Tag: SF

Seoul 2008 SF&F Festival Report

gordsellar2 Comments
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 …

Continue Reading

Last Bit on This Discussion

gordsellar4 Comments
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Who's Complaining in Korea

The wider discussion that The Korean and Rob have sparked off continues with two more recent posts on the subject, here and here. Along the way, a very interesting post was contributed by Matt, that reads almost like a “bitching expat blog” roundup, except all the complaints were made by foreigners in Korea a century or more ago, long before blogs ever existed. I loved this post, and I wanted to link it, but I had it in my head that I’d be posting it with another installment: that’s not going to happen, so I am posting the link as …

Continue Reading

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 …

Continue Reading

My Thoughts on SF in Korea (How and Why They’ve Changed)

gordsellar7 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Anyone who’s reading this series from the beginning will note that this post was written much later than the second post in the series. My thoughts on SF in Korea have changed somewhat, and I think it’s important to frame that. A few months ago, when I began looking into SF here, all I really had access to was a couple of websites, and the shelves of every bookstore I walked past. You see, everytime I saw a bookstore, I would hurry into it and look around for the SF section. Not the SF section in English, but the Korean …

Continue Reading

Home With Split Head, But Good…

gordsellar0 Comments

I’m just posting this to say I went to the festival both yesterday and today, met some interesting people, had fun, took a lot of pictures, and will be reporting back soon. (And looking into what I need to do to submit a notice to Locus about it, or whether that’s even possible…) But also to say that I was thinking back on my earlier posts on the SF in South Korea series, and will need to add a preamble to it, explaining how my impressions and opinions have changed since I started looking into this topic. Both those posts, …

Continue Reading

Ian McHugh: Ass Kicking Writer

gordsellar0 Comments

Kudos time! Australian writer Ian McHugh, the friend I visited in Canberra last year (photos here), not only won 1st Prize for the third quarter of 2008 in the WOTF (Writers of the Future) Contest, and word has it he also won the Gold Prize last night, thereby making, as Wikipedia notes, more money for his short story than most writers make for a first novel sale. Congratulations, Ian! That’s some powerful ass-kicking. Competitor (and fellow Clarion Westie — I would probably have met her if I’d been at WorldCon, as many Westies were about the place) Erin Cashier graciously …

Continue Reading

Reading The Host in Context, Part 1

gordsellar2 Comments
This entry is part 10 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Well, here I go. This is my attempt to provide a reading of the 2006 blockbuster Korean film The Host in context — that is , not only a Korean cultural and historical context, but also in the context of Korean Gwoesu (“Giant Monster”)  movies, and those films which influenced the development of the genre in South Korea. Disclaimer — all images not cited to an photographer at copyright their respective owners. They are used in this post for educational/critical purposes, and thus their use falls under fair use. Thank goodness, because this essay would be hard to read without …

Continue Reading

“the tops […] are comprised of two pieces, with a very dark grey (almost black) undershirt and the over shirt of the appropriate color, with a slight v-neck”

gordsellar3 Comments

Remember when Thomas Disch wrote (in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of) that in SF, about the singular importance of fashion in SFnal (and other pop entertainment) media? About the “pajamas” of Trek as singularly important to viewers, communicative of a kind of harmonious conformity that is especially resonant to those discovering Trek at an early age? I find it interesting that “spoilers” could even exist for clothing in a film, but look at this: Star Trek Movie Uniform Spoilers. And what you might not know is: I used to watch Original Series Trek as a kid in Lac …

Continue Reading

2008 SF&F Festival (Seoul)?

gordsellar0 Comments
This entry is part 9 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Oh my… Well, I missed Denvention (this year’s WorldCon), but there is this, at least, to give a look-see: The 2008 SF&F Festival is going on in Seoul. It’s a two-day event with a bunch of movie screenings, along with some lectures (or maybe more like panel discussions?) I’m sure will be mostly incomprehensible. But it’s W1,000 — about a buck — to join in on the fun, it’ll be a chance to see a few films I’ve not seen, it’ll feature Korean SF geeks in their native environment, and it’s only a couple of days long… so what the …

Continue Reading

Star Wars ROK Rock

gordsellar0 Comments
This entry is part 8 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

The stunningly knowledgeable Helikkopter (of Indieful ROK), who was kind enough to remember I’ve been trying to get a handle on the status of SF fiction and film in Korea, very kindly notified me of the fact that in March of this year… a very odd little album was released by Ruby Record. It’s called Star Wars Project Compilation. SF fans, panic not! It features not some Korean form of the filk (perish the thought) but rather original works by (seemingly) competent musicians in homage to, reference to, or all about the Star Wars movie series. I can’t get the …

Continue Reading