Book Excerpt for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Introduction

Newtrospection:

Reverse-Engineering Modernity

in South Korean Speculative Fiction

Sang-Keun Yoo

1. Elephant-Shaped Hole

N HER BOOK Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, science fiction scholar Jessica Langer recounts a conversation she had with SF writer Nalo Hopkinson in 2005, in which they discussed the absence of voices of color and postcolonial perspectives in the genre. Hopkinson remarked that it was like “there should be an elephant, but instead, there’s an elephant-shaped hole” (1). Langer goes on to note that “the volume of science fiction in a particular language available in English is merely a fraction of a larger body of cultural production” (1).

In the intervening 17 years since Langer and Hopkinson’s observation, substantial transformations have occurred within the domain of science fiction literature, progressively filling the metaphorical elephant-shaped void. The number of science fiction authors of color publishing in English and garnering prestigious accolades, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, has witnessed a significant upswing. Concurrently, there has been an efflorescence of scholarly work encompassing Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and Chicanofuturism, authored by scholars of color and their allies. Prominent scholars, such as Ida Yoshinaga, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, and Isiah Lavender III, to name but a few, have made considerable contributions to the ongoing discourse. This evolving literary landscape reflects a broader cultural shift, engendering a more inclusive and diverse representation within the science fiction genre.

Simultaneously, the burgeoning popularity of South Korean K-pop artists, such as BTS and Blackpink, coupled with the widespread appeal of South Korean visual media, including Netflix dramas and films, has ushered in a renaissance of South Korean science fiction and fantasy. This resurgence can be traced back to the acclaimed film director Bong Joon-ho’s seminal science fiction film, The Host (2006), which was followed by Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Subsequently, an array of South Korean SF films and TV dramas spanning diverse genres have achieved success in the United States and other countries. Examples include the zombie genre with Train to Busan (2016), Kingdom (2019-2021), and All of Us are Dead (2022); space travel in The Silent Sea (2021) and Space Sweepers (2021); the monster/creature genre in Sweet Home (2020); cyberpunk and robot/cyborgs in Memories of the Alhambra (2018), Dr. Brain (2021) and Jung_E (2023); time travel narratives in Goblin (2016) and Reborn Rich (2022); climate fiction in Black Knight (2023); and ghost fantasy in The School Nurse Files (2020), Hi Bye, Mama! (2020), and Revenant (2023).

Furthermore, considering the multitude of science fiction and fantasy films and TV series that have garnered popularity among domestic audiences in South Korea, albeit without achieving global recognition, the list is virtually inexhaustible. It is also worth noting that while the majority of global attention on South Korean cultural products has centered on films and TV series, the market for South Korean webtoons and web novels has reached a staggering 117 million dollars, particularly captivating the interest of South Korean Generation Z readers. A preponderance of these webtoon and web novel writers in South Korea employ the diverse genre of speculative fiction, predominantly concentrating on themes of return, possession, and reincarnation (íšŒê·€, ë¹™ì˜, í™˜ìƒ; hoegwi, pingÅi, hwansaeng).

Despite the escalating global popularity of South Korean science fiction and fantasy in visual media and web formats, a conspicuous lacuna persists in the translation and academic scrutiny of South Korean SF literature within the Anglophone world. While new South Korean science fiction films and television series continue to be released at an unparalleled pace, the availability of English translations for South Korean SF literature remains markedly constrained. This discrepancy highlights the need for further investigation and dissemination of South Korean SF literature and visual media in order to foster a more comprehensive understanding of its cultural and literary significance in the global landscape.

Nonetheless, several commendable endeavors have been undertaken in recent years to ameliorate this disparity. In 2019, Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, the inaugural anthology of South Korean SF literature in translation, was published under the editorship of USC Professor Sun-Young Park and SF translator and archivist Sang-Joon Park. Furthermore, Korean novelist Kim Bo-Young’s two short story collections, On the Origin of Species and Other Stories (2021) and I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories (2022), have been translated and published in English.

