If you’re a listener of the Escape Pod family (including PseudoPod and PodCastle), or Starship Sofa, this is for you. My classmate and friend from Clarion West, Maura McHugh, mentioned during an email discussion that TTA Press — publishers of Interzone, Black Static, and Crimewave — has launched a fiction podcast. There’s a new story every couple of weeks, taken from one of the magazines listed above. They started with a killer story by Tim Akers titled “The Algorithm,” that is… well, some kind of bizarre clockpunk theological fantasy. Which you might not think I’d go for, but I absolutely …
Tag: SF
The KOFA 괴수 대백과
Unfortunately, I didn’t catch on to what was being played — or, rather, how very rarely some of it is seen — until the evening of the 3rd of August, when it was too late to see the legendary, much-sought-after first Korean monster movie, 우주괴인 왕마귀 (Giant Space Monster Wangmagwi), so I’ll have to just keep looking around and try to catch it next time around. Or, rather, get stomped by it. However, I did manage to see a few other Korean giant monster movies. I’m going to reserve comments on The Host beyond the few things that hit me …
PiFan 2008
I like the newish Listal Widget that lets you flow-scroll through the images in a list. This is an (incomplete) list of the films I saw at the Bucheon International Fantastic (PiFan) Film Festival 2008. (I’ll post tomorrow, at greater length, about the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) 괴수 대백과 (Giant Monster Movie Omnibus) retrospective I caught part of earlier this week.) View my Listal profile Get this widget at Listal I’m not going to stand a hope in hell of reviewing every one of them in depth, so I’m going to do a hit-and-run review: Ten words or less for …
Quick Note
Thanks to, er, Noah Body mentioning a link in the comments to this post, I was made aware of a whole festival of Korean monster movies that’s playng at the Cinematheque. (I missed some I’d have liked to see — though I may get another chance, at some point… we’ll see — but anyway, still getting to see a bunch.) I’ll be there Tuesday, the closing day, for all three films. Just in case anyone else feelings like watching The Host, Bulgasari, and some other Korean film I’ve never heard of before. By the way, I wasn’t the only person …
A Late Bow of the Head
Damn, I fall behind on blogs and the rest of the world, and then this happens. I found out because weeks ago Ellen Datlow posted about Thomas Disch’s passing, and a particularly saddening way of going. Of course, I never met him. In fact, I’d only read a few of Disch’s books — 334 being the only novel, partly because it depressed me so, in an already-depressing time, but I also very much enjoyed his SF history The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of quite recently (here’s what I had to say about it) and, back in grad school, his …
Ape @ KOFA this Monday…
I’m sure I’m the only person interested, but the Korean Film Archive is showing some old SF movies this month. That is, this weekend and Monday. My Friday is already spoken for, and I have a DVD of Yonggary here, but I’ve never seen Ape (1976) and I’ve heard it’s deliciously awful, and since I’m researching Korean SF at the moment, — and it is apparently some kind of a Korean-American co-production — I am definitely going to see it. It’s playing at 2pm this Monday at the KOFA theater. I’m sure I’m the only one deranged enough to be …
Almost as Entertaining as a Bollywood Film
Which is high praise coming from me. I’m sure nobody will be shocked to know I have the soundtrack to Om Shanti Om in my headphones as I write this. When my aging finally process reverses and I slide back into a world before a gut and bad ankles and having to make a living and all the rest of the stuff that keeps me busy, I think I want to (un-) grow up be Shahrukh Khan. You know, I’m not saying the man is immature, it’s just: wouldn’t it be just the best fun to dance seductively with Aishwarya …
NCC-1492 and The Good Ship Daehan
This is part three in a series. You may wish to read the above links. If you don’t: Part 1 discussed reasons why so many expatriates complain about Korea. Part 2 seemed to rush off onto a tangent mostly focused on Iksan, a small city where I lived for a couple of years when I first arrived in Korea, and the unevenness of its development. I ended discussing a landfill crisis there, and describing how young locals were all dressed in their usual stunning finery, promenading serenely past barricades of trash bags blocking the sidewalk. Then, with promises to return …
PiFan Book Fair: SF/Fantasy/Horror/Thriller novels and Magazines… in Korean!
Well, I was told I could pick up my tickets at the ticket booth today, but of course, I couldn’t. Somehow, though, I ended up at City Hall and noticed a huge display of books and magazines near the ticket booth. It turned out to be the biggest collection of Korean SF, thriller, suspense, and horror novels I’ve ever seen. I had already picked up some of the books, but I still managed to grab the following titles (in translation) for Lime: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (in hardback) Odd John by …
Gender Iconography & Transformations in Korean Pop Culture: What Can We Learn From Japanese Women’s SF?
A lot of attention has been paid to Wonder Girls, to sexual imagery in advertising, but what about images of men an masculinity in Korean pop culture? This picture-laden post looks at both through the lens of a paper on SFnal treatments and transformations of gender in women’s SF in Japan by scholar Miri Nakamura. It’s long, it’s big, it’s one of those posts. Hence the excerpt.