All Tomorrow's Cultures

My review of the tremendously exciting collection of translated South Korean science fiction: Readymade Bodhisattva .  It's the first of its kind in English, and serves as a tremendous introduction to SF that is really quite different than that of neighboring China or Japan. 

I've been following Kim's work for some time now, and, at some point, will post up my impressions of his novel, "Neighborhood War" (동네 전쟁).  But, until then, some short notes on his short story, "Superman Now" (초인은 지금) in the collection "The Superhero Next Door" (2015).  What draws me to Kim's work is his use of Seoul as the staging for his stories, and it is not difficult to see why.  Besides being a huge, Dickensian metropolis full of dramatic encounters and chance meetings, it is city of sometimes profoundly alienating spaces: row upon row of apartments, faceless office buildings.  Accordingly, Kim's Seoul is a place for disturbingly non-human encounters.  Seoul citizens are harried by a black-hole like sphere in 절망의 구 (2009), and by monstrous, multi-species aliens in 동네전쟁 (2011).  Confronted with the completely enigmatic, Kim's characters circulate rumors and wild theories, but their attempts to understand the city always fall sh...

Lee Young-do's "Concerning the Translation of Kaiwapandom" appeared in an anthology of Korean science fiction, Alternative Dream , in 2007. Like many of his sf contemporaries, Lee's work was first available online--with all the advantages and disadvantages that it implies. That medium may be ideal for the world's most wired nation, but it has also served to limit the foreign, scholarly audience for this work. Translators, after all, are less likely to invest their energies in a medium that is, by definition, shifting and protean. So it's nice when presses like 황금가지 (Hwanggeumgaji) publish these collections of stories. As for translators--well, as you see below, I'm not much of one. But I have tried to give you a sense of this interesting story. You can find another translation of the story at Crossroads , an online journal of science and culture published by the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. And, in that vein, if you're intereste...