Category: REVIEWS

The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban

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Sometimes I think that we’re forgetting a certain kind of creativity in the hothouse world of genre fiction — a sense of freedom, actually, is what I mean. Yes, among us number the people who write the really weird stuff — audacious time travel narratives that turn all the tropes on their ear inteligently; stories of terror rooted in, well, something weird out the window — and a harrowing tale that one is (I’m thinking of Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber); stories imagining how, yeah, we are flushing the planet down the tubes, and what might happen to us …

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Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin

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Of late, I’ve been on a sort of kick where I want to read short books — books of fewer than 300 pages, in general, often even shorter. As I’ve been on this kick, I’ve run into pairs of writings that explore the same basic terrain at different lengths. I mentioned this when I reviewed Patricia Anthony’s Happy Policeman and I’m noting it again as I review this book by Emma Larkin, though in this case the comparable text is this short article from Time, published in 2002 (a few years before Larkin’s book). In this case, I have to say, …

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Happy Policeman by Patricia Anthony

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Well, a few days ago I finished tearing through Patricia Anthony’s Happy Policeman. I wanted to post a review then, but the Internet was pretty much ruined on campus and didn’t start up again till yesterday. Reflecting on my feelings about the book, I am left once again wondering why she is one of those authors I feel like we don’t remember in SF, and I think this fact in itself indicates something problematic in SF circles. Authors who have impressed me less (or at least less consistently — Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad, among others) are far better-remembered, and …

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The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan by Christopher Benfey

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This book should be required reading for all who want to talk about Korea’s constant, deep-seated anxiety regarding the lack of a place in the Western imagination held by South Korea, and many Koreans’ jealousy of the place that Japan and China have in the Western mind, the foolish attempts to “brand” Korea and market the country onto the imaginative map of Westerners, and so on. What Benfey’s book shows is that Tokyo and Kyoto were not built in a day, and certainly not just in the 20th century. We might remember history as if Americans got interested in Japan …

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“Contemporary Music” for Traditional Korean Instruments

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I don’t know how much of this is going on in Seoul, but I was pleased to run across a channel on Youtube featuring a bunch of it. Now, when I say “contemporary music” I don’t mean people playing Beatles songs on traditional instruments. I especially don’t mean “fusion” music where people on traditional Korean instruments try to play in a jazz-fusion or rock-fusion setting, something I think rarely works. (Though I have heard tracks by a few indie bands that made great use of some instruments — haegeum in one song by 3rd Line Butterfly, and samul nori in …

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Platform by Michel Houellebecq (Translated by Frank Wynne)

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I was working on a revision of a story, and a character ended up needing to recommend a French author. Searching my memory, I came up with only a few names, including Camus and Sartre, but as I wanted something more recent, I tried to think of another French writer; Bernard Werber is popular in Korea, and so came to mind, but it was the wrong author to think of, so finally, perhaps because I’d recently mentioned him (here), Michel Houellebecq came to mind. I recalled many of the things I’d read about him: the accusations of his racism, of …

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Lovecraft Stories I’ve Loved

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UPDATE NOTE (3 July 2011): Not really an update, I just ended the final paragraph, as it was incomplete somehow. ORIGINAL POST: My friend Chris still hasn’t read HPL, though he is an excellent writer working in genre fiction and really, I imagined he would have somehow, for some reason, just because Lovecraft’s influence is so pervasive in the speculative arts. I think I was urging him to address that oversight, when he asked me which stories have meant the most to me. I figured I might as well blog it, and then, like most things I swear an oath …

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천군 (Heaven’s Soldiers) revisited: Hanmura Ryō’s Sengoku Jieitai (戦国自衛隊), 독재자 (Dictator), and more Korean SF News

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This entry is part 45 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Long ago, I posted briefly about the monstrosity that is Heaven’s Soldiers (천군) a while back (and discussed it in an interview, too), but this is a point that is sure to interest those who, like me, have no access to Korean SF except through film and that small cache of English translations online linked in my sidebar (okay, here you go). As you may recall, Heaven’s Soldiers is a South Korean SF film about North and South Korean soldiers cooperating on the construction of nuclear weapons with which to apparently meet the threat of foreign hegemonic domination or invasion or …

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The Caryatids, by Bruce Sterling

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I’ve had The Caryatids on my shelf for a while now, and have been trying to set aside time to read it. After all, Bruce Sterling was a formative influence on my own idea of SF, whether you can see it in my own writing. In a conversation the other night, somehow I kept ending up talking about his work with our guest, a futurist. The funny thing is, when I talked about Sterling’s work, it was his ideas I kept mentioning, and my references to The Caryatids was no exception: I talked about the three big loci of power …

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Vampires, Confucianism, Christianity’s Latent Monarchism, and the Translation of Sociohorror

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Seriously, now...
This entry is part 44 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

(Note: I’m filing this under Korean SF, though it only fits there if we define SF as “speculative fiction”: still, I think this post does appeal to a crucial question at the heart of the reception of SF and other fantastical genres in cultures foreign to the culture of a given work’s original production. So there.) So I’ll admit it now: I’ve been watching True Blood. Yes, yes, it’s trashy. But as someone who is not very plot-minded, I have to say, it does a particular trick with a knife that I, too, am learning to do. I’m close to …

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