South Korean Science Fiction!

 From The Nation's Dissolve Into Nothing:: The enigmatic science fiction of Djuna I learned there is South Korean science fiction, and it is a big deal. This Djuna appears to be a big thing there.

Science fiction has long flourished on the Korean peninsula, starting in the early 1900s with translations of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. By the mid-20th century, Korean writers were producing works of their own, initially as didactic stories in science education magazines and as vehicles for veiled social criticism. From the 1960s through the ’90s, the conventions of sci-fi proved well suited to describing what Sunyoung Park, a literature professor and translator, calls “the malaise of living under dictatorship in a fast industrializing society.” In Cho Se-hui’s best-selling novel The Dwarf, from 1978, a poor and rather abject family displaced by urban renewal clings to fantasies of space travel. The daughter absconds to do sex work but is rumored to have been kidnapped by aliens. “I dreamed every night,” she says. “In the dream my brothers had found jobs at a different factory and had left for work. Father made several trips a day to the moon and back.”

***

One of the most popular science fiction writers in South Korea is Djuna, a mononymous, pseudonymous, and officially anonymous novelist and film critic who emerged in the mid-1990s as an active poster on the chat server Hi-Tel. Online sleuths have their theories about the person behind the name: Djuna may have been born in the 1970s; may live in the city of Bucheon; may be Catholic; and may even be a three-person collective. What is certain, based on Djuna’s film criticism, is that Djuna loves Anna Paquin, Cate Blanchett, and movies with strong female leads—and likes to poke fun at the autoerotic repetitions in the movies of Hong Sang-soo. We also know that Djuna is quite prolific, having written thousands of online movie reviews and dozens of stories and novellas, mostly sci-fi but also mysteries. Between 2019 and 2021, Djuna was president of the Science Fiction Writers Union of the Republic of Korea, appearing in publicity photos as a cuddly brown bunny.

If science fiction is the fiction of ideas, if it is fiction conducive to social issues (as I recall China's Liu Cixin writing), if science fiction can operate as an allegory for the current world, then should we not be seeing what the rest of the world thinks? Let us see what is happening outside our own sandboxes, it may show us what we have missed as people, as writers.

sch 11/2