Timeless Love – Connecting “Interstellar” with “I’m Waiting for You” Pt.1

Recently, I read Kim Bo-Young’s “I’m Waiting for You”, and was pleasantly surprised about it’s profound message of timeless love. I found that this relatively obscure piece of Korean sci-fi literature (a genre that I certainly never knew existed until this point) had eerily similar elements to Christopher Nolan’s 2014 “Interstellar”: both pieces of media’s plot revolved around space warping time, and love transcending this form of warped time. Thus, in this blog post, I will be exploring the parallels, and underlying rhetorical message, of Kim Bo-young’s “I’m Waiting for You” and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”.

As of yet, the theory of relativity remains just a theory, and remains beyond human experience. Perhaps thankfully so, because in her short story, “I’m Waiting for You,” Kim Bo-young imagines a dystopian world where interstellar travel has made relativity– and the time-space distortions associated with it– very real. Throughout the course of fifteen love letters, Relativity becomes a villain, an agent of separation and disunion, that tests the hearts and minds of two star-crossed lovers. Frustratingly, they are separated, at times by small quantum miscalculations that amplify minutes into years, years into centuries, and at other times, by just plain bad luck. The experience is tinged with despair, loneliness, and of course, heartache, but Love transcends the expanse of space and time. 

The backdrop might be space-age, but the themes are as old as time itself: Loneliness and Isolation, Love and Sacrifice.  The story shares some thematic elements with several Western science fiction films. However, in “I’m Waiting for You,” as evidenced by an almost complete thematic overlap, Kim Bo-young seems to pay special homage to Christopher Nolan’s, “Interstellar.”

Given the vastness of space, and the dearth of human beings who are able or even willing to make the journey, the theme of loneliness and isolation seems inevitable in any space-faring adventure. In “I’m Waiting for You,” the tone of the First Letter is optimistic and buoyant. However, as the string of misjudgments and bad luck compounds throughout the course of the story, the protagonist’s isolation and loneliness parallels his increasingly darkening mood. He starts his journey on a populated ship the size of a small city, but through a series of errors, he winds up on a tiny one-man spaceship in his Hail-Mary quest to rendezvous with his love.  

Within the darkness of space, he is physically alone on a very long, forlorn journey through a seemingly perpetual night.  And even during the intermittent periods when he is physically surrounded by other human beings, they are strangers from another time, another place–unable to understand or empathize. The communications that he sends out to his lover are sent out into the Void; but he is never sure that his thoughts are being conveyed to the one he cares about the most.  Still, he endures.  In “Interstellar,” the name of the space station that carries the characters through their voyage is, in fact, named the “Endurance.” And like the protagonist in Kim’s story, Cooper, along with his team, must endure crushing isolation within the emptiness of space. To remain sane, Cooper and his teammate, Romilly, resort to listening to recordings of crickets and falling rain back home.