While it doesn’t surprise me to see a dancing stormtrooper video from Japan: … I must say I was surprised to see such a thing from Korea: and indeed there’s a whole channel of dancing Stormtrooper vids from Seoul. Anyone know who these people are?
Tag: SERIES: SF IN SOUTH KOREA
If Only I Were Part Robot…
I’d have time to post constantly. But since I’m not: Here’s some vintage Korean SF action… well, for a broad definition of SF: Apparently the show is now retro-hip enough for indie rockers Go Go Star to do a musical (and cosplay) tribute: Another version of the song, with better video: As for me, I’ll be off to Melbourne for the Utopias 4 conference hosted at Monash University and WorldCon — I’m presenting (different) papers at each. I’ll post my schedule as soon as it’s finalized, in case anyone wants to meet up.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …