Well, sort of. I will have to do up a PowerPoint of some sort (maybe, if I want) and reformulate it as a talk before flying to St. Louis. But before I do that, I’m going to read a novel. For fun. For fun, I tell you.

(Don’t get me started on how badly I’m dying to write some new fiction. Dying, I tell you.)

In the meantime, a discard from among my witty footnotes. (Witty footnotes are a thing with me. I love writing them. Maybe they’re not as witty as I think, though.) Anyway, I quipped that maybe, with the stakes rising so high, SF today aspires not so much to evoke a “sense of wonder” as a “sense of WTF?”… I had Accelerando by Charles Stross, in mind, but a number of other books also rather nicely fit that description, I think.

(How she stays on top of music in Korea is something everyone paying attention is amazed by, considering she’s not actually in Korea. Such is the power of the internet… and strong passions.)

Now, this is going to be delicate. See, there’s such a thing as genre-media-inspired music in the West. It’s called filk, and it generally has a kind of, well, hmmm. It has a reputation, let’s put it that way. One of the most diplomatic SF writers I know, in terms of professional comportment, twisted her face into a mask of horror when she saw some filkers and said, “There’s NO &%*$^#! excuse for filk!!!” or something like that. It was as if it were as offensive as, well, pick your disgusting crime against humanity.

I’m less horrified by the notion of filk, but then, for me it’s mostly an abstract concept at the moment. I haven’t run across much of it. I’m not mostly into so much of the media being drawn upon, and anyway, I’ve only been to two cons in my life. The one time I did hear filk, it was a guy playing the Star Wars theme on an accordion. So I can’t say I’m into it, or hate it. I do kind of cringe at the notion.

So believe me when I say that I was shocked by how very good a number of the tracks on this thing are, considering it’s a Korean Star Wars filk album. Maybe the filk tradition isn’t big in Korea? Given the size of SF fandom here, I wouldn’t expect it to be. And lots of these people sound like people who came to filk after really getting their chops up in music — they learned to play not just to do filk, but to play rock or whatever else they’re playing.

It’s a pretty good album, in my books, with a few tracks that make it worth buying. The standout song for me at the moment is a very cute, weird little tune about Yoda and Green tea. Which makes sense because, you know, Yoda’s green.

I’m smiling as I type this.

Here’s a rough translation of the lyrics (with the original pasted under the cut). I’ll just note that the original is trilingual, with the italicized lines in English, and the rest of the English in Korean. The non-English is Japanese phoneticized from the Korean representation of the Japanese. Oh, and there’s a sample available below, I promise! (At the end of the review, the link.)

Green Tea Please

Yoda, with a green face
Really likes to drink green tea
So when he went to Japan,
He went into a tea shop

“Green Tea Please!”
Yoda only spoke English
“How do I order a green tea?”
Shall we learn together?

Rokucha, rokucha: “Green tea, Green tea”!
“Please”: kudasai kudasai!
Rokucha kudasai!
Rokucha kudasai!
“It’s really really delicious”:
Oishi honttoni desseune

Yoda, having tasted this tea,
Went off to live in Japan;
Went to a tea shop in Osaka
And sat there everyday!
“Green Tea Please!”:
Rokucha kudasai
“It’s really really delicious”:
Oishi honttoni desseune

Rokucha rokucha: “Green tea, green tea”
“Please”: kudasai kudasai
Rokucha kudasai
Rokucha kudasai
“If I collect 10 stamps [on this club card],
Will I get a cup for free?”

The track itself is as wonderful and innocent as you would imagine for lyrics like that.

And that’s not the only wonderful track on the album. The very next song is a lovesong to Chewbacca, ostensibly from the POV of Han Solo (from what I can tell, anyway, though it’s not exactly “slash”, again, from what I can figure out). There’s another tune which sounds very somewhat like it’s in the old-fashioned Korean karaoke style (as impeccably lampooned by Flight of the Conchords here, though slightly less old-fashioned than that example) which is titled “My Name’s Chewbacca the Galactic Blaster.” There’s a song that fuses traditional pansori style (like this) with guitar blues, and it’s about R2D2.

There’s a also punky song called “I Am Your Father,” another titled something that would translate approximately as “Yoda’s Everyday [Routine]” and a song that I think is about The Dark Side which is titled 끝없는 어두움, which I’ll render as “Endless Darkness.” There’s even a pretty wild appearance by Sato Yukie, Seoul’s leading avantgarde crazymusic guru, who contributed a wild track titled “Solo Improvisation for Starwars.”

Another song that gets stuck in my head is the one titled “Skywalker” — though I would probably smash the out-of-tune-recorder if I saw the song performed live. But my only complaint other than that recorder is that I didn’t quite get the theme-relatedness of the electronic songs at the end of disc 1. They’re alright, I just didn’t get the link. But over all, it’s quite listenable and quite K-indie-sounding, really, a bit eclectic and weird and quirky and fun. And if you listen to the lyrics and get much at all, it’s even weirder and more fun, even when the links are quite tenuous. Maybe even more when they’re tenuous, like with the Green Tea Please song…

If you’re hooked already, order the album here (among probably other places, though unfortunately I can’t find any sign of it on the sites where I assume people outside Korean usually buy K-indie, like MrKwang’s or Yesasia.com). If anyone out of country is desperate for a copy, let me know and I’ll try harder to find a place where you can order it. (Though if you don’t speak enough Korean to find it yourself, you may not get much out of it anyway!)

But if you would like to sample the complete album, it’s available in a javascript thingie on this page, a plugin for which I can’t seem to copy and paste the code here, so go there and try out those tunes. Just click on the blue jukeboxy widget thing in the middle of the post and it’ll pop open to reveal a listing of every track on the 2-disc album. The Yoda song with the lyrics above is the first track on the second CD, so the one marked 1. after 14 previous tracks (right after the track titled “krasch dance”).