English translations of other notable works include Chung Bora’s Cursed Bunny (2017), Pyun Hye-Young’s City of Ash and Red (2010), The Hole (2017), and The Owl Cries (2023), Bae Myung-Hoon’s Tower (2009; translation in 2020), Launch Something! (2020; translation in 2022), Choi Jin-Young’s To the Warm Horizon (2017; translation in 2021), Dolki Min’s Walking Practice (2022; translation 2023), and Djuna’s Counterweight (2023). Moreover, it is pertinent to acknowledge the presence of South Korean short stories in American SF magazines such as Clarkesworld, as well as English works penned by American authors of Korean descent, including Yoon-ha Lee and Alice Sola Kim. The University of Hawaii Press’s journal Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture has also published translations of Korean science fiction short stories.

Despite these strides, the extant English translations represent a mere fraction of the extensive corpus of South Korean science fiction and fantasy literature, demanding more translation and introduction of the South Korean science fiction and fantasy literature to the global world. For example, in an examination of the bestseller list for fiction on Kyobobooks, the nation’s preeminent online bookstore website, it is notable that the current top two bestselling novels are fantasy works: Lee Mi-ye’s Dallergut Dream Department Store and its sequel. Within the top 20, an additional four science fiction and fantasy novels are featured, such as Kim Cho-yup’s SF anthology and hard science fiction novel, Cheon Seon-ran’s A Thousand Blues, and Jeong Se-rang’s The School Nurse Files. The authors of other works on the list, including Han Kang and Jeong Yu-jeong, have also engaged with science fiction and fantasy genres at various points in their careers, incorporating elements such as dreams and speculative modes within their narratives, despite the listed works of this year’s bestseller not being strictly classified as science fiction or fantasy.

As the nation’s literary and visual media landscape becomes increasingly saturated with science fiction and fantasy, aspiring writers from the younger generation are likewise drawn to these genres. The burgeoning interest in science fiction and fantasy among these emerging writers is best exemplified by the proliferation of literary awards specifically targeting these genres, which have been established within the past decade. Examples of such accolades include Gwacheon National Science Museum’s Korean Science Fiction Award (2014–), Han Nak-won Science Fiction Award (2014–), Hubble’s Korean Science Fiction Award (2016–), Arzak’s Moon Yun-Sung Science Fiction Award (2021–), the Postech Science Fiction Award (2021–), Golden Leaf's Time Leap Literary Award (2016–), the Golden Dragon Award (2000–), and the ZA Literary Award (2016–). Most of these awards have relatively brief histories, with durations of less than a decade, which serves to emphasize the burgeoning interest and engagement of new writers in the realms of science fiction and fantasy over the past ten years. This trend also reflects a broader cultural shift, as science fiction and fantasy literature attain unprecedented traction and prominence within the South Korean literary landscape.

2. Disparity between South Korean Science Fiction’s Global Popularity and the Scarcity of Academic Research

Numerous factors may contribute to the underrepresentation of South Korean speculative fiction and its rich history in global translations and scholarship, including a dearth of scholarly research, different genre categorizations compared to their Western counterparts, and the perceived degradation of genre literature in Korean society. Firstly, there is a notable scarcity of scholarship on Korean speculative fiction within the Anglophone academic sphere. Between 2016 and 2021, Korean language course enrollments experienced a significant increase in U.S. higher education—20.3% at two-year schools and 37.8% at four-year institutions. This growth is particularly noteworthy given that enrollment in most other foreign language courses has been on the decline during the same period (“Korean Language Study Continues to Grow”; Looney and Lusin 29-33). Despite this enthusiasm, research on Korean science fiction and fantasy continues to be limited.

