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 …
Category: SF in South Korea
Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report
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 …
Reading The Host in Context, Part 2: How I Read The Host
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 …
My Thoughts on SF in Korea (How and Why They’ve Changed)
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 …
Reading The Host in Context, Part 1
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 …
2008 SF&F Festival (Seoul)?
Oh my… Well, I missed Denvention (this year’s WorldCon), but there is this, at least, to give a look-see: The 2008 SF&F Festival is going on in Seoul. It’s a two-day event with a bunch of movie screenings, along with some lectures (or maybe more like panel discussions?) I’m sure will be mostly incomprehensible. But it’s W1,000 — about a buck — to join in on the fun, it’ll be a chance to see a few films I’ve not seen, it’ll feature Korean SF geeks in their native environment, and it’s only a couple of days long… so what the …
Star Wars ROK Rock
The stunningly knowledgeable Helikkopter (of Indieful ROK), who was kind enough to remember I’ve been trying to get a handle on the status of SF fiction and film in Korea, very kindly notified me of the fact that in March of this year… a very odd little album was released by Ruby Record. It’s called Star Wars Project Compilation. SF fans, panic not! It features not some Korean form of the filk (perish the thought) but rather original works by (seemingly) competent musicians in homage to, reference to, or all about the Star Wars movie series. I can’t get the …
The KOFA 괴수 대백과
Unfortunately, I didn’t catch on to what was being played — or, rather, how very rarely some of it is seen — until the evening of the 3rd of August, when it was too late to see the legendary, much-sought-after first Korean monster movie, 우주괴인 왕마귀 (Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi), so I’ll have to just keep looking around and try to catch it next time around. Or, rather, get stomped by it. However, I did manage to see a few other Korean giant monster movies. I’m going to reserve comments on The Host beyond the few things that hit me …
PiFan Book Fair: SF/Fantasy/Horror/Thriller novels and Magazines… in Korean!
Well, I was told I could pick up my tickets at the ticket booth today, but of course, I couldn’t. Somehow, though, I ended up at City Hall and noticed a huge display of books and magazines near the ticket booth. It turned out to be the biggest collection of Korean SF, thriller, suspense, and horror novels I’ve ever seen. I had already picked up some of the books, but I still managed to grab the following titles (in translation) for Lime: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (in hardback) Odd John by …
To All SF Geeks in Korea With [Patient or Interested] Korean Other Halves
Lime posts here about, “His Books, My Books.” For the relatively Korean impaired — for whom that page will be less than useful — here’s the image from the post: You can see I got her some Debussy, because Debussy rocks, and you can’t have too much Debussy in your life. This is the guy who was asked, once, by which theoretical principles he organized his music, and, I was told by one of my professors, he replied, “My taste, of course.” Make it sound good. And make it new, I’m sure Pound would add — and make it new …