Below the cut, the original Korean (/English/Japanese) lyrics for “Rokucha Kudasai.”

Now, those lyrics in the original to the Green Tea song, which I snagged from here:

이랑&진주조개잡이와 사람낚는어부 – 로쿠차 구다사이

하나 둘 셋 넷

요다는 녹색얼굴
녹차를 즐겨마셔요
요번에 일본에도 갔다왔어
녹차 전문점에 갔어

그린티 플리즈
요다는 영어밖에 못하는데
녹차를 어떻게 주문하나
함께 배워볼까요

로쿠차로쿠차 녹차녹차
구다사이 구다사이 주세요
로쿠차 구다사이
로쿠차 구다사이
너무너무 맛이 있어요
혼또니 오이시 데쓰네

요다는 그 맛에 반해서
일본에서 살기로했어
오사카에 녹차전문점에 가면
매일매일 앉아있어요
그린티 플리즈
로쿠차 구다사이
너무너무 맛이 있어요
혼또니 오이시 데쓰네

로쿠차로쿠차 녹차녹차
구다사이구다사이 주세요
로쿠차 구다사이
로쿠차 구다사이
도장 열 개 모으면
한 잔은 공짜로 주나요

Oh yeah: this is late notice, y’all, but…

Hwang Shin Hae Band is playing tonight. No idea if there are tickets available but I’ll be there a few hours early, trying to get one! Show’s at 8, and here’s a map to the venue — the Sang Sang Madang live hall…

So anyway — my content free post of…

Shiny Links!

Some stories by people you should know about:

• Tina Connolly’s “Hard Choices” at Brain Harvest (or play the game, made by Kaolin Fire, here)
• Caroline Yaochim’s “Tending the Mori Birds” at Fantasy Magazine
• Maura McHugh’s “The Diet” is available in this issue of Arkham Tales, free for download
• David Simons’ “Second String” at IGMS (but you gotta pay)
• T.F. Davenport’s “Penance” in the Futures column of Nature

Other neat stuff:

• The Snail on the Slope — a Youtube video that feels like a trip into the mind of Stanislaw Lem, sorta. Blogged by Bruce Sterling…
• The Soulless Victorian Dress-Up Doll… reminds me of what Maureen told me about Victorian laundry handling. Nightmarish…
• I’m trying to teach myself to play some basic guitar chords. This is handy, for a start…
• It’s amusing to see that when he can get his mind off pornography, this random Christian guy thinks sex with robots is bad… but he is much less pessimistic about its effect on humanity’s prospects for survival than the atheistic, scientistic, irreverent Charlie Stross, who (if my positronic brain isn’t malfunctioning) quipped somewhere about his novel Saturn’s Children that sex with robots contributed to the extinction of humanity…
• Aussie dust insanity. Now imagine a future clogged with days like this. Still don’t care about climate change?

For Writers:

• Have spacesuit? Will travel for research? Gulliver Travel Grant fast approaching!

Music Stuff

• Another Goddamn Music Blog — reviews and links for free online music
• k-indie: a neat livejournal community for getting the skinny and samples on new indie in Korea, especially useful if you’re not in-country
• The Far Eastern Audio Review. Just what the name suggests.

Korean Media Sugardump:

Yes, this video is utterly syrupy sweet. If you’re inclined to complain about such things (or cutesy amateur spoofmitations) don’t watch it.

If you daren’t risk that, than here’s some 장기하 와 얼굴들 singin’ his Cheap Coffee song, which was a huge thing last semester:

One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few days later — literally, just a few days later — Kim Sang Hoon (the Korean translator) and Dr. Q  (ie. Kim Kyu Hyun) were explaining to me the special sense of the word in a little more detail. It’s not precisely geekiness, but rather a kind of overtly childish mode of behaviour that at once comes across as vaguely put-on or conscious but also endearing. At least, that’s what I got from it. Dr. Q said he thought it should become a regular word in English, since Americans do it all the time — and he’d know better than me, he lives in the States. Sang Hoon Kim specifically mentioned the website of a famous Korean genre author and the discussion boards there in relation to being behaving like a 지찔이.

Anyway, there are tons of examples of this, but I’ll just recount one more that is pretty surprising: 오크. At least, I think this is how it is spelled. The word is the Koreanization of “orc,” a word Iimagine was, for most Koreans aside from online gamers and dedicated fans of fantasy literature and media, mostly unknown until 2002, when the first Lord of the Rings film was released here… just as it probably was unknown or forgotten for a large number of Westerners, for that matter. (I imagine most of my non-D&D-playing friends in high school might have encountered the word at some point, but wouldn’t remember what it wqas or, at least, wouldn’t ever have used it in conversation)

Well, my tutor used the word “orc” in passing while describing a nasty incident at the subway station, in the course of illustrating her agreement that our neighborhood is rough and weird and full of unsavory characters.

This guy wants your seat on the subway.

I said, “오크? 오크 뭐예요?” (Orc? What’s an orc?) She smiled and said, “Young people use that word to describe people who are soooooo ugly…” and then described the Korean version of being ugly as sin, based on the specific example: dark, dark brown skin like a farmer’s; tiny, nasty little beady eyes; a broad face; nasty hair; and — this took a little dictionary consultation — pock marks in the skin as if from a long-ago bout of smallpox.

The specifics of that aside — this definition of ugly itself is probably at least somewhat generational, because while fifty or sixty or a hundred years ago, before the age of sun creams, paleness might have been a sign of beauty, nonetheless for most I imagine relatively darker skin from working in the sun would have been the norm — it’s fascinating that a word like Orc has entered the Korean vocabulary in such a way that it can be used directly, as a kind of common metaphor one can assume one’s peers will understand without explanation.