Nevertheless, a few exceptional scholarly works have spearheaded this field of research. Haerin Shin’s two articles, “The Curious Case of South Korean Science Fiction: A Hyper-Technological Society’s Call for Speculative Imagination” (2013) in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, and “Affect in the End of Days: South Korean Science Fiction Cinema, Doomsday Book, and Affective Estrangement” from Future Yet to Come (2021), spearheaded this research. Additionally, Min Sung Park’s “Korea's Force is Not Strong—Exploring the Definitions of Science Fiction” (2017) in Plaridel, Sun-Young Park’s “Between Science and Politics: Science Fiction as a Critical Discourse in South Korea, 1960s–1990s” in the Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) (2018) and “Decolonizing the future: Postcolonial themes in South Korean science fiction” (2020) from the Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature, and Dong-Won Kim’s “Science Fiction in South and North Korea: Reading Science and Technology as Fantasized in Cultures” (2018) in East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, all contribute to this burgeoning field of study.

Dafna Zur and Benoit Berthelier have also advanced research on North Korean science fiction. Dafna Zur has authored more than a dozen articles on Korean children’s literature, encompassing both South and North Korea, as well as the interdisciplinary relationship between science and literature in Korea. Her 2014 article, “Let’s Go to the Moon: Science Fiction in the North Korean Children's Magazine Adong Munhak, 1956–1965,” published in the Journal of Asian Studies, represents the first attempt to analyze North Korean science fiction within the Anglophone academic sphere. Benoit Berthelier has similarly pioneered research on North Korean science fiction, as evidenced by his 2018 article, “Encountering the Alien: Alterity and Innovation in North Korean Science Fiction since 1945,” published in the JKS. Furthermore, Dahye Kim’s recent article, “Who Is Afraid of Techno-Fiction? The Emergence of Online Science Fiction in the Age of Informatization,” published in the JKS in 2022, explores the history of Korean online fiction as it relates to the domain of science fiction.

It is noteworthy that this previous scholarship on South Korean science fiction has been presented and published within the domains of Korean studies or Asian studies, rather than in the field of science fiction studies. The Anglophone world of science fiction studies has generally overlooked Korean science fiction. Over the past forty years, there have been no papers on Korean science fiction in either Science Fiction Studies or the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. It was not until 2020 that the first paper exclusively focused on a Korean science fiction work appeared in Science Fiction Film and Television. Authored by myself, Sang-Keun Yoo, this paper examined Bong Joon-Ho’s science fiction film The Host (2006) compared to his more recent film Parasite (2019).

The second reason for the lack of research and introduction of Korean science fiction in the global world can be attributed to the distinct genre categorization prevalent in South Korea. Nalo Hopkinson notes in Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (2000) that “Northern science fiction and fantasy emerge from a rational and skeptical approach to the world […] But the Caribbean, much like the rest of the world, tends to have a different worldview: The irrational, the inexplicable, and the mysterious exist side by side with the daily events of life” (xii-xiii). This statement demonstrates that the traditional genre categories, developed within the Anglophone context, may not be applicable to global cultural productions. She argues that in many parts of the world beyond the United States and modern imperial nations, the distinction between science fiction and other fantastic genres, such as those engaging with spirits and magic, does not exist. Similarly, in Korea, the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy have been consistently blurred, rendering the distinction between them largely meaningless for several decades.

Consequently, for the past several decades, numerous South Korean writers have not labeled their science fiction and fantasy works as SFF, nor have they identified themselves as SFF writers—instead, they predominantly classified themselves merely as fiction writers, rather than science fiction writers. In the interview included in this issue, Bo-Young Kim, currently one of the most famous science fiction writers, admits, “Honestly, even after my debut as a science fiction writer, I was skeptical about the potential of sustaining a professional career with this genre of novels.” She attributes her skepticism to the insufficient recognition of science fiction as a distinctive genre. Kim adds, “The literary contests that gave me my debut were soon discontinued, and there weren’t many science fiction magazines or awards where I could publish my work.” Similarly, Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 science fiction film, The Host, wasn’t promoted or labeled as a science fiction film in Korea. Instead, it was marketed as a family drama that incorporated a profound social critique.

