I’m not exactly sure, as I haven’t read the essays I ran across. (Time intensive!) I’d have to guess (note: guess!) these reasons are among those in play:

1. Ted’s an excellent writer. I mean like, the guy’s the writer’s version of Tiger Woods or something. He produces outstanding work consistently. It’s hard not to attract attention.

2. He has won a pretty impressive number of awards. In Korea, things like test scores, industry awards, and the like — the external, official confirmations of success or quality — are taken somewhat more seriously than in the West. (Or, perhaps, I should say, official tests and award systems are viewed with less skepticism here than among Westerners. People may have a sense of the process being like those involved in making law and sausage, but I think people still put a LOT of stock into the significance of awards here.) Note that I’m not implying Ted didn’t deserve those awards — he deserves every last one — but that in Korean society, awards are probably likelier to predispose people to see someone as significant.

3. His work is all short, meaning it’s likelier to have arrived in Korea in translation — though I’d have to check to see how much of his work was translated and published here prior to the full collection. In any case, the shortness would also make reading the work in English more practicable for Koreans (as opposed to a novel-length oeuvre).

4. His work straddles SF and, well, fantasy or other fantastical genres. I think this gives it a wider appeal to people who aren’t exclusively SF readers (say, fantasy fans), but I think it also makes it more accessible in a society where there are fewer people who are primarily readers of SF than, say, in Anglophone countries. He hits a lot of different bells, if that makes any sense.

5. The point I’m hesitant to note, but: he’s an Asian-American. While Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in translation (in Fantastique, for example), there’s scarcity of Korean-American genre authors (the other who comes to mind is Minsoo Kang). While Koreans SF fans certainly don’t seem to discriminate — I think they’re eager to get good stuff whether it’s by a white American author, a Japanese, a Caribbean-Canadian, a WASP Brit, etc. — I think the phenomenon of an Asian-American author rising to prominence in the US is likely to heighten interest in his work here.

So it’s kind of a perfect storm, I guess? I want to note that the points are listed in descending order. I think the quality of his work, its widespread recognition, and its accessibility (in the sense of both #3 and #4) have a lot to do with it. The fact that he’s of Asian descent is far from the only reason, though I do think all those factors combined make it unsurprising he’s attracted so much interest here.

Being Asian alone, though, isn’t enough. I’m not aware of any major interest in Somtow Sucharitkul’s writing, or in the work of William F. Wu. I’m under the impression Zelazny is also popular here, and Neal Stephenson seems popular too — I think most of his work has been translated, while the surface of Bruce Sterling’s work has barely been scratched. I’m thinking of writing something about how SF gets translated into Korean — the selection process, what factors come into play, and so on. But it’ll have to wait a while.

Why?