(Another one I’ve sometimes heard is Zerg. Which I think are those little doggie-like creatures in the massively popular (in Korea) computer game Starcraft.)

Not because that’s particularly surprising, mind you: English words (and other foreign words) do this all the time, in Korean. (As they do in plenty of languages.) But the fact that foreign genre-related words can carry more popular resonance in a foreign language and (youth-)culture than in the culture of its origin is surprising and fascinating. Think about it: if you were in a pub in London or Toronto, and were complaining about some ugly jerk on the subway, would you call him an “orc”? And if you did, would your friends understand what you meant immediately, and use the word themselves? I can’t  quite imagine that happening in Canada or the US, somehow… at least not outside of an SF convention.

야! 야! 반대말 하지마라, 이 미친 놈아! 아이씨~~~!

You’re pushing the limits of your reactor engines, but you need to catch this ride. It’s the only one that will pull you out of this fucking sinkhole of a gravity well, where everything weighs too much, where the world is pulling at you all the time.

The skyhook is coming now, howling through the upper air, and the shiver passes through your body, the chilling sensation of hope riding along on brilliant, insanely ancient machineries and your own brutally perfect training.

You fight the shuttle’s built-in weaknesses, and push and push, and suddenly, you start to wonder if, today, you might just be in the right place at the right time. If you miss, it’s just another flub. If you make it, cool, but if not, you will try again. And again.

And again.

But what if you make it?

The grapples shoot out, and you hold your breath for a second until you feel the tug, gentle just because you’ve been pushing this crap shuttle as hard as you can. The tug turns into upward spin, and were the shuttle not completely pumped with smartfoam, the force would be enough to smash your bones to pieces, and squash the rest of you flat.

But you’re safe, for now, and you’ve caught the ride you needed. Today, you were in the right place at the right time, and as you are dragged up and out of atmosphere, you smile gently, faintly. It’s not just luck. The hours in the simulator. The days of thinking through this maneuver. All the missed hitches in the past.

Soon, the smartfoam will thin, and you will float free and stare out at the naked, distant faces of the stars. There’s a whole ‘nother world up here, whole economies you’d read rumors about but never seen in operation. You’re going to have to learn to work ‘em, if you’re going to get the kind of ship that will survive any real trip. And then, you’ll have to figure out where to go next: the Oort Cloud? The Kuiper Belt? A holiday on one of the moons of Jupiter?

In hauling yourself up off the homeworld, you’ve just traded up for a better class of dilemmas.

And baby, it feels good.

Told you it was funny!

(via justinhowe)

Not quite the cover on the version I picked up, but close.

Today, I happened to pick up a copy of the 1970 futurist classic Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. This being Korea, there’s never a shortage of Toffler books around: the author’s tenure as an advisor to Kim Dae Jung seems to have ensured an enduring reputation here. (The library where I work even has a Korean translation of the book! I wonder how faithful the translation was, as well as how some of the, er, cheesier and more culturally-specific concepts were translated.)

The book surely has the aura of the 1970s. One passage near the beginning of Chapter 1 waxes, er, gamut-ward in its examples of the “odd personalities” that accelerated social changes are “breeding”:

… children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at fifty are children of twelve. There are rich men who playact poverty, computer programers who turn on with LSD. There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists whom beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. There are married priests and atheist ministers and Jewish Zion Buddhists. We have pop… and op… and art cinéthique… There are Playboy Clubs and homosexual movie theaters… amphetamines and tranquilizers… anger, affluence, and oblivion. Much oblivion.

Just prior to this passage, Toffler refers to curious social flora–from psychedelic churches and ‘free universities’ to science cities in the Arctic and wife-swap clubs California, and this specifically struck me as quite analogous to Korea. (If I remember rightly, a wife-swapping club — or was it just a swingers’ club? — was busted recently in Busan, which is the closest thing Korea has to a California.) It makes perfect sense to me that the book was seen as relevant to Korea in the late 90s!

Outside of Korea, the  impact of the book Future Shock on our world is possibly inestimable, but its impact on the SF genre is still greater. As much as SF people love to trace their lineage back to  Frankenstein, or Lucian of Samasota, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, even, it seems to be that Toffler’s book was a deep, hard shot of heroin to the genre, eventually culminating in at least one of its major late-20th/early-21st century tropes: The Singularity.

(After all, for all that its best-selling (ostensible) nonfiction proponents, such as Ray Kurzweil and, though he calls its something else, Frank J. Tipler, like to prognosticate about The Technological Singularity, its central defining feature is its absolute incomprehensibility to human minds. The Technological Singularity is, as a literary trope, simply “future shock” raised to an exponent so high that the mathematics itself starts to break apart under the pressure.)

My old, hardback copy of Future Shock is somewhere in a box  in Canada. I bought it at a Symphony Booksale, I think, or, no, on second thought I believe I got it at the St. Thomas More college booksale. (The same place I bought my now-lost 1947 edition of the Vogue Book of Etiquette, which is about the most insane book I’ve ever read.) I only got around to reading it when I arrived in Montreal for graduate school.

The book was a revelation for me. For one thing, I’d just read Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire and was working my way through John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, and on reading Toffler I felt as if I’d stumbled upon the ur-text of post-1970 SF. Indeed, I was so struck by it that months later, I ended up using the book extensively in a paper I wrote for my Creative Writing workshop course.

My peers were mostly mainstream-fiction people, though there was a touch of genre-like stuff: a little hardboiled here, a little magical realism there, that sort of thing. But the responses to my work were often laced with what I took for discomfort with SF, puzzlement at why it would be taken seriously, and a certain degree of axiety at having to give feedback on work that simply didn’t seem to operate on the same lines as mainsteram fiction. (I was, at times, striving for beauty of prose, of course, but there was Adventure! and Science Stuff! and Overt, Unapololgetic Politics! To be fair, some classmates were cool with it from day one, and others got into the swing of things, and my own anxiety about being the only SF person in the bunch probably colored my reading of their critiques.)

