Boyoung Kim’s “An Evolutionary Myth”: Reviews and Comments, and Audio Version

This entry is part 70 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I mentioned recently that our translation of Boyoung Kim’s “An Evolutionary Myth” was published in May, in the (excellent) 104th issue of Clarkesworld. Since then, a podcast of the story has been released—you can hear it here. It’s worth mentioning that, David Steffen deemed Boyoung’s story the #4 best of Clarkesworld’s story podcast episodes (out of a total of fifteen best) in his review of Clarkesworld’s podcast. In addition, the story has been reviewed a few other times since it was published, and very positively too! It was one of Lois Tilton’s recommended stories for the month. In her reviews column in Locus, she …

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Yuan Shih-k’ai by Jerome Chen

Ah, hostile biography. Today I’ll be discussing what I’ve picked up reading a book about Yuan Shih-k’ai (now just Yuan Shikai), the first President of post-revolutionary China. He’s one of those figures I’d never even heard of, and when I stumbled upon Jerome Chen’s eponymously titled  biography of the man, I decided to read it mostly out of curiosity regarding his role in Seoul in the turbulent 1880s. I’d assumed his involvement there was the main reason the book was in the library’s holdings at all, to be honest, but it turns out he’s actually more like China’s equivalent of Syngman Rhee, except that just before his downfall, …

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The Record of the Black Dragon Year

The other day I mentioned how I’ve been reading Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Nok (임진록), titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year.  Lee is a scholar I’ve encountered before, mainly as an editor but also as a translator in the excellent 2-volume Sources of Korean Tradition, as well as A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany: The P’aegwan Chapki of O Sukkwon—the latter, a book I own and I think I’ve loaned out to a friend, but which I haven’t read all the way through. In any case, my curiosity about the Imjin Nok is pretty much rooted in the fact that it’s popular …

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The Status of Fiction in Traditional Northeast Asian Literary Culture

A while back, I mentioned how, in 1632, the commoners around Shaoxing (in China) had planned to cosplay the characters from the famous wuxia novel The Outlaws of the Marsh, hoping to appease the gods into making it rain so a famine could be avoided, and some of the local literati had gotten involved, donated some cloth and lots of money, and turned the thing into a massive Harajuku-meets-Vegas stage production extravaganza. Ah, late Ming China! Ah, Zhang Dai! This mini-anecdote leaves me slightly skeptical about parts of the introduction of Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Rok, titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year (a Korean text roughly …

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