This maybe better.

Go http://www.sciencetimes.co.kr/search.do?query and input 레디메이드 보살

But maybe you can read it and other korean SF in here : http://www.sciencetimes.co.kr/article.do?atidx=0000016377

have fun. :)

Of course I remember meeting you and your wife on Friday! I’m so pleased to be able to read this novella — and so happy I didn’t start trying to translate it myself. Thank you very much!

PS: Do you have a website? And is “레디메이드 보살” still online? I tried to search (in Korean) but the site that everyone linked didn’t work on my PC. I should try again in Windows… Though I guess it’s also in here?

When I was googling around after your question, I ran across an odd claim: that African-Americans are more prone to it than Caucasian-Americans. I’m guessing social/cultural influences might have a lot to do with how common it is, therefore, as well as just plain interpretation. Odd stuff!

(Update 14 June 2008: Did I write that? I meant:I’m guessing genetics has a lot to do with how common the experience itself is, while culture probably is more involved in interpretation. After all, we can see that my Korean students, whose language seems to not have a word for this — or so it seems: I checked the other night in class with a decent sample of people — but that didn’t stop them having the experience. They just had no shorthand term to describe it, the way it’s called “the Hag” in some African-American communities or was called “the succubus” in Medieval Europe.)

Yeah, see what I mean? There might be a few SF authors out there, but it hardly counts for a living, breathing native form of the genre, whereas in China, you have magazines with thousands of readers, and in Taiwan an intergenerational tradition of SF writers.

I’d like to branch into manhwa, but the last time I tried that, I found everything utterly unreadable, and many of the puzzling words weren’t in the dictionary. Lime’s explanation was that a kind of “futuristic saturi” was being used. What frustration!

As for “가위눌림” — well, that’s just sleep paralysis, right? (And, yeah, real!) The “succubus experience” incorporates a sensation of being crushed by a demonic or malevolent being — usually female — astride the sleeper, sometimes sexually abusing the sleeper, hallucinated during a hypnagogic state. Interestingly, it seems like traditions exist for naming this perceived being in a lot of Asian countries, including China and Japan, but not Korea! (At least, there’s nothing in Wikipedia, and Lime has never heard of the hallucinatory component in “가위눌림” manifesting consistently as an imaginary being. But the whole idea was so off-putting to her she didn’t want to hear about it.) I should clarify that when my students insisted it was “real,” they meant their perception of an evil, invisible being was literally true. I agreed with them they’s experienced something, but suggested that scientific evidence exists to suggest it’s hallucinatory. They insisted this wasn’t the case, that they knew it was “real.”

To be fair, I’m sure some Westerners would assert the same thing based on the same experience.

I think you’re probably right to start with film, though.

And in your previous comment, at the end there, are you talking about 가위눌림? Where you think you’re awake but can’t move? That’s what it sounds like. Definitely real. Definitely *not* a ghost. :)

I don’t know if anyone’s written a paper to that effect — I haven’t seen one, anyway — but then, Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as a “literature of cognitive estrangement” would add at least a stage 0, which is a period where expansion — early “globalization” — and scientific development leak into culture, including literature, in such a way that older assumptions start to give way and a new shared “imaginary” takes form. (Gulliver’s Travels, More’s Utopia, the novel Frankenstein, etc.)

I think there are also many branches on the tree. Greg Egan’s stuff is distrustful of some of the very Stage 3 stuff it participates in — he’s thoughtful on gender and sexuality and identity, but some of his writing comes off as downright hostile to humanities-academic interest in science or SF (such as Teranesia for example).

As I was lookign at this model, I was thinking that Stage 2 looked like “New Wave” — ironic use of stuff from older SF — but New Wave also includes Stage 3, and I can say that earlier hard SF — say, some of Clarke’s books — seem to veer off in a different stage 2, where actual science becomes important to the narrative, where FTL needs to be discarded or at least ornately justified, and so on. I think the branching-off may even come earlier; HG Wells and Jules Verne seem to present different aesthetics of believability and the purpose of extrapolation. (Wells was often preaching and poeticizing, where Verne was often trying to point at wow-cool scientific possibilities, or that’s how I understand it.)

Ironically, in my 6 weeks in Seattle, I never did make it to the SF museum! (I was too busy writing!) I’ll have to stop in next time I’m there!

The problem with Korea needing a stage 2 is that really, it doesn’t even have a popular stage 1 right now — though I can see why you’d class the films I mentioned as stage 1, these films mostly bombed horrifically. They were net losses in cash — with the possible exception of 2009: Lost Memories, Korean SF films, until The Host, were a consistent loss of revenue as far as I know. SFnal ideas are advocated by the government because they’re not approached as SFnal, but as “realistic.”