Anyway, my paper focused on the use of “literary realism” in SF as a psychological trick, a kind of Trojan horse, as it were. I explained that many stories tended to begin with a situation that at once seemed to draw readers into the imaginary world immersively, while also slapping them in the face with its absolute, unarguable unreality. (This was my understanding, at the time, of Darko Suvin’s notion of Cognitive Estrangement.) I argued that not only was this experience one of the core pleasures of SF across subgenres, but also that this was one of the functional purposes of SF.

Functional because, I argued, besides being entertaining literature, and literature in the other senses we use the word, SF also can act as an vaccine — or at least as a cognitive-immunobooster — against the phenomenon of “future shock”… which was, as Toffler defined it, the reaction of human beings when they find their ability to adapt to change is too far outpaced by the rate of change going on in their world.

As I mentioned in a recent interview with Mary Robinette Kowal, SF really does appear to have an effect on how people deal with advances of science and technology. All the SF people I knew at the time that Dolly the Sheep was cloned shrugged their shoulders while so many others — including even lotsof supposedly-educated people who had spent time thinking about this stuff beforehand — seemed to be taken aback, and haunted by images of superhuman clone armies, blabbering about the “dehumanization of cloning” and so on.

SF people? Most of the ones I knew chuckled in response, saying things like, “Okay, so when can we start growing ourselves spare kidneys and hearts and limbs like in that novel by ______?” [You fill in the blank with your favorite author.] And whatever novel it was had already gone way beyond the cheeseball fantasy of The Island and the earlier film it was based upon, to imaginewhat kind of industry would come of this, what kinds of workarounds would be developed for the cheesy moral quandries of dumb-style cloning.They often pointed out that cloning wasn’t really a smart or efefctive way of developing superhuman armies, for a whole host of reasons from unhealthy homogeneity to the inefficiency of the method. (The clones would still have to grow up and learn all the skills of their original, and some would undoubtedly end up cognitively or idiosyncratically different,perhaps in ways that would jeopardize the whole project!

Anyway, that’s a passing glance at the first chunk of the book. I’ll be reading the whole thing again as part of my preparation for a paper I’ll be presenting on the topic of various forms of the The Singularity (and the possibility of a critical synthesis of them) for the “Posthumanism Today” panel at the M/MLA conference in St. Louis this November. (There’s a description of the panel in general under the heading “Science and Fiction: ‘Posthumanism Today‘” on that page.)

I may also post reflections on the the rest of the text, and the influence I see it having had on SF, over the next few months, if people show interest. Interest would be shown by commenting, but don’t feel obligated, folks. I may do it anyway.

I’ll probably only refer to Future Shock in passing in the actual paper, but it seems to me like the generative root of the notion of the SFnal, Vingean trope of the Singularity, in a sense. It is, after all, simply a type of Future Shock generated not by the pace of change, but by a fundamental change in the nature of change which itself proceeds from the accelerated change so important to Toffler.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, you can click over to this post at Odd Culture where you can see the 1972 film that was, er, “inspired” by Future Shock. I’m not saying it’s a good film, but you will probably get a kick out of it.

The discussion ranges from Nebula Award winners and Locus Award shortlist to The Singularity, gaming as literature, and sentimentality about Heinlein “juveniles.” It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this, and I’m appropriately confused and scattered at points — I’m not much of a gamer and not so into Heinlein, after all — but it was a fun chat, and you can check it out here.

• The 2009 Hugo Voter Packet, kindly assembled by John Scalzi, is now available for everyone who is eligible to vote. If you’re attending or a supporting member, you are eligible to download it. More details on Scalzi’s blog — it’s freaking huge, and full of amazing stuff… including Campbell Award nominees’ stories, so, yeah, a few things from me. And you know what, buying a supporting membership would also essentially be a big savings for you cheap bastards who wanna get a pile of novels, novellas, short stories, an audiobook, and more, all for free.
• Mary Robinette Kowal continues her interviews with Campbell Award nominees Tony Pi and Felix Gilman, and yo ass is bound to find what they have to say interesting.

When I was playing in a local student big band in Saskatoon, the guy on second tenor was the funniest person I’d met up until then. His name was Jason — I can’t remember his family name, but he was Jason the tenor player — and  he once said of his job at a video store, “Man, I was so busy today I didn’t have time to take a sh*t!”

Suffice it to say I know now exactly what he meant. (And if I haven’t emailed you yet, sorry, but the flood of 30-40 emails a day is something I resigned myself to not keeping up with at any sensible rate. Patience, my netkittens and voidbots of the ether. I will get back to you if Santa tells me you’ve been bad, I promise.) But anyway, in the midst of all that busy craziness, I thought I’d take a second to link a few cool things you might want to see.

One of them is a post by David Anthony Durham, a fellow Campbell Award nominee who is doing highlights on the whole lot of us. He did a post on Aliette de Bodard, and the next post was about me. (There’s some video in there that brought back oooooold memories.) As Mr. Durham writes, all the nominees seem like such interesting folks, and I am definitely looking forward to meeting up with as many of them as possible in Montreal.

(By the way, Mr. Durham’s very interesting interview with Mary Robinette Kowal is here.)

Another thing to check out is a post by Aliette de Bodard on writing in a foreign language. As someone who struggles to even read snippets of SF or SF criticism in a foreign language–hell, even Korean comic books mystify me much of the time — I’ve got to pay her some respect. (Though, again, I have resolved — when I am less busy — to start studying Korean again. If I study, I can learn. If I continue not to study, I will not learn. It’s as simple as that. A student offered to tutor me, recently, but then she dropped out of school for the semester to take on an internship, so, uh, there goes that opportunity!)

