Your Utopia: Stories

Chung’s (Cursed Bunny) new collection is as speculative as the last but firmly haunts the science fiction end of the spectrum. Chung also writes with a directness that highlights the human aspects of each story. Similarly, narrator Greta Jung’s performance guides listeners through each possible future with a down-to-earth tone that naturalizes every strange event. Jung confidently underscores Chung’s emotional beats for a variety of characters, including an author-obsessed survivor of an explosion, a community that fights corporate invaders with pollen, and a robot whose desire for survival and friendship may be thwarted by a directive to aid all humans. The opening story serves well as an introduction to speculative fiction, and the stories that follow are even more intriguing. Almost the entirety of “The Center for Immortality Research” seems to be corporate drama before the science fictional element arrives most satisfyingly.