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: SF
Not Yet Gods Translation, NOT Out Today!
Edit (16 January 2026): Er, yeah, no, it wasn’t actually out. It’s coming out next year. Some miscommunication there, and I forgot that I’d posted this. Sorry! I’m happy to announce that we have a new translation out today (11 November)! It’s a book by the South Korean SF author Djuna titled Not Yet Gods, which was translated by Jihyun Park and myself, and published by Kaya Press. It was a big project and we want to express our thanks for indispensable editorial help from Sunyoung Park, Ly Lan Dill, and Michael Ahn. Jihyun and I been translating together for …
Why I Keep Coming Back To The Walking Dead
I think I’ve figured out why I keep coming back to The Walking Dead and its spinoff franchises, even when they descend into repetition, holey and hokey plots, baffling characterization, and zombified soap drama.
A Lovely Discussion of a Lovely Story
I’m late catching up—it’s been one of those weeks—but on the radio a few days ago, Paul Matthews (@ajosshi) discussed our translation of Bae Myung-hoon’s lovely short story “The Peppers of Green Scallion,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld a few years ago. Listening to Paul read from and discuss the story was a delight for both of us, and he definitely hit on a lot of the things that made us love the story and want to translate it in the first place. You can check out a recording of the discussion over on Arirang’s Check it Out podcast. (Or …
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts get published with some lag. I’m trying to be more punctual, though, and this one’s very recent. Cursed Bunny is a collection of nightmares: curses gone infectious, an impossible pregnancy, a real estate horror, a fantasy set in a mythic desert, a few ghost stories with surprising twists. I was delighted to find a copy just sitting there on the shelf at one of our local libraries, crying out to be read. I can understand why people have made comparisons to Angela Carter (despite my being only slightly familiar …
Djuna Interview Up at Clarkesworld
While this is not a full-fledged update on SF in South Korea, I thought it’s noteworthy that Clarkesworld recently published our interview interview with the author Djuna, a longtime enigmatic titan of the Korean SF scene. (We’ve also translated two of their stories recently, so it’s been very 듀나-듀나-듀나 at our place lately.) Anyway, the interview is up at Clarkesworld now, alongside lots of other great stuff including an interview with translator Rachel Cordasco (founder of the SF in Translation website) and some a really gangbusters lineup of stories—for me, the Pan Haitian and Greg Egan are especially attention-grabbing. Go …
Korean SF 2020: A Rushed Update
The vagaries of full-time child-care and full-time work (online, thank goodness) on top of full-time pandemic and full-time global insanity have left me a bit out of the loop when it comes to Korean SF—and I feel a little less obligated to keep up this series now that more people out there in the rest of the world are paying attention to Korean SF—but I feel like it’s worth mentioning a few things: Back in September, FutureCon happened. It was a great series of panel discussions about SF all over the world, and I highly recommend checking out all of …
루머와 잘못된 정보에 대한 성명 (A Statement Concerning Rumors and Misinformation)
For those who only read English—and just in case there is any misunderstanding with the Korean text below—the full English text is included below, to avoid misunderstanding and clarify my intent in this post. It is a bit late, with WorldCon starting tomorrow, but better late than never. Anyone with questions or concerns is welcome to contact me. I speak only for myself, by the way. 루머와 잘못된 정보에 대한 성명 한국 SF 내에 돌고 있는 많은 혼란스러운 루머와 잘못된 정보들에 대해 알게 되었습니다. 지금 여기서 모두 다 언급할 수는 없지만, 저와 직접적으로 관련된 한 가지 루머에 대해서 먼저 짚고넘어가야 …
Readymade Bodhisattva, “The Flowering,” Los Angeles/Riverside, and More
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to the SF in South Korea series on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s happened in the field. It’s just that: My interests have broadened out from SF to other forms of speculative or “genre” narrative (and, in a big way, to include tabletop RPGs in general), and a lot has happened in many other narrative genres and different media within Korea. I’ve been a little less involved in the informal Korean SF world since 2013. We were abroad for a while, and then we had a kid and moved …
Reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Moon Trilogy: The Moon Maid, The Moon Men, and The Red Hawk
Well, the next in the set of Edgar Rice Burroughs books I’ve tackled are his Moon stories. The series consists of one novel (The Moon Maid) and two sequel novellas (“The Moon Men” and “The Red Hawk”), the latter of which Ace published together under the title The Moon Men. I read the former in late 2018, and the latter just today, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on the whole series: the lunar adventure and romance, the pulp war stories, and the inevitable weird racial fantasy of postapocalyptic cowboy-and-Indians-and-moon-men and all. Oh, and naked Japanese hill-pygmy warriors. Yeah, …