Finally, there are a couple of stories by my pal Tina Connolly up at Strange Horizons (“Turning the Apples”) and at Podcastle (“Birthday Wish”). Worth your time, folks, assuming you have any. And hey, my other pal Ian McHugh has a story up at Drabblecast, too (“The Alchemical Automaton”).

Oh, and for those of you who can read Korean, I got profiled/interviewed here. I’m liking the first photo a lot, and the photographer gave me the pics for my own use, so expect a front-page/bio update soon.

It’s a recording of a talk given way back in February 2008 by Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, a prof at Notre Dame. The talk is titled “Our Toys, Our Selves: Robot Taekwon V and South Korean Identity.” (That’s a direct link to the MP3, so if you want, you can right-click and save it, instead of listening to it stream online.)

The talk discusses the role of taekwondo in the building of national identity, the military, and nationalist propaganda, speculates the role of anti-communist government directives in the rhetoric of the film, and discusses the relationship between industrialization initiatives contemporaneous to the film and some of the science-fictional technologies depicted.

(I happen to have a copy of two versions of the film, which were “subtitled in English for children to develop their English abilities.” I haven’t watched either version all the way through, but I’ll have to do so eventually.)

• Jetse de Vries’ Shine Anthology submissions period is crawling closer. He’s looking for Optimistic SF set in the near future — see the Shine Anthology Blog for more information about what “Optimistic” means, and the anthology guidelines here. He’s also taking twitterfic submissions for the Outshine feed.
• Ahmed A. Khan is looking for fiction for two anthologies, one titled “Cheer Up, Universe” (feel-good SF), and the other a YA (pre-teen) anthology titled “Fun Times in Andromeda”. More details on both at Mr. Khan’s Livejournal.

I’m sure there are other interesting calls for submissions floating out there, but I have a few invitations that have filled my plate, so I’m not up to speed. If you know of something interesting, feel free to link to it in the comments, and I’ll add it to this post.

Once that muscle is in shape, it’s pretty damned hard to criticize people for being different: after all, one needn’t even think about the far future to realize one’s much-cherished values or principles might have been utterly different if one had been born in ancient Greece, or in a Buddhist community a thousand years ago, or in Kabul just twenty years ago.

(And no, I’m not saying most of us would be gay if we were born in those places. But our values and norms would have been different, as might have been our inclinations. Given the slim chance of our being born at all, isn’t it even more random that the world happened to be as it was when we were born? This dissuades one from too much attachment to one’s norms, doesn’t it?

And while I won’t link the site — I don’t want to send the bigots an easy route to harassment — it’s run by that a Korean SF author I’ve mentioned here before, and whose penname is a reference to another literary figure who depicted lesbianism in a society that was far from accepting of it.

• Here’s a great story at Strange Horizons by Shweta Narayan.
• Here’s a very interesting essay about SF (or its relative lack thereof) in the Arabic world, by Achmed A. W. Khammas. It’s particularly interesting in relation to relatively (though not exactly) comparable status in Korea, and its pinpointing of cultural and historical causes for the scarcity.

Groggy-headed? Ah, well, you see, I was up late last night. Apparently Wednesday was the deadline for funding applications for publications for the coming year. Essentially, professors submit their research plans for the year, specifying one paper that they intend to research and publish, where they plan to do so, and so on. The problem is that nobody told me, and nobody told the one secretary who usually communicates this stuff to me. The result being that I missed the deadline, and would be denied funding if I published something during the year.

So of course, she complained to academic affairs about the screw-up, and they made an exception for me. That is, they gave me until Friday to get a research plan written. Well, I’m researching SF in Korea, which is a pretty different area from the other profs in my department (who usually research linguistics and TEFL-related stuff) so none of the journals on our selected journal list are really appropriate, and I had to specify which journals I am thinking about for submission. I also had to have a bibliography, and explain the needs my research would fulfill, the context within the literature, and so on. Luckily I’ve been thinking about this stuff, or I’d have had no idea what to write.

I ended up emailing the research proposal to the secretary at 1:00am, so that she could copy and paste it into the system when she arrived at work. I pushed myself to finish it last night because I was planning to visit the Incheon Immigration Office and get my new Alien Registration Card this morning. But the stress pretty much had me up until 4:00am.

(I had this awful nightmare that kept waking me up, which tells you something about the stress I was feeling, since I never have nightmares, but this sudden stress seems to have triggered it. In the dream, I was a little old man in a hospital, and my name was Harvey, and my white-haired old Ukranian wife (who looked like Baba Yaga in a hospital gown) had gone violent and senile, and kept breaking out of her restraints and running to the locked door of her isolation chamber and screaming at me through the glass. “Help me! Help me out of here! Look at me, Harvey! You never look me in the eye, Harvey! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!” I’d wake up and feel my heart gently pounding in my chest.)

I’m up, just the same, because I need to take my hypertension meds at a regular time, but I’m not really awake, and I plan on trying to get some more sleep after I take the meds. Ah well, I’m trying to chalk it up to a learning experience: next year I’ll know about this impending deadline at the end of March.

And before the snide commentary starts to roll in, no, it’s not like this only happens in Korea: my friend Mike down the hall told me about a bunch of the grad students in one department of an American university failed to get funding one year because a secretary simply forgot to file the paperwork in tim, and I’ve heard of similar cases in other places. It’s a feature of large organizations… it’s just frustrating when you’re the only one who didn’t know, and then you’re trying to figure out what the vague form you need to fill out means, and the only person who can explain it to you doesn’t quite know what any of it means either. The added language barrier makes it harder, and maybe also was the source of the information bottleneck in this case, but bottlenecks crop up even without such issues in play.

(We did figure it out, but only by cheating: we looked at another proposal briefly in order to figure out what the obscure titles of the sections actually meant in conventional practice of writing an actual application.)

