Category: REVIEWS

Today is Full of Yaaaaaaar…

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… in a good way. Not just because there’s buzz about Tesseracts Twelve, including a nice review of my story in it over in Locus (see here, at the bottom of the post), but also because I found out another of my Clarion West stories, “The Country of the Young,” is coming out in Interzone this month! I’ll be putting up a post soon about “The Country of the Young.” If you’re in Britain, feel free to hit the shops (in a couple of weeks, as it’s not out quite yet). Otherwise, there’s always an eMagazine edition (isn’t there?) at …

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Reading Now, Reading Then

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These days, I’ve made a holiday project of finishing all the books I started prior to 2012, or at least trying to finish them — though I am also trying to get better about setting aside a book when I truly don’t like it after 100 pages or so. Discussing my reading beyond that is a slightly uncomfortable subject, for a few reasons. One of them is that I am not a reviewer, and don’t find it particularly politic to slam stories I don’t like in public. I am all for praising the ones I did like, but that also …

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Trope Salad and Penis Guns and Indie SF Films… No, Really.

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This entry is part 13 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There it is. I hereby coin it. I googled it, and found only this, and that’s an email address for which even the cached page it was contained on was somehow empty. So Trope Salad is mine. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “You can have it. But what does it mean?” What it means is that I am trying to have fun while working on an academic paper. Always a dangerous route. What it signifies is the phenomenon wherein someone who knows absolutely jack squat about SF, or seems to know jack squat, treats it as a kind of …

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Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report

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This entry is part 12 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report I promised a report on the micro-con I mentioned here and attended last weekend, but it’s taken me a little time to get the photos I wanted to post along with it. (This text was written on Monday, but I didn’t get through the photos until today.) The set I’ve uploaded to Flickr can be seen here. I had a good time at this festival, which was organized by the JoySF fanclub. There were a number of events, including screenings, lectures, and hanging around in the dealer’s room. The Festival was held at the Seoul …

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Reading The Host in Context, Part 2: How I Read The Host

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This entry is part 11 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

NOTE: The following is a continuation of my earlier post on Reading The Host in context. You should probably start at part 1  first, and proceed here afterward. Though I have trawled through the books I’ve recently read for over a half an hour now, I cannot now find the passage that sticks out in my mind where an SF critic points out that American readings of Gojira, while they tend to correctly grasp the political subtext of the film — anxieties about nuclear weaponry, loss of colonial territory after the war, the threat of American power — miss out …

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My Thoughts on SF in Korea (How and Why They’ve Changed)

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This entry is part 1 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Anyone who’s reading this series from the beginning will note that this post was written much later than the second post in the series. My thoughts on SF in Korea have changed somewhat, and I think it’s important to frame that. A few months ago, when I began looking into SF here, all I really had access to was a couple of websites, and the shelves of every bookstore I walked past. You see, everytime I saw a bookstore, I would hurry into it and look around for the SF section. Not the SF section in English, but the Korean …

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Home With Split Head, But Good…

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I’m just posting this to say I went to the festival both yesterday and today, met some interesting people, had fun, took a lot of pictures, and will be reporting back soon. (And looking into what I need to do to submit a notice to Locus about it, or whether that’s even possible…) But also to say that I was thinking back on my earlier posts on the SF in South Korea series, and will need to add a preamble to it, explaining how my impressions and opinions have changed since I started looking into this topic. Both those posts, …

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Ian McHugh: Ass Kicking Writer

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Kudos time! Australian writer Ian McHugh, the friend I visited in Canberra last year (photos here), not only won 1st Prize for the third quarter of 2008 in the WOTF (Writers of the Future) Contest, and word has it he also won the Gold Prize last night, thereby making, as Wikipedia notes, more money for his short story than most writers make for a first novel sale. Congratulations, Ian! That’s some powerful ass-kicking. Competitor (and fellow Clarion Westie — I would probably have met her if I’d been at WorldCon, as many Westies were about the place) Erin Cashier graciously …

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Reading The Host in Context, Part 1

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This entry is part 10 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Well, here I go. This is my attempt to provide a reading of the 2006 blockbuster Korean film The Host in context — that is , not only a Korean cultural and historical context, but also in the context of Korean Gwoesu (“Giant Monster”)  movies, and those films which influenced the development of the genre in South Korea. Disclaimer — all images not cited to an photographer at copyright their respective owners. They are used in this post for educational/critical purposes, and thus their use falls under fair use. Thank goodness, because this essay would be hard to read without …

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