★In a near-future world where memories can be erased and manipulated, a female police officer's life unravels after a botched investigation—forcing her to confront the terrifying question: when the state controls memory, what is left of the self?

The most intriguing question surrounding "memory erasure technology," the manipulation of memories. "The way I remember is who I am."

Safe City is a social mystery novel set in the near future, where technology has been developed that can erase or manipulate human memories. When the "memory correction procedure," disguised as a benevolent tool for trauma treatment and crime prevention, is combined with state power, how can human identity be defined? This work explores the ethical dilemmas surrounding science and technology and the workings of power, delving deeply into the relationship between truth and ethics through the struggles of a woman surrounded by manipulated public opinion and distorted truths.

Humans consumed outside the manipulated truth

The triangular structure of ethics surrounding dignity, public opinion, and power.

A female police officer, "She," extracts a false confession from the wrong suspect while investigating a kidnapping case involving a girl. Meanwhile, the real culprit murders his family and commits suicide. Unable to withstand the pressure and reprehension from the Chief Detective, "She" takes a leave of absence and suffers from insomnia. Her husband faithfully stays by her side, but their daily lives slowly begin to drift away from each other.

Meanwhile, Lim Yoon-sung, a neuroscientist and college classmate of her husband, is working on a "memory correction" project that uses Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology to selectively erase or control human memories. When Lim asks her the tempting question, "Is there a memory you want to erase?" she responds, "Memory is what makes the person themselves," revealing an instinctive aversion. The protagonist's belief, which contrasts with Lim Yoon-sung's technocentric claim that the uniqueness of humans and memory is an illusion, stands in stark opposition, but their debate does not continue for long.

This book also vividly shows how truth is manipulated and distributed in the age of social media. The sentence, "Truth is like an object that must be seized first. Moreover, it is a very fragile object. It is very difficult to handle," conveys a chilling sense of reality to readers living in this era, while also containing the harsh insight that truth is not fact, but merely an arrangement of seized and processed information.

Son Bo-mi
Son Bo-mi began her literary career by winning the 2009 21st Century Literature New Writers' Prize and the 2011 Dong-A Ilbo New Writers' Contest.

She is the author of the short story collections A Lindy Hop for Them, Elegant Nights and Cats, The Dream of Love, and The Fireflies of Manhattan; novels Dear Ralph Lauren, The Small Town, and The Children of the Vanished Forest; a novella The God of Happenstance; and an essay collection Anyways, American TV Series.

She has won numerous awards, including the Young Writer Award, the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Kim Joonsung Literary Award, the Daesan Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award.