"Literature may not save the world, but I believe it can make someone stop for a moment. To keep that belief, I decided to place commas longer than periods this year."
Looking back on 2025, novelist Park Min-jung shared these reflections. Amidst rapidly consumed events and forgotten words, she confessed to pausing more often than usual. "Before saying anything, I needed to verify if those words were truly 'mine.' This year, that process was longer and quieter than expected."
Park Min-jung has consistently built her own narrative perspective in Korean literature. Notably, her previous work The Shilla was published globally via Amazon, meeting readers beyond the boundaries of Korean literature. Through this work, she demonstrated an attempt to flexibly cross the borders of familiar realism.
On this trajectory, she slowed down the pace of her new work, which was originally planned to be released at the end of this year. The work is the grand SF mystery The Cypress Forest (working title), confirmed for publication in the first half of 2026.
"Originally, I planned to finish the manuscript within this year and send it out into the world as if 'clocking in' for work. However, during the joint collaborative process, I realized that our conversations and narratives had not yet fully ripened. Rather than rushing to write a conclusion, I chose to wander and question a bit more within the text."
The upcoming The Cypress Forest heralds a massive scale distinct from her previous works. Inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune and Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, this novel maximizes imagination against the backdrop of the actual Hapcheon meteor impact crater. The core of the narrative involves the birth of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) at the impact site and the century-long struggle and conspiracy among powerful families from Korea, China, and Japan to possess it.
The behind-the-scenes story of her writing is also intriguing. Park recently revealed that she always wears a watch made from a Gibeon meteorite in her studio. Since the novel is set in the Hapcheon meteor impact crater, it is a unique and determined ritual for the author to literally receive "cosmic energy" from the watch while writing.
She explained the delay in her new work as the aesthetics of "pausing." Since it deals with such a vast worldview, dense contemplation was needed rather than hasty completion.
"Looking at people who cannot move—that gaze itself might be what literature can do. Especially in an era where everything flows quickly. It's not that the completion is late; I am stopping to look deeper."
In a column published for the year-end, Park also focused on the sensation of "stopping." "As a novelist, this year I stayed longer in paused scenes than in words. Since the world is too fast, I thought sentences that make you stop, even for a moment, could be the role of literature. Even if my novel arrives a little late, I hope that time can give readers a chance to breathe deeper."
Few believe that literature can save society. However, Park Min-jung still believes in the power of a "small stop" in literature. In an era where people are too easily convinced and speak too easily, she continues to write slowly but clearly to not lose the sense of pausing and doubting, waiting for the spring of 2026.
"I wrote several 'pauses' this year, too. If those sentences become a breathing space for someone to meet next year, the wait is enough."
She said so and fell silent for a long time. That silence was just like her novel.
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