Isabel J. Kim Makes Her Own World
Wednesday evenings at Hex&Co., a board-game café and bar in Morningside Heights, are dedicated to “RPG Encounters,” in which fans of role-playing games gather to create collaborative stories over espresso drinks. On a recent R.P.G. night, Isabel J. Kim—a speculative-fiction author whose first novel, “Sublimation,” came out in June—sat at a table in front of a long shelf cluttered with games.
“People really love writing tabletop games, almost as an art form,” Kim, who has long dark hair and was wearing a floral blouse, said. Kim had a busy spring: she turned thirty, got married, and published “Sublimation.” (Universal bought the TV rights before the book was even out.) Her own love for T.T.R.P.G.s, a multibillion-dollar subset of the larger board-gaming industry, began in college, with a Dungeons & Dragons group, but solidified during COVID, when she began taking a literary interest in the games she played. “There’s a million indie games that are, like, one or two pages, and, quite frankly, a lot of them are not playable,” she said. “But it is very interesting to read them.”
On the table in front of her was a small burlap bag containing the rudiments of a mapmaking game called the Quiet Year, in which players use a sheet of paper, a pen, some dice, and a deck of special cards to tell the story of a community struggling to rebuild after society collapses. The game begins in spring, and ends when the Frost Shepherds card, representing the arrival of deep winter, is pulled. Kim started turning over cards and quickly added elements to her town—a mountain river, an evil cave, a charismatic young woman. For each new element, she made a rough sketch on the map. “When you write a story, you are creating an artificial situation that is supposed to look natural, and, if you do your job right, it looks effortless,” she said.
Kim was born in New Jersey, and grew up moving where her father’s job as a physics professor took him. In South Korea, she lived in a house in the small suburban town of Gongju, which quickly expanded when dozens of governmental offices moved to the nearby planned administrative capital of Sejong City. “Every time I would go back, more of the city would be built,” she said. “At first, it was, like, ‘Wow, they’re building high rises and stuff.’ And then, like, ‘Wow, they got a Starbucks. Wow, they got a Costco?’ ”
Kim wrote fiction while studying law and fine art at the University of Pennsylvania, and continued after she became an associate at a big law firm. She chose speculative fiction—an umbrella genre that encompasses sci-fi, dystopia, fantasy, and horror—because, she said, “you can critique a lot of what’s going on in our world without people immediately jumping to feeling defensive.”
“Sublimation” describes a world where crossing a border creates an “instance,” an identical version of oneself, who must proceed on to another country and another life while the original remains in place. The book was written before the second Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown became daily news; in “Sublimation,” government bureaucrats and their corporate collaborators are “politely evil,” Kim said. “They’re white-glove evil. The characters feel like they have options because they are urban professionals who have money and privilege.”
She went on, “Immigration is not just a ‘somebody you never talk to’ issue. It’s not a ‘somebody who works for you’ issue. It is an issue that affects people of every social class. The way that people think about the world around them, and about mobility, is going to change a lot depending on whether they have a quote-unquote good passport.”
Back in the game, Kim’s paper map was getting filled in; what was once a tiny mining town now had paved roads, a pier, houses, and a mysterious woodland fairy circle. Finally, after ninety minutes, she pulled the Frost Shepherds card: game over.
“Sublimation” is threaded with references to the Odyssey, the Book of Genesis, and the Korean folk song “Arirang”—all stories about departure and return that include themes akin to “instancing.” “In the universe of my book, we consider being a nation of instances a point of pride,” Kim said, “in the same way that America, during previous Administrations, might have considered our diversity a strength.” ♦