Okay, enough of the muttered complaining, and on to the good news: last week, I was invited to a meeting in Seoul, the purpose of which I vaguely understood to be a collective of people interested in working on the translation of Korean SF into English. It turns out I was wrong, and what was really going on was the founding of an academic association for the study, translation, and publication of Korean SF in English.

This is a group organized by Mr. Park Sang Joon (whose name must be familiar to readers of this blog by now) and while the group doesn’t yet have a name, it can safely be referred to as The Korean SF Project in the meantime. The people who were there, besides Mr. Park and myself, include Lee Soo Hyeon (who was introduced to me at a party a few months ago as Korea’s foremost expert and translator of Ursula K. Le Guin — this is some of her work — and who is also the translator of such stuff as Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and, currently, the Sandman graphic novels series); Prof. Kim Tai-Young (a professor of Business Management at Dongyang University and an active SF fan); and Prof. Hwang Eun Ju (a literary scholar teaching at Anyang University who did her PhD in Essex and whose dissertation dealt with Ballard’s work).

This newly-founded organization is, in fact, so new that it  doesn’t have a website yet, or even a name, but it will get these things soon, and I’ll mention both when that’s settled. Dr. Hwang (Eun-Ju) and I discussed the possibility of academic collaboration, with the notion of conference presentations coming up, something that’s especially cool since I now supposedly have access to some funding for such things! Hopefully, we will be able to connect to other scholars of SF in non-Anglophone societies, and perhaps help facilitate not only an Asian SF Studies network, but indeed a worldwide Global SF studies network.

Which reminds me, for anyone interested in Global SF studies, you really ought to check out The World SF News Blog. It’s an excellent new blog that seeks to document news World SF, and is the companion project to an upcoming book on the subject by the blog’s author! There are at least a few people that site has linked whom I intend to contact when our own organization gets its legs under it.

In February, I was invited by Mr. Park Sang Joon to attend the SOAO Workshop hosted by KASI (The Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute), and while I posted photos at Flickr, and a few here on my site, I never really discussed the workshop. It’s been several weeks now, but I’ll do my best to reconstruct my experience, as it was a wonderful and invaluable one.

The experience actually began in early February, on the 6th of February to be precise, when we met at Yonsei University Campus and dropped by the observatory there. We got a chance to meet the astronomers who would be working with us at the workshop: Dr. Sung Eon Chang, Dr. Lee Myung-Hun, and Dr. Moon Heung Gyu.

(Please note, these –and all other name romanizations, are my best guesses. The individuals I’m talking about may use other romanizations as a matter of course, hence the links to articles containing pictures of them.)

While we were at Yonsei, it dawned on me that there was actually media interest in this workshop, which was cool. A photographer from the Gwahak Dong-a Magazine–the biggest science magazine in Korea, I’m told–was on hand to photograph all the participants of the workshop, on the roof of the offices attached to the observatory, and indeed there was someone from the media with us at all times: mostly science reporters, but also, toward the end, a reporter who normally covers literature.

Anyway, after that first meeting, we went off campus for dinner, and talked a lot. It was then that I realized how much trouble I was in linguistically. That is to say, I was reminded of the fact that my Korean ability is poor, and has been slipping for years now, simply because trying to follow the conversation of a bunch of really smart people chatting about things like black holes left me completely dumbfounded. This was something that also recurred throughout the workshop, though finally I relaxed into it, accepted that I wouldn’t understand everything, and just let that go. (At which point things became a bit easier to follow, in fact, but more on that later.)

That first night, at the preliminary meeting, we ended up splitting into two groups: those who wanted to go home, and those who wanted to stay and talk. What I remember most vividly from that discussion was the impression that Yu Gwang-soo made upon me — he’s a lively character and speaks in a very impassioned way–and the very interesting talk about contemporary SF that I had with Kim Chang-gyu, a novelist who also participated in the workshop. (He’s crazy about Stross and Doctorow and Egan, and other recent SF, and he told me about some of his own writing that sounded something like a cyberpunk/horror crossover.)

Unfortunately, between the time and the need to get home to Bucheon, and my language ability, I had to leave at what I have the impression was a bit of an early hour, and missed out on lots of fun, but just a week later, the group was to convene again. Early the morning of Wednesday the 11th of February, we met in Seoul and caught a bus down to Mt. Sobaek, where Korea’s biggest optical telescope is located.

Like Kim Chang Gyu, who sat in the back with me, I was tired and ended up sleeping for much of the trip down. We stopped on the way and had a very nice lunch, and then went on to the mountain. When we arrived, we split into two groups, with the first group heading up the mountain and being dropped off partway up (with the expectation that the rest of the way would be covered on foot). Unusually for me, I felt up for a little adventure and also felt like trying out my new mountain boots, so I volunteered to go with that first team.

The drive up the mountain seemed like a drive through the seasons of the year — at the foot of the mountain, it was cool but sunny and bright. As we drove up, it began to look more like fall, and then we drove into snow and it was suddenly more like winter than I have seen in all the time I’ve been in Korea. It was a Saskatchewan-grade winter, deep snow and some wind and lovely cold. I found that absolutely invigorating, which is funny since I hate the cold when I am in Canada. But this was just stunning. Anyway, the walk up wasn’t really very tough, but most of the group I was with didn’t stop for pictures as much as I did, and so I ended up talking with another scientists who’d caught a lift up with us, and had previously simply been hiking alone up the mountain. (Her area had something to do with GPS systems, though she was working on something related to tracking objects in space, I think it was.)