The historical disregard for genre literature, specifically science fiction, in South Korea mirrors past attitudes in North America, though it’s arguably more intense. Genre literature has been perceived as second-rate compared to realist fiction and has been regarded as solely for young children’s entertainment or scientific education or a genre for national political propaganda. Given South Korea’s history, which is fraught with a series of brutal events and mass massacres stemming from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, military dictatorship, and the Cold War, writing science fiction and fantasy was often deemed as not-serious escapism, while “serious” writers focused on addressing the “real” social problems at hand.

Additionally, certain geopolitical conditions caused South Korean writers to hesitate in exploring science fiction themes. Tae-hun Lim, in his enlightening article “A Preface to the Study of ‘Geopolitical SF,’” attributes this dearth of science fiction imagination in South Korean literary history to the nation’s geopolitical status. He discusses South Korea’s experience with 35 years of colonialism and its subsequent influence from the Cold War conditions between global powers. He observes, “Positioned geopolitically as inferior, [Korean SF] writers’ creative potential often gets overshadowed as they measure themselves against the world’s central powers. This comparison leads to a sense of emptiness and anxiety, which they attempt to alleviate through a quest for recognition and international validation from these leading nations” (my translation 98). Specifically, he notes the impact of Cold War ideology on late-twentieth-century South Korea, stating, “When factors such as Cold War ideology come into play, they inevitably constrain the writers’ imagination of collective identity and lead to self-censorship, thereby stifling or halting creativity and thought” (my translation 100). This indicates that the marginalization of science fiction and fantasy in South Korea throughout the twentieth century is not solely due to local readers’ preference for “serious” literature. External factors such as Cold War ideology and colonialism also played a significant role, as these conditions made imagining the distant future and outer space seem absurd.

In this context, the recent upsurge of science fiction and fantasy in South Korean culture mirrors a shift in the geopolitical conditions that Lim outlined about the literary history of the twentieth century. This change has occurred as the nation’s people start to conceptualize a decolonized futurity in step with the development of their own technology. The country is leading the world in certain ways, as demonstrated by globally prominent tech companies such as Samsung and Hyundai. The recent launch of a self-developed space rocket, Nuri-ho, has also been a significant event for South Korean readers. It has made imagining a science fiction future seem more tangible, rather than just a far-fetched idea.

3. Newtrospection

As the guest editors of this focused issue, we—Haerin Shin and Sang-Keun Yoo—have endeavored to address this glaring omission in recent years by organizing South Korean science fiction panels at academic conferences such as ICFA and SFRA and authoring research papers for academic journals. This focused issue on South Korean science fiction represents the first publication in English-language academic journals devoted exclusively to the nation’s SFF products. Furthermore, academic journals in the fields of Korean studies or Asian studies have not previously featured a focused issue on the nation’s science fiction, although Dafna Zur and Christopher P. Hanscom, as guest editors, edited a special issue on “Science and Literature in North and South Korea” with the JKS.

We have titled this issue Newtrospection: Reverse-Engineering Modernity in South Korean Speculative Fiction. The title Newtrospection emphasizes several distinct characteristics of South Korean science fiction and its traditions. One of the key traits of South Korean science fiction and fantasy is its persistent interest in the past and history. South Korean speculative fiction is predominantly retrospective. It may seem peculiar for science fiction works to maintain a consistent interest in the past rather than the future, and in history rather than science, especially considering that science fiction as a genre typically envisions futures with advanced science and technology. For example, one of the early South Korean science fiction films, 2009: Lost Memories (2002), presents an alternative historical narrative that imagines a Korea that could not achieve independence from Japanese colonialism. A SF drama released last year that gained significant popularity among local audiences, Reborn Rich, is also a time-travel narrative in which the main character returns to the 1990s and is reborn as the youngest grandson of a wealthy CEO of a conglomerate company (presumably Samsung’s founder). Netflix’s fantasy series The School Nurse Files portrays a high school nurse who discovers a centuries-old well in the basement of a high school, and how it affects the well-being of 21^st-century Korean students. Gina Kim’s VR film Bloodless revisits the historical events of the early 1990s, employing the newly developed media technology of virtual reality film to offer a fresh perspective on representation.

