Tag: SF in South Korea

Korea in English-Language SF

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This entry is part 60 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Over at Gusts of Popular Feeling, everyone’s favorite archives-trawler Matt has a post about about “the first SF story involving Korea” and a few other such tales from the Galaxy/Amazing Stories era. I’ve left a comment clarifying that “the first SF story” should be qualified as “the first English-language SF story” and also noting that depending on how you define “SF,” one might consider Jack London’s Star Rover the first in the English language. As for the first Korean-language SF story, I don’t know what it was, though I’d argue that the amount of remixing that seems to have gone …

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사이코메트리 [Psychometry] — The Gifted Hands (2013)

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This entry is part 58 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

There is now a stereotype for psychics in Korean cinema. (Assuming there wasn’t already one, that is.) Psychics are tall and pale as Snow White. They are skinny and their eyes do weird, sparkly blue things. Even if they’re from a poor background or living in poverty, they are obviously plastic-surgeried, and they look as if they belong in the back line of the photographs of a Korean boy band. Also, when they do something psychic, they look kind of crazy, and their eyes get really big too. To be fair, it’s probably as much the investors pressuring the director …

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Koreanizing Lovecraft (on a Budget)

gordsellar12 Comments
This entry is part 13 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

I’m still thinking this over, since I first mentioned it last January. Had an interesting talk on a couple of weekends ago with some of my Korean SF-fan friends about Lovecraft, the contents of which surprised me. I though ol’ H.P. was popular here, given that a large number of his works had been translated and published — in some cases, there are collections containing some of the same stories, worked over by different translators, put out by different publishers, even. But I was told that Lovecraft hasn’t really caught on in any appreciable way, which also makes it hard …

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