When we reached the observatory at the top of the mountain, she asked me what I thought it looked like, and I told her immediately, “Like the place where an astronomer-vampire would live! This is like an old castle!” I was looking at the older, defunct observatory when I said that:

We all went inside to warm up, and had ourselves some coffee while we waited for the other participants to arrive. Soon they did, and we ended up going for a hike to have a look around the mountain, as well as to receive a brief tour of the observatory’s older and newer facilities. The landscape was stunning, and the whole area was covered in what are, in Korea, called “snow flowers”: trees covered in frozen snow in such a way that they look stunningly beautiful, a sight which is, now, relatively less common in the lowlands.

Finally, we went inside and got a little more tour, having some of the equipment explained to us. (I made a total fool of myself by misunderstanding that I was looking at a remote-controlled observatory in Arizona (I think it was?) and guessing that the light blotch on the display was the sun, not the moon.) We also checked out the main optical telescope, some of the beautiful photos adorning the walls of the observatory, the log books, and finally, the dining facilities, where a wonderful dinner awaited us, followed by a trip outside to look at the night sky.

The stars shone brilliantly. It was freezing, of course, but I haven’t seen the sky so dark, so spangled with stars, since I left Saskatchewan, except one night on a beach in Thailand, and a few weeks’ worth of nights in Dharamsala. A big telescope was set up for us, and we took turns looking at the face of the moon–as close as a lover’s face, it looked, as bright and as detailed, every pore laid bare before us–and at a few constellations.

Finally, we retreated back inside, shivering but happy, where the cook staff had prepared an amazing spread of “anju” (side dishes to be had while drinking). The food that night was bo-ssam, a kind of steamed pork with leaves for wrapping it up, and it was heavenly. I tried the Sobaek Mountain Makkeoli, which is a rather unique form of this rice liquor that was both smooth and darker than other makkeoli I’ve had before. That night, I had a fascinating talk (in English, bless her generous soul) with the writer/translator Jeong So Yeon about SF in Korea, specifically its thematic content, the economics (and reputational economics) of translation, of gender and fandom, and much more. I learned a great deal from her, and have ideas for at least one or two academic papers I’m considering writing. Then we all retreated to bed, or rather, some of us did, and some (not me) stayed up for more drinking and talking.

The next day, people gathered in the large common room and hung out. We were supposed to go out for a hike, because the weather was good and the view was stunning, but we all ended up staying inside and relaxing. I am still kicking myself for not taking any pictures of the ocean of clouds that spread out beneath the mountaintop — it really did look like gazing out at sea — but anyway, we relaxed while Kim Bo-Young, a writer and publisher, gave Tarot readings and everyone checked their email and so on.

In the afternoon, there were some presentations by Drs. Lee and Moon, about… well, I remember one presentation was about the involvement of military funding and projects in astronomy and astrophysics and SETI, and that the other was about… er, wait, maybe my notes are garbled, but I do know that the discussions were tantalizing enough for the bits I understood to prompt me to write notes about the Fermi Paradox, the necessity of tracking asteroids in the vicinity of the Earth, the problems involved in the visual representation of radio telescope data, SETI and steganography, astrochemistry, the role of amateur astronomers [and SETI@home] in data collection/analysis, and more. In all, it was an afternoon of brilliantly interesting discussion and I kicked myself many times for being so unstudied that I understood far too little of it to participate or to savour it as I might have.

After a much needed break, we retreated downstairs, took more photos (if I remember right — there were a lot of photo ops) and had dinner followed by a brainstorming session. The brainstorming session was, again, mostly over my head through there was a lively discussion going on, with the astronomers among us surely holding their own, citing literary references and scientific ideas left and right. Even the very quiet (but very friendly) Park Sung Hwan raised what seemed like an interesting question, and I kicked myself for being so out of the loop that I couldn’t understand it. I’m sure more than a couple of interesting stories will come of that discussion, which is a good thing: all of the (author) participants of the workshop are supposed to contribute a story to be included in an anthology later this year. Me included, and I bet you can guess what my take on the Fermi Paradox will be in it, given how I spent that workshop pushing up against a language barrier.

Then, again, there followed a wonderful spread of food–this time the anju was yuk-hwae, or in other words, raw beef. The stuff was gloriously oily (in sesame oil) and we all had something to drink. I spent much of that evening chatting with Kim Chang-gyu again, talking about the Korean SF scene and also just getting to know one another. I ended up with the late-night squad that night, though I think I retired earlier than most of the squad, and then I went to get a little sleep.

The next day, it was raining, and the ice on the mountain had begun to melt, but we didn’t head out into all that right away. Rather, while we waited to hear about the truck’s progress up the mountain, while the very thoughtful and friendly Kim Bo-young gave Tarot readings. (At least, I think she was doing this the next morning, maybe it was the evening before… I’m not sure.) I finally worked up the guts to ask for one — I would normally have done so before, but I knew how hard it would be to give a reading in simplified Korea, so I asked Jeong So Yeon to translate, which she graciously did. Most of those who received one reported that it was quite accurate, and I must say I’m no exception, though Ms. Kim’s reading assumed I was thinking of one thing, and mine assumed I was thinking about another. Even so, it was almost disturbing how exactly she answered my very ambiguously phrased question.) One historic reading was made about the future of the Omelas SF publication imprint, but I will divulge no more than to say it was very positive, and that the photographic evidence makes that clear:

Eventually, we headed down the mountain on foot, because the slick melting ice was so bad that the truck couldn’t go all the way back up the mountain again. A few people slipped and fell, and a few more ended up soaked on the way down, but finally the first group–the group I was with–reached the truck and was driven to a ranger station most of the way down the mountain.

While we were there, Kim Bo-Young, Kim Chang-gyu, and Yoon Lee-Hyung as well as a reporter and a photographer all hung out and chatted together with me in the ranger’s station. The one Korean word I learned while we waited was kkweong (꿩) which means “pheasant,” which I learned because there was a stuffed pheasant in the ranger’s office. The ranger claimed people still hunt wild pheasant around mountains, too, though I’ve never seen one running around wild myself, and I have wandered around mountains from time to time. Maybe the pheasants don’t hang around the touristy areas, though, like temples and such?

