Two interviews with me have recently been published in Korea, both of them quite long. They may be of interest to anyone curious about stuff like what it’s like to be an expat writing SF, my personal thoughts on Korean SF and the Korean SF scene, and so on. The first interview was conducted and translated by my friend Hong Insu, a translator (he did part of The Hard SF Renaissance) and prominent Korean SF fan, now missed by many (as he is in grad school in Arizona). The interview appears in a “mook” — apparently this is some kind …
Tag: Korean SF
박민규의 지구 영웅 전설과 카스테라
Park Min Gyu is a Korean author that has been recommended to me by several people, independent of one another. After hearing about my novella “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang,” Stephen Epstein recommended Park’s book 지구 영웅 전설, which I’ll render here sloppily as World Hero Legend or, a little less sloppily, as The Legend of the Earth’s Superheroes, a novel featuring a Korean supe who supposedly sets out to become a superhero and ends up calling himself “Banana-man” and ends up being a kind of gopher or page for American heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman (who sends …
Why, Revisited: The KOFAC Presentation
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 22nd I spoke at a short SF-related seminar for KOFAC (The Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science & Creativity) in Gangbyeon. I was asked to lay say a bit about how SF writers choose what to write about. Basically, to answer that question I felt I had to explain what I think SF is. So I put it this way: SF is how modern, industrialized culture digests the two shocks of technologically-imposed change on society, and the philosophical changes imposed on culture by science. That’s meaty — note that culture and society are …
Boyran, a novel by “World’s Youngest Fantasy Writer Wonje Song”
UPDATE (9 Feb 2010): Yeah, I know he’s not really the world’s youngest fantasy writer. The book was marketed this way, though, and I wanted to include that in the title of the post. It’s exactly the kind of hyperbole one sees in Korea all the time, absolutely not fact-checked or anything. Anyway… ORIGINAL POST: On Friday last, my friend Nick and dropped by that jazz festival I mentioned. I’ll post more about that soon — I have some pics I want to add to the post, but it’s already written up. On the way back to the subway station, …
Geek Out
“You know you’re with a bunch of geeks when…” was the line I said most often last night. Being among SF geeks is salutary, though; it’s normal for everyone to totally geek out over an iPad (as we did — trying out a bunch of bookreader and comic book reader applications in sequence), or to check out the bookshelves and talk about all the great books and authors contained thereupon, and so on. There was a party including a nice chunk of Seoul’s SF fandom population, including a number of my own friends and acquaintances. I supplied a sampling of …
Wackiest Korean Book I Ever Bought
If you’re curious, I found the wackiest Korean book I’d ever seen this past weekend at the Kyobo Bookstore in Gangnam, and got myself a copy while I could, because I don’t imagine it’s going to sell too well and will likely end up sold off for cheap before long, at which point it’ll be easier to find hunting in discount book stands (in one of which Miss Jiwaku and I found several books of translations of Lovecraft stories this past winter, for example)… but who has time for that? The book is titled 도해 쿠툴루 신화 (Zukai Cthulhu Shinhwa) …
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.
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 …
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. …
Guest Blog on Global SF & Translation @ Apex
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.”