Series: SF in South Korea

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

gordsellar24 Comments
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.

gordsellar2 Comments
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

gordsellar3 Comments
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

gordsellar0 Comments
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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