When everyone had finally reached the foot of the mountain, we drove into town and had some (wonderful) Japanese food for lunch. I especially got to know Kim Bo Young and Bae Myung Hoon better, as we discussed the function and purpose of school systems and Korean schooling and I somehow discovered their love of Bollywood films. (Bae published a short story titled “Koi Mil Gaya”, named after the first Indian SF film, in a collection of stories that was published by Kim, and titled the Korean translation of the title “Koi Mil Gaya.”)

Next, we hit the KASI offices in Daejeon for a tour and saw several interesting things, including the space weather tracking center, the radio telescope, and the GPS center, each explained to us by an expert.

By this point, my ability to follow much had slipped, but I did find one thing basically at my level: a series comics for children on various aspects of astronomy and science, which I intend to read once my office hours get quiet enough for me to have spare time for Korean study. At the end of our visit, we were led to an office where an the individual I assumed was the President of the KASI presented us each with an individually inscribed book of his own authorship, and spoke to us for a brief time about I have no idea what. (My Korean-comprehension circuits were pretty much burned out by then.)

Finally, it was time to return to Seoul, and once again, on the drive back, I did a little sleeping, though I also worked on a couple of stories I’d been wanting to finish off. When we reached Seoul, we parted ways, some of us on the subway and some of us not. That was the experience, in a nutshell.

Overall, my impression and experience was very positive. Despite the fact I have bemoaned my pathetic grasp on the Korean language here many times, I left the workshop feeling invigorated, and immediately applied for the Launch Pad Workshop, which is essentially a week-long version of the same thing, but hosted in Wyoming and, pivotally, in English. There’s something energizing about being around a group of really smart people, people who are extremely bright, extremely thoughtful, and who regard science and SF as interesting, serious, and important. I couldn’t help but feel, despite my own anxiety at the problems I had in communicating, like I was among kinfolk, or rather, the way I imagine a German or Brazilian Catholic priest would feel visiting a Catholic rectory in China or Uzbekistan, or the way an American turkey-hunter would feel among some New Guineans armed with spears chasing a crazed water buffalo: like a man among his kind of people, all differences meaning less than this fundamental commonality.

(I also resolved to study Korean harder, so that I can better connect to this community of authors and SF-people.)

As for the stories that will come of this–each of the fiction writers who attended will be contributing one for a themed anthology to come out later this year–I desperately want to read them all, so I suppose I shall have to study hard. In mine, I’ll definitely be doing something with the (so-called) Fermi paradox, SETI, communication barriers, and, I think, the mending of a broken heart. (Because those things are all of a kind, and belong together in a story, just like women, fire and dangerous things in whatever language it was Lakoff claimed that category exists in.)

For more information, you can check out the news coverage in Hankyoreh, the Joongang Ilbo, and the Hankook Ilbo. and there should be an article in the upcoming (or is it out now?) Gwahak Dong-a, unless I’m suffering a memory error. And finally, there is my photoset from the event at Flickr here. I’ve been sent a number of pictures by other participants, but I haven’t had much of a chance to sort through them, so I may update this post with a particularly choice shot. But for now, to put some faces to names, here’s the picture from the Hankyoreh article, and I’ll name off the writers beneath the pic:

Photo by Kim Il Ja: click to see source. From left to right, the SF-author participants are: Park Sung Hwan, me, Yoon I Hyoung, Kim Bo Young, Jeong So Yeon, Bae Myoung Hoon, Kim Chang Gyu, and Yu Gwang Soo.

That’s it for now. (We’ll be having a meeting again sometime, I think, so I may have something to add to this, especially if I forgot to mention something. Miss Jeong specifically pointed out that I hadn’t posted about it yet, and that she was waiting to see what I had to say about the workshop.)

As for upcoming posts, I also attended the opening of the Seoul SF & Fantasy Library, and will be posting about that as soon as I can get myself a picture from the SF fan known as Stonevirus (Bae Yoon Ho, whose blog link in my sidebar is not his real blog, he tells me). Trust me, the picture will be worth the wait, as it blends SF fandom with traditional Korean culture in a way that blew my mind! Next, I’ll be posting about a very exciting academic project involving Korean SF that I’ve been invited to participate in. Lots of cool things going on these days!

Ears

First, a couple of excellent stories in podcast form, by my pals from Clarion West:

• Pesudopod’s rendition of the very dark story “The Greatest Adventure of All” by Ian McHugh
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies‘ rendition of Tina Connolly’s fantasy “The God-Death of Halla” (and other excellent stories are available on the same page)

Eyes

A short article giving even more context to the context I provided for my story “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” has been posted over at his excellent blog Gusts of Popular Feeling. Matt’s quotes are pretty illustrative of the awful conditions Korean girls suffered not only at the hands of the Japanese, but also in some cases at the hands of their own families.

Launch Pad is, as of yesterday (well, to me, as it’s the 16th of February here and now) looking for applicants. Twelve lucky people — writers, whether of science, SF, film scripts, or other things — will be selected to get a crash course on astronomy out in Laramie, Wyoming. It’s an excellent opportunity. Find out more, and apply, at the Launch Pad website. The deadline for applications for the 2009 workshop is March 15th, and you’ll hear back by the end of March.

Also, a reminder for aspiring speculative fiction writers, that the Clarion West Workshop is still taking applications until March 1st 2009 for its summer workshop. More on this year’s workshop, and how to apply, here. (Clarion Workshop in San Diego has the same deadline, but I’m biased towards Clarion West, simply by virtue of it being where I went… though  both workshops’ lineups generally look pretty damned good this year!)

That’s the observatory in the distance in the second pic. Much more coming soon, probably this weekend.