Maybe I missed the boat, and Korea really is just missing a Stage 0. 50 years ago, this was all rice fields. Yet I think that’s true of China, too, and China’s had several SF booms in its history, and Japan’s stage 0 isn’t necessarily much longer than Korea’s, while Japan has active fandom and an SF scene. So maybe cultural elements really can impact on how long it takes for Stage 0 to move to Stage 1, 2, or beyond.

As for The Host, I’ll save my comments on the film and its SFnal peculiarities till my post on my current interpretation of the film, except to say that I agree with you on the *-edy nature of it… there are strong reasons for that, I think.

And yeah, East Asian countries seem to be significantly better at horror (and fantasy) than at SF. Ghosts, possessions, spooky reincarnations… Korean filmmakers sometimes make stinkers, but some of the spookiest films I’ve seen have been Korean ones. (Even if horror movies never really “scare” me.)

It might because a widespread belief in the dead is still alive and well? You’d be surprised how many Koreans were leery about vacationing in Thailand after the tsunami… and about how many who “don’t believe in ghosts” are, well, not sure enough to laugh when you call out to a tomb, at night, “Hey! You there? Come out and see us!” (I did that once with a couple of friends, out in the middle of nowhere, and was surprised at how terrified they were.) If you ask around, a surprising number of people believe they’ve seen ghosts or cite experiences of loved ones interacting with the dead. And sometimes they’ll warn you not to go to this or that place, train station or town or whatever, because of some horrible mass death that happened there at some point in the past.

(I’ve even had multiple university students tell me, in all seriousness, of experiences that in the West are called “succubus” experiences, and widely known to be a result hynagogic states. Yet they’ve all insisted it was “real” and a “ghost.”)

Alexis,

I’ll clearly mark the horror movies. There aren’t too many on my list… but you might find some of the non-horror films more harrowing, actually. I’ll try to make that clear, too!

I’d appreciate the Korean film list, Gord. I looked through the list you mentioned here, and it included a lot of horror. I can’t actually watch really scary horror (like the Ring), but can handle stuff like “The Host.”

Stage 1: Rayguns, rocketships, robots, little green guys. Destination Moon.

Stage 1.5: Day the Earth Stood Still kind of stuff.

Stage 2: Ironic handling of rayguns and rocketships. Attempts to include women. Critical things like (bad example perhaps but comes to mind) Toxie. Island of Dr Moreau. Spaceballs. etc. 1984. Clockwork Orange. (thinking contentwise not chronolog)

Stage 3: Diversity or at least a pretense of diversity appears. SF set in a changed and invented past can happen. SF tackles social issues. Academics write about SF. Only happened in books yet, I think.

That’s probably woefully inaccurrate and leaving things out, but maybe Korea needs a stage 2 or 3 and it isn’t ready yet and that’s why it’s not alive yet? But if a 2 or 3 novel shows up, it will take off like a, to pardon the simile, rocketship….

Very sketchy, but maybe an idea?

On the zombies front….I’ve noticed a lot of evocative horror involving dead people from Japan too (Kuchi-sake Onna seems to appear both in Korea and Japan afaik)…which makes me wonder if its a Pacific Rim thing, passed between countries? Maybe there’s a focus on comparing the past to the present more than the present to the future? This is a guess. As I said, I have no degree in Asian studies, I’ve just consumed a little bit of pop culture. I saw The Host, found it to be more about the folks fighting the monster off than the monster….more dramaedy or horroredy than sf.

Ok, I digressed, but maybe some of what I said will be helpful.

I’ll try type up a list in the next day or two and make a new post out of it. If you don’t comment on it, I’ll let you know it’s there.

Charles,

Well, as I say, I’ve hunted for some actual SF written by Koreans and found nothing. I suspect there must be some, and I would like to run across it, but frankly, it’s not like I’m going to be reading it in the original anytime soon, and there are definitely no translations. And the difficulty of finding anything in itself seems to support my argument.

(There are a couple of websites in Korea devoted to SF, though most of them are dead links now. And there is a small trickle of SF-in-translation. I’m rather hoping I can find someone on campus here who is responsible for all those copies of American SF books I’ve come across in the library!)

Anyway, I think I’ll mainly focus on film. And one big blank spot in my argument is manhwa, which I won’t be dealing with but which has more SF than we find in novels or films. (Though, again, much of what I’ve skimmed looked more like Star Warsy fantasy-as-SF; not truly “literature of change” stuff.)

Do you know of any Korean SF authors you can recommend me? (The only one I ever get told about is Lee Woo Hyuk, the Toemarok guy.) If you know someone who could recommend more, I’m all ears!

I’ll check back for your recommendations.