Jihyun Park and I were recently interviewed by Cristina Jurado about our translation work—that is, our work translating Korean SF to English. You can see the interview (and lots of other cool content) in issue 2 of SMALL PLANET, here.
New Interview!
Category: lit
More Early Modern Women Adventurers (… and others)
You read my post about Mary Ambree and Dianne Dugaw’s scholarship on women warriors in popular 16th-18th century English culture, and now you want more, you say? You’re in luck: the excellent Stuff you Missed in History Class podcast (which I listen to a lot these days, while driving) has made a few pertinent episodes recently. Here they are: Catalina de Erauso, “the Lieutenant Nun.” Not English, in this case—she was what ended up being called Basque—but a fascinating figure all the same, she was a runaway from a convent (and not actually a nun) as well as a cross-dressing …
Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown sighted and captured in Seoul.
I never thought I would find a copy of it on the shelves, let alone in Korea. But in the Youngpoong bookshop in the Central City shopping complex attached to the Seoul Express Bus Terminal, I boggled for a moment and then realized that, yes, what I was looking at was that very same book, a decade old and micheviously new-looking (the text reads pretty freshly too, a credit to Mr. Sterling). There it was, nudged between a Christian diatribe and a copy of Ayn Rand. I just had to rescue it. So I plunked down my ten-thousand won (about …
Ballard, Burroughs, and “Truth” in Writing
Today I read a rather interesting interview with JG Ballard at Salon. It’s mainly about Ballard’s thoughts on his own work and the work of William S. Burroughs, and I found it interesting because he had some very intriguing things to say about what he terms “the bourgeois novel”.
Hesse’s Demian
One night during a discussion between some friends, including my girlfriend, Hermann Hesse’s book Demian came up. One of the things I like about our relationship is that while neither of us simply runs out to read books that the other has read, we sometimes do recommend books to one another and eventually talk about them.
Technique and Politics in Hard SF
In his famous Harper’s piece,“Perchance to
Dream: Reasons to Write Novels in an Age of Images”, the now oft-discussed
Jonathan Franzen articulates his personal motivation for writing literature
in an age where the most powerful media is not print but image-based technology
like TV and film. He starts out the description of a retreat from the world
— a world that his persona in the essay feels has gone mad. He writes:
“I began to think that the most reasonable thing for a citizen to
do might be to enter a monastery and pray for humanity.” This, from
a man who describes his connections with the outside world as “the
twin portals of my TV set and my New York Times subscription.” He
decants nightmares of a Silicon Valley VR-helmet plague, and derides rampant
multiculturalism…
The Big Sleep
These days, since my novel has taken the turn into somehow morphing into a kind of futuristic potboiler, I’ve taken it upon myself to read some mystery novels. During a trip to Seoul I managed to pick up an old, abused hardcover copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. I’m precisely halfway through it and in awe of the plotting and style. The story is just getting more and more convoluted and I’m finding it harder and harder to put down. Another thing that’s exceptionally well-done is the treatment of the culture… the underground P.I. culture, the local culture, the …