Some of the protesters have been using references to V for Vendetta during the demonstrations. Turns out Scott went up and talked to them, and asked whether they knew that V is an anarchist, or that the V sign is an inverted anarchy symbol. They didn’t. Scott thinks they’re “retards” who are guilty of “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation,” and that “they think that going to a massive anti-government demonstration is cosplay and means nothing serious in the end…” and that I’m being patronizing in excusing this. I disagree. Wanna know why?
Tag: SF
To All SF Geeks in Korea With [Patient or Interested] Korean Other Halves
Lime posts here about, “His Books, My Books.” For the relatively Korean impaired — for whom that page will be less than useful — here’s the image from the post: You can see I got her some Debussy, because Debussy rocks, and you can’t have too much Debussy in your life. This is the guy who was asked, once, by which theoretical principles he organized his music, and, I was told by one of my professors, he replied, “My taste, of course.” Make it sound good. And make it new, I’m sure Pound would add — and make it new …
Clarion West Laptop Theft
Ugh, this is horrible. Someone broke into the Seattle sorority house where Clarion West is going on this year, and stole four laptops, along with other random items. (Including, er, clothing?) The workshop is an intense training camp for writers of science fiction and fantasy, meaning losing their laptops means losing the very thing they were to be using daily, as well, probably, as countless notes and preparatory materials, and quite possibly their most current archive of writings. It’s sounds like quite an ordeal. You can read reports from the ground here and here. The both posts include a contact …
Bad Run at Cinema
By the way, since I want to say this: What a crappy month it’s been for films in the cinema. I hadn’t gone in some time, but of the three films I saw, only Kung-Fu Panda amused me. Actually, it was good fun, once you got beyond the feelgoodishness of it all. I mean, it was very nicely animated and had some funny bits, some cool imagery — man, that scene with Master Oogway the turtle and the peach blossoms, man — and all that badass Tai Lung business, that was some fun, even if I was snickering (inwardly, always, …
K-Raelians plus The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch, and The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson
As part of my continuing adventures in figuring out what I want to say in my paper on SF cinema in Korea, this post discusses Raelianism in Korea whilst working through a review of two books on SF and their effects on the world. I’ve just finished reading Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats, kindly recommended to me by my friend and recent WOTF prizewinner, the lovely and talented Ian McHugh. It goes so well with The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch — which I finished reading …
Why SF Has Failed to Put Down Roots in Korea, Part I: To Start With, Questions…
I had a post I was going to write, about fantasy, SF, and the demonstrations going on in Seoul these days, but I decided to pitch it as an article idea. The editor to whom I pitched it liked the concept, so I’m binning that post to keep the juice for my article. That leaves me with two things to write this summer about SF and Korea. The article on the protests is a theme I’m putting off limits, but the paper on the general failure of the SF genre to take root in Korea in is something I can, …
I Am Not the Only Asimov’s SF Subscriber in South Korea!
Today the most surprising thing happened! I’m ending off my Anglophone Popular Cultures course with a discussion of SF and its role in (and effect on) Western popular culture. Last week, we watched Blade Runner and there was a panel discussion on The Fifth Element and Brazil. Today, my lecture focused on getting students not to think of SF as an attempt to literally depict the future, and instead to focus on the symbolism or metonymy in SF. (For example, working off Thomas Disch’s wonderful statement, “The car is the hidden meaning of the rocket ship.” (Rough paraphrase, but he …
Asimov’s July ’08 — Fictionwise eMagazine Edition Up
For those living outside of the English-speaking, American-magazine-distributed world who are interested in reading my recently-published story “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues” in the July 2008 issue of Asimov’s SF, you might be interested in the Fictionwise eMagazine edition. (There’s DRM, of course, and I don’t usually buy things with DRM myself — though since my subscription copy was sent to the wrong address somehow, and I’m going to have to wait a few more weeks before demanding it be re-sent, along with a couple of other months’ worth of my subscription! But anyway, it’s up, it’s available, …
Bracing Myself for Evisceration, But At Least I’ll Probably Still Have All My Horrid Teeth
Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies (the site seems not to work in Firefox/Linux… I suspect you need Internet Explorer & Windows to load it, as I was able to get at it on my dual boot) which is happening late this September in Fukuoka, …
It’s Not Just the Lateness of Industrialization: How and Why Korean SF Doesn’t Quite Work
I should be grading in-class essays, but my guilt at not yet having done so has been assuaged by the fact that another professor in the department, someone above me, confessed to not having graded her midterms either, and not feeling the slightest bit badly about it! So among all the other insanity of the last week, I also spent some time working up a couple of abstracts for a conference that I think I have no realistic shot at, mostly because I’m not an “official” Korea studies scholar, but at least one of my abstracts was for an essay …