Bora Chung shows us what sci-fi with its fists raised looks like

An AI-powered elevator harbors an unrequited love for an apartment resident it ferries up and down each day. It hides secrets in its coded database, pines in tender silence and serenades her with a 1941 poem by a Polish resistance fighter — its language so achingly sensuous, “it feels like gold and silver melting into verse” (“A Song for Sleep”). Elsewhere, at a high-tech research institute, a low-level employee battles cosmic bureaucracy to plan a flashy gala, only to be swept into a crime she didn’t commit. But she can’t be fired. Not now, not ever (“The Center for Immortality Research”). Welcome to “Your Utopia” — another wonderfully bizarre collection of short stories from Bora Chung, the acclaimed Korean author of “Cursed Bunny.” Deftly rendered into English by Anton Hur, the collection, like its International Booker Prize- and National Book Award-nominated predecessor, traverses a landscape where the uncanny meets droll humor and tenderness lurks in the unlikeliest places. The eight featured stories leap across fantastical worlds — from space cannibal