Even other SF films, novels, and TV dramas that do not return to the past and instead imagine the future, such as The Silent Sea (2021), Space Sweepers (2021), and Peninsula (2020), consistently scrutinize South Korea’s position within global politics and among powerful countries. They imagine a future South Korean government and its citizens who do not possess sovereignty as an independent country, reminding audiences of the nation’s modernization history, which was influenced by foreign forces such as the Japanese Empire, People’s Republic of China, and US neo-imperial military intervention. These films retrospectively examine how Koreans have arrived at their present situation and what they should do to forge different, changed trajectories in the future. The dual gaze that South Korean science fiction displays—rewriting history from the perspective of present-day insights and imagining the future informed by the lessons of the past and present—aptly captures the unique characteristics of South Korean science fiction.

Although it may seem peculiar for South Korean science fiction to focus more on the past rather than the future, it is understandable when considering that the birth of science fiction coincided with the emergence of historical fiction. Carl Freedman, in his book Critical Theory and Science Fiction, argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was written around the same time as the first historical novel, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), and that both genres are byproducts of the European readers’ initial mass experience of the French Revolution. Both historical novels and science fiction were borne from the newly-formed collective identity experienced by Europeans, which enabled them to imagine their shared past and future as part of a larger historical narrative. What is unique in South Korean science fiction and fantasy, however, is that the desire to understand and imagine this collective past and future is not divided into two separate genres but rather merged into one, making South Korean science fiction simultaneously historical and retrospective rather than solely futuristic or projective. To denote this unique characteristic of South Korean science fiction, where the imagination of the future and retrospection of the past converge within a single work, we have chosen to employ the neologism “Newtrospection” rather than “Retrospection.”

The term “Newtrospection” carries an additional connotation in the context of this issue’s aim. Our objective is to trace and revisit the history of South Korean science fiction literature and films through the lens of contemporary science fiction studies. As mentioned earlier, a considerable body of literary works and films produced in the past in South Korea was often not classified or categorized as science fiction or fantasy, even though they would be considered compelling examples within the current discourse of global science fiction studies. Since the distinction between hard and soft science fiction has blurred with the emergence of the New Wave in the Anglophone world, the umbrella term “speculative fiction” has become more widely circulated in science fiction studies, making it increasingly challenging to clearly delineate what is and what is not science fiction. Reexamining past literary and visual examples from South Korea through the lens of this evolved academic discourse allows us to adopt a fresh perspective for analyzing the imaginative spheres of South Korean artistic materials from the past—neither as folklore and myth, nor as second-rate, non-serious literature solely intended for children's scientific education.

To this aim, this issue presents four academic articles from leading scholars in the field. The inaugural article, penned by Ji Eun Lee, critically examines the catalysts behind the recent upsurge in South Korean science fiction novels. Lee conducts an extensive analysis of three prominent female science fiction authors’ works, providing valuable insights into the sociocultural conditions that have spurred the growth of feminist science fiction. Additionally, Lee contrasts these Korean narratives with American feminist science fiction theories, notably those of Donna Haraway and Joanna Russ, to foster comparative understanding. In the second article, Se Young Kim navigates through the history of South Korea’s diverse sub-genres of speculative fiction visual media in popular culture, with a particular emphasis on its relationship with Japanese cultural influence. Through a thorough analysis of the globally acclaimed Netflix series, Squid Game, Kim contends that the show’s success is significantly influenced by Japanese culture. Furthermore, Kim demonstrates how this influence permeates various speculative fiction sub-genres of South Korea and Japan, including piloted robot series, kaiju (monster), and Tokusatsu genres. Rather than viewing this as a unilateral influence, Kim interprets it as a manifestation of hybridity, where the melding of distinct national traditions forms something entirely new.

