I was invited to write a guest blog post for Apex a little while ago, and it’s now up. It’s about global SF, culture, and translation, with some attention to Korean SF and horror in the cinema, and it’s titled “On the Translation of Dreams.”
Series: SF in South Korea
Party Last Night
I am not going to talk about the party I was at last night, except that it was nice to see Sanghoon and Rira again, and good to meet several new people including Dr. Kim Kyu-hyun, and a few others. I wish I’d known they were likely to leave early-ish, so I could have talked to them more… especially since I have a funny vague feeling I was intended to talk to someone I didn’t (much). One of the “few others” I met was a guy I recognized, but couldn’t place where I recognized him from until someone mentioned Youtube. …
Orcs!
One of the fascinating things that keeps coming up in my Korean lessons is the generation gap. It’s not that I was unaware of this before, but my tutor has made a careful point of noting when she shows me a word that older people either won’t find appropriate in speech, or which she considers a “young people” word. One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few …
Star Wars: 스타워즈 프로젝트 컴필레이션 (2008)
Quite a long time ago, K-indie insider helikoppter of Indieful ROK emailed me to let me know about an album she figured I’d be interested in. The reason she thought I’d be interested was, you see, my ongoing series about SF in Korea. (How she stays on top of music in Korea is something everyone paying attention is amazed by, considering she’s not actually in Korea. Such is the power of the internet… and strong passions.) Now, this is going to be delicate. See, there’s such a thing as genre-media-inspired music in the West. It’s called filk, and it generally …
Outsider Writing
Now that I’m back in Korea, and have a free morning, I’m just catching up on some blogs and fiction online and so on. I ran across a very interesting post at Aliette de Bodard’s blog, titled, Writing cultures: insider vs. outsider, about the various advantages and pitfalls faced by authors writing about a specific culture either as an insider, or as an outsider, for a Western audience (as in the dominant SF-reading audience, for example). It’s worth a read, including the comments, especially if you’re interested in my thoughts on the subject.