Combating climate anxiety with hope, fantasy, and magical girls
A MAGICAL GIRL RETIRES by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur, published by HarperVia, 2024
Welcome to Reading the (Un)Familiar, where Jin curates translated and diasporic literature to encourage us to read beyond the Anglosphere. Jin is currently reading contemporary feminist Korean writers, Asian/diasporic Asian writers, and other writers in translation (loosely defined).
I grew up with the deceivingly neutral term climate change, but today’s young people are rightfully growing up with climate crisis, climate justice, even climate anxiety.
Thinking about the fate of our ecological future evokes, for me, a complicated mix of overwhelm, resignation, and hope.
Overwhelm and resignation for obvious reasons… I’ve heard some friends pronounce hesitation about considering having children, wondering why they would bring new life onto a doomed planet. (“세이프 섹스를 하고 새 생명을 내보내지 말게…” <좋은 소식 나쁜 소식>, 이랑).
I saw a video online recently about a huge Meta data center that uses up huge amounts of water and electricity from surrounding neighborhoods, even causing intense light pollution that makes it hard for people nearby to sleep at night.
On the whole carbon footprint framework, too…
The great irony is that the term “carbon footprint” was popularized in the early 2000s by none other than British Petroleum, one of the world’s largest oil companies, when they launched a “carbon footprint calculator” to help individuals track their personal impact. (“Tending little groves,” Mana Short at
)
I know that the multinational corporations are mainly at fault for much of our current state of things, but I still feel guilty every time I take out the trash — where is my trash going? My waste does not disappear into thin air. Who lives next to the landfills? How is my trash seeping into the ground, the water, the air, and coming back to affect us all?
The area I live in was put on Tornado Warning recently. I received emails from local organizations warning everyone to immediately take cover. I don’t recall my area being particularly historically tornado-prone.
We’re not only setting our weather and climate patterns askew, but our human collective health, too. I worked an internship years ago at an organization that aimed to reframe the climate crisis into a crisis affecting our standards of living in terms of water, indoor/outdoor air, materials, disease, etc. (See here for a piece I published then, interviewing Mana Short of
.)And on, and on, and on. And yet, I admit I feel some level of questionable hope in the mix that I will attribute to my questionably relentless optimism. I somehow still believe, deep down, that despite all of these terrible things, that some other better things will happen to guide us into different, unknowable (perhaps better?!) futures.
I remember a scene from a nature documentary (possibly Planet Earth?) about a little crab species that was set to die out but instead had adapted to live on plastic nets cluttering the ocean and was thriving instead. This scene came right after one where they talked about turtles dying from plastic waste in the ocean.
The crab scene stuck with me. Of course, I’m pretty sure the less plastic we have in the ocean, the better, but it stuck with me because I hadn’t thought about how some life might be finding ways to sustain itself in creative, imperfect, surprising ways amidst our polluted, chaotic world.
There was a time, too, when I once thought that making myself as small as I could would be better for the world — and to take this logic to the extreme, if I/we didn’t exist at all, the world would be all the happier and healthier for it. I resonated deeply with the sentiment Mana details here below:
There was a time when I couldn’t stop thinking about how I needed to reduce my (negative) impact, to lower my carbon footprint, to achieve a zero waste lifestyle, to consume less energy, less water, less meat… This focus on trying to do less of everything made me feel like I needed to make myself smaller in order to lessen my burden on the environment. It led me to hyperfixate on my individual lifestyle while overlooking the importance of collective action and systemic change. Most of all, it made me feel like a destructive force rather than allowing me to embrace my human capacity for care, cooperation, and healing. (“Tending little groves,” Mana Short at little grove)
As Mana implies, I don’t think making ourselves disappear is the answer, either. Perhaps the answer lies in the embracing of the fact that we are active agents — yes, we might use a single-use plastic receptacle one day, but we might also tend to our gardens the next. And the earth, too, is an active agent, just as the little crabs living on plastic nets are active agents. Perhaps it’s rather audacious of us to assume that we humans are the only sole active agents in this world, with nature being only a passive recipient of whatever we do “to” it. I think we grossly underestimate the agency of everything around us — perhaps something surprising and unexpected will happen to lead us into unexpected futures. And perhaps, even at the end of the world, something good will miraculously find a way to thrive. (“What manages to live in the ruins we have made?” asks Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her well-known book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins)
Anyway, onto today’s book recommendation, A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon 박서련 translated by Anton Hur, published in 2024 by HarperVia — this is a book about a union of magical girls fighting the climate crisis. The protagonist comes into her magical powers in her darkest moment, when she’s struggling with credit card debt and her precarious housing/financial situation.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower also famously centers the ecological crisis in a dystopian setting, so I was aware of climate + dystopian fiction, but climate + fantasy fiction? I remember being so pleasantly surprised that the “forces of evil” in this book was the climate crisis, something so deeply realistic.