The third contribution, authored by myself, Sang-Keun Yoo, delves into Gina Kim’s recent virtual reality film Bloodless. I scrutinize how Kim uses newly emerging media technology to artistically revisit traumatic historical events from Korea. This analysis explores how virtual reality media serves as a potent tool to blur the boundaries between realistic and speculative modes to visualize South Korea’s military sex workers’s ghostly presence. In the issue’s concluding article, Sang Eun Eunice Lee illuminates South Korea’s current speculative media landscape through an analysis of webtoons. Focusing on the unique aspects of recent South Korean webtoons, such as cyclical rebirth and gamified existence, Lee employs Tomb Raider King and Again My Life as her primary examples to dissect how these narratives challenge covert societal hierarchies in South Korea. By illuminating the alternate future world these webtoons envision, Lee’s analysis invites us to contemplate the potential of these digital narratives in challenging and dismantling entrenched social inequalities.

This issue goes beyond a traditional academic article collection to provide a comprehensive look at South Korean science fiction and fantasy, incorporating a design fiction and three insightful interviews to deepen our understanding of South Korean SFF’s present. The issue presents a speculative design fiction from Seo-Young Chu, the author of the influential science fiction theory monograph, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (2010). Chu’s short explanation in this issue about design fiction does not provide a single definition, but it does identify the practice as interdisciplinary and a type of storytelling with experimental artifacts. In her design fiction, Chu provides a thought-provoking exploration of South Korea’s colonial history and rapid capitalist development through the lens of Korea’s college entrance examination. Completing the issue are interviews with prominent figures in South Korean SFF: acclaimed science fiction novelist Bo-Young Kim, Sung-hee Jo, the film director of Netflix’s Space Sweepers, and Kyoung-mi Lee, the director of Netflix’s fantasy series The School Nurse Files. The interviews were conducted remotely, with questionnaires provided to the artists in writing, and their responses also received in the same format.

While the guest editors of this issue endeavored to adopt a comprehensive approach toward the history and current state of South Korean science fiction and fantasy across diverse media and genres, we were unable to encompass the entire scope. In particular, this issue could not address North Korean science fiction and its unique traditions, despite the fact that North Korea has cultivated a distinct and rich history of science fiction that differs from that of South Korea. We also could not include young adult fiction and other various sub-genres of speculative fiction. The editors are also cognizant of the absence of research on major South Korean science fiction writers, such as Djuna, Lee Yeongdo, Bok Geo-il, Han Nak-won, and others. Furthermore, South Korean science fiction history boasts a rich tradition of feminist comics and graphic novels by female writers in the 1980s and 90s, such as Kim Jin, Shin Il-Sook, and Kang Kyung-ok, which this issue could not cover. Additionally, many American and European science fiction works have been introduced and translated into Korean since the 1920s, and the history of translating English, French, and Russian science fiction works into Korean throughout the twentieth century is an important area of research that we wished to include in this issue but could not due to the issue’s limited scope. We hope that this issue serves as a starting point for further future research.

Works Cited

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Hopkinson, Nalo. Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root. Invisible Cities Press, 2000.

"Korean Language Study Continues to Grow." The MLA Newsletter, vol. 55, no. 2, 2023, p. 4.

Langer, Jessica. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. Springer, 2011.

Lim, Tae-hun. “A Preface to the Study of ‘Geopolitical SF.’” Journal of Bangyo Language and Literature, vol. 63, pp. 81-118, 2023.

Looney, Dennis, and Natalia Lusin. “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Summer 2016 and Fall 2016: Final Report.” MLA, June 2019, www.mla.org/content/download/110154/file/2016- Enrollments- Final-Report.pdf.