Series: SF in South Korea

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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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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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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Matt on Symmetry in The Host

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This entry is part 14 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

For those into Korean cinema, Korean SF, or both: Matt’s written up a good post on The Host and the role of symmetry in the film, and linked my posts on the Host (starting here). I’ve commented to expand (slightly) on his observations. Check it out! As for me, I’m planning on working on a paper on the film and its political elements, somewhat expanding on my observations in the posts I’ve made here, and on the paper I’ll be presenting in a couple of weeks. I’ll be working on that sometime in the next couple of months, time permitting, …

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Done, Fun, Thinking Some

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This entry is part 15 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Aigo! It was a week ago tomorrow that I presented my paper at the 4th International Congress of Korean Studies. The experience was my first — I’d never presented anything at any sort of conference before — but I was told that nobody could have guessed it. I suppose being a windbag has its benefits, but people (the English-speaking audience members, at any rate) seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. No evisceration, no dismemberment, just a couple of questions for which there was no time to offer answers, because I was on a panel that was way …

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More SF Goodness, Including a Bunch of Korean SF in Translation…

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This entry is part 16 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m thinking I should start a reference page for all the Korean-SF goodness I’ve been coming across, and just link my post series from there. For those living in Seoul and interested in seeing SF films with other SF enthusiasts, editor/critic/translator Park Sang-Jun has teamed up with the proprietor of a newly-relocated cinema in Shinchon to put together Cinema Odyssey an SF & Fantasy film club that will meet periodically to view screenings of SF films. (That link is the Naver cafe, so you need to be logged into Naver to access it.) I met with Park on Friday just …

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How Candlegirl and V Took on 2MB

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This entry is part 17 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

It feels so long ago, but I still think it’s worth a look back: My article on the SFnal side of the anti-2MB protests that rocked Seoul this past summer, titled “How Candle Girl and V Took on 2MB”, is now up at the excellent Clarkesworld. It touches on the political reception and adaptation of foreign SF, techno-protest culture, Korean politics and food-culture, and more. Not quite something for everyone, but lots of stuff swirling around the nexus there. The ending is a bit, well, dated — I wrote it back in August, and it sounds like the protests just …

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From Mt. Sobaek

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This entry is part 18 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m currently at the observatory on Mt. Sobaek with a bunch of Korean SF writers/publishers/translators and astronomers, for the three-day 2009 SOAO workshop. (2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, by the way.) This is the Korean equivalent of the Launch Pad workshop held in the US yearly, and similarly brings together scientists and SF creators. I’ll have more about this later, including tons of pictures and some video, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m catching just enough of the discussions to kick myself (hard) for not only not having studied Korean much in the last few …

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SOAO Workshop 2009 Pictures Up

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This entry is part 19 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There’s lots of snowy ones, and some not-so-great photos, but the majority of the shots I’ll be posting are now viewable here. I’ll add some descriptions when I get time, and write up the experience here soon. Here are a couple of pics, with a few more in the extended post…

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The SOAO Workshop @ Sobaeksan

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This entry is part 20 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Well, I have some good news in terms of my SF-writing, but I can’t post that at the moment — I’m waiting for the news to go official — so I’ll post about something related, and which has been awaited. In February, I was invited by Mr. Park Sang Joon to attend the SOAO Workshop hosted by KASI (The Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute), and while I posted photos at Flickr, and a few here on my site, I never really discussed the workshop. It’s been several weeks now, but I’ll do my best to reconstruct my experience, as …

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