And that’s how Park Seolyeon, the author, wanted it to be, to ground the magic within reality:
"A Magical Girl Retires" blends fantasy with stark realism. The girls in the novel resemble everyday working people. The heroine (narrator) grapples with credit debt and a lack of opportunities. They are part of organizations, hired for security work, or involved in counter-terrorism operations, and have trade unions.
“I wanted to balance magic with reality. I hoped the magic would feel real and that readers would feel that our real-world problems could somehow be solved magically. And at the same time, I wanted to show that having magical powers doesn't make reality any easier,” said Park.
The ultimate villain in the story? Climate change.
“I think the biggest threat we face today as humanity is the climate crisis. It affects everyone equally, whether you are rich and healthy, or poor and sick. So I thought it was the perfect villain for my story.”
“Magical girls battle climate change in Park Seo-lyeon's 'A Magical Girl Retires',” Korea Herald
I’m not very good at remembering all the factual details that happens in a book — rather, I remember how it made me feel (hopefully I’m not the only one?). This book made me feel happy to have read it, happy that this author created something so lovely. It’s funny, well-composed, and the main two characters have adorable feelings for each other <3. I recommend this book for a casual, fun, yet thoughtful read.
Bringing it back to my earlier points about sustaining hope for the unknown amidst terrible ecological crises, I appreciate the genre of fantasy as it really engages our imaginations and the creation of alternative possibilities. In a similar vein to magical girls fighting the climate crisis — magic may not exist, but I’m positive we do have infinite creative paths to cultivating healthier holistic futures for ourselves and all organisms of Earth. We are never trapped in our current realities — each of us are changing our current world by the simple act of existing. And so, I continue to feel a mixture of overwhelm and hope as I think about our futures here on our planet.
Anyway… please read this book! I really loved it. What a lovely read. And what a beautiful cover!
Let me know if you’ve read this already and what you thought of it! If not, let me know if you might consider finding a copy yourself at the library/bookstore/online. Perhaps this reminds you of another related book, writer, or inspires an unrelated thought. Let me know what you think; I will happily respond.
Hoping everyone is having a happy summer,
Jin
P.S. Related fun links and more
Here’s the official link to the English book from the publisher’s website, Harper Collins.
Another link to the English book via Bookshop (I learned that this is a popular site to purchase books from in the US).
For readers of Korean, here’s the original book on 교보문고 Kyobo Books.
There’s also a sequel in Korean (yet to be translated into English) — titled 마법소녀 복직합니다, or A Magical Girl Comes Back to Work. I really enjoyed this one, as well! I read it right after I read the first one, so it was a nice smooth continuous read. I would recommend! I read both Korean versions on the 밀리의 서재 Millie’s Library app (monthly subscription for access to tons of ebooks).
Park Seolyeon is prolific! She has another book that is on my to-read list — 체공녀 강주룡, or Capitalists Must Starve, the English translation set to release this fall, also translated by Anton Hur. I’m really looking forward to this as it’s described as a feminist historical novel set in Japanese-occupied Korea. I hope to read & write about this one later this year!
Park Seolyeon also has another English translated book coming out in the coming years (the rights were sold in 2024), titled Project V, translated by Gene Png, described as a science fiction novel where “steminist mecha meets Mulan.”
Park Seolyeon, the author’s Instagram
Anton Hur, the translator’s Instagram
Sidenote, whenever I think about climate anxiety and related literature, I first think of anattynook, my favorite book-ish creator. See her related YouTube video below for some good recommendations. Here’s also her Instagram and her full YouTube channel.
i had no idea that these magical girls were fighting climate change!! this is def being bumped up on my tbr. great writing & thank you for the rec!
I found it on audible and had a delightful time listening to it while working today. It was light and fun, but also managed to take on the major issues of climate change, the cost of choices, and the development of self. Really enjoyable, and an excellent recommendation!