If you’re curious about what happened with that textbook series I was working on last year, for which I wrote the reading-text narratives for a series of English textbooks for Korean elementary schoolkids, focused on English reading and writing skills, this post is for you.
Most of what was great about this week in Australia was personal stuff — seeing (however briefly) old friends, spending time, meeting new cool people, and of course having a brief bit of time outside of Korea, because it was about the time when I was needing a break. Also, Melbourne has some really good beer, and I highly recommend the Belgian Beer Cafe Eureka, which is down near Dockside. It was amazing. (More about that latter place in posts yet to come.) Most of what was good about the conference and convention had to do with regular conference/con stuff: …
Well, I gave my presentation on The Host the other day. I didn’t read a paper, just spoke, which of course is a little risky sometimes, though usually I’m fine when I do that sort of thing. This time, the risk caught up with me, though, and there were a couple of lapses, but worse, because previous prresentations had gone overtime, I started out with less time than I ought to have had, and had to summarize the last third, on top of that essentially skipping the final chunk (about the ongoing duel between right-wing technophilic/globalization/developmentalist/minjok discourse and left-wing environmentalist/anti-American/resistance/minjung …
I’m in Melbourne, now, and will be till next Monday morning. I have a presentation to do at the Utopias 4 conference as well as a presentation and some panels to participate in at WorldCon later in the week, along with some catching up with friends and so on. I also have to get some video lectures recorded and uploaded for my students for Thursday and Friday classes I’ll be missing, so it’s time I got up and got some of that done. I’ll post my WorldCon schedule as soon as I get a chance to check it!
I have a story in my mind, about time travel and moral yearnings and hope and the complete annihilation of everything you hold dear. It feels like this song: … and I don’t know if I can write it so it comes out that way. But it’s a good song, isn’t it? And yeah, I first heard it on Weeds, and couldn’t get it out of my head then.
Two interviews with me have recently been published in Korea, both of them quite long. They may be of interest to anyone curious about stuff like what it’s like to be an expat writing SF, my personal thoughts on Korean SF and the Korean SF scene, and so on. The first interview was conducted and translated by my friend Hong Insu, a translator (he did part of The Hard SF Renaissance) and prominent Korean SF fan, now missed by many (as he is in grad school in Arizona). The interview appears in a “mook” — apparently this is some kind …
Yes, the Immersion Book of SF (edited by Carmelo Rafala and published by Immersion Press) is now available for preorder on Amazon.com. Along with Tanith Lee, Lavie Tidhar, Aliette de Bodard, and others, I have a story included in it, titled “The Broken Pathway” — a tale not only set in Korea, but in the very area where I have lived for the past five years (except, of course, it’s not set in the present day). It’s a tale of geomantic warfare, colonialism, love, regret, and harsh justice. You can find out more about my story here, and you can find out …
Here are two interviews worth looking at: Arafat Kazi talks to the inimitable Paolo Bacigalupi, and Avi Solomon interviews the brilliant Ted Chiang. Both of these interviews deal with their most recent works, neither of which I’ve read yet but Bacigalupi’s novel is high in my pile of books to get to, and Chiang’s is in my list of books to get, period.
Well, as I announced about six weeks ago, I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-Thon again this year, I think the first time since 2007. I pledged something insane: to write three academic papers in six weeks, to the point of them being ready to send out at the end of the six weeks. Well, the result was: close, but not quite, but I’m still quite chuffed by what I did achieve, and a few things got thrown into the mix that I didn’t expect, so I’m overall quite pleased with what I did manage: The first paper I worked …
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 22nd I spoke at a short SF-related seminar for KOFAC (The Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science & Creativity) in Gangbyeon. I was asked to lay say a bit about how SF writers choose what to write about. Basically, to answer that question I felt I had to explain what I think SF is. So I put it this way: SF is how modern, industrialized culture digests the two shocks of technologically-imposed change on society, and the philosophical changes imposed on culture by science. That’s meaty — note that culture and society are …