Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction

Sang Joon Park, president of the newly launched Korea SF Association, and scholar Sunyoung Park present a history of literary science fiction in South Korea to Anglophone readers through this thoughtfully annotated selection of 13 stories and excerpts of “discursive significance” published since the 1960s. A postapocalyptic, dystopian aesthetic and a sense of the individual’s self-exploration in the face of huge forces threads through almost all of the work. Those forces include alien invasion, as in Kim Jung-Hyuk’s eerie “Where Boats Go,” and corporate interest, as in the title story’s thought experiment on what it means for a robot to be enlightened. Several of the newer stories explore issues of gender, including Kim Bo-Young’s powerful “Between Zero and One,” which addresses competitive mothering and the Korean education system alongside quantum physics and time travel. Extensive introductions to the short excerpts of older works do an admirable job of supplying helpful historical and cultural context, but those snippets don’t deliver the emotional punch of the more recent stories. Readers used to American SF’s notions of Asian technology will be challenged by seeing how related ideas manifest in Asian fiction, and this collection makes that challenge accessible and enjoyable while lifting up some voices new to this side of the world. (Mar.)