or hanging someone to feed crows? And isn't eloquence, in particular, the essential talent of dictators, who control people, manipulating them like tongues in their mouths, only to slaughter them the moment they deem it worthless and uninteresting?
_From "Knocker"

"Everything That Could Be" is a story in which the storyteller explores all possible worlds that could exist.
Novelist C, who was commissioned to write a romance novel, goes to sleep that night and sees a movie in his dream that tells a story he's seen somewhere before.
But he wakes up without seeing the ending, and tries to figure out whether he has seen the story somewhere before or if it came to him.
But in a situation where he cannot say for sure which way to go, he begins to imagine 'all possible' endings, which leads to an ontological exploration of possible worlds.


In this way, Gu Byeong-mo unfolds stories that make us reflect on ourselves through unfamiliar beings, unfamiliar spaces, and unfamiliar worlds.
In "How to Save Energy," the meaning of family under a patriarchal system is examined through the speaker's recollections of the 1980s, a period of rapid economic growth, and the present day, while "Q's Requiem" uses abstract images to represent a space where a sent message floats without reaching the recipient.
The '1', which means the message did not reach, is digitally encoded and wanders through the netherworld of meaning, and the quantum world where meaning and meaninglessness coexist is wonderfully visualized through Koo Byung-mo's unique and delicate language.

"Movement and Affect" is set in a near-future dystopia ravaged by recurring epidemics, where movement has become the preserve of the privileged.
Earl, a truck driver, investigates the whereabouts of his fellow driver, Shard, who has not been seen since one day. He discovers that his disappearance is related to spiritualists who believe they can teleport through meditation.
And through Earl's story, we are led to think about what movement across boundaries means to humans.


─Just now… …you said it.
─What?
─In this world, can anything not happen?
If anything can happen, there's no reason why human power wouldn't be able to get us to the other side.
_From "Movement and Emotion"

“Nevertheless, there is something that is likely to happen
Somewhere in between all the possible things you are
“It is triggered, it rises, it overflows, it resonates, it settles.”

Koo Byung-mo is a writer who has been constantly renewing himself and giving us unfamiliar and surprising literary experiences since his debut with "Wizard Bakery," which won the Changbi Youth Literature Award in 2008 and became a bestseller.
Although he is a writer who has received much love for his full-length novels such as 『Breakthrough』 and 『Your Neighbor's Table』, the intense images and multi-layered thoughts he portrays with dense language particularly shine in his short stories.
His collection of short stories is a stage where you can see all of Koo Byung-mo's works in one place, where he transforms ideas that could otherwise remain mere imagination into colorful stories through original and bold language.
However, the virtue of Gu Byeong-mo's novels does not lie solely in his outstanding imagination that creates colorful stories.
The stories he depicts captivate us in their own way, while at the same time, like a bronze mirror, they coolly illuminate the other side of our world.
His keen sense of reality, which makes this possible, may be said to be the most powerful strength that Gu Byeong-mo possesses as a novelist.
As we read "Everything That Could Be," we will encounter unfamiliar beings.
And we will also face a strange being called us.
That's why we read novels, and that's why we read Gu Byeong-mo.