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North Korean science fiction

arstechnica.com

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Re: North Korean science fiction

#121

Post by lgeorget »

c_crank wrote: post #54
mcpackieh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society. Worse: You aren't such a superhero, but by random chance you might be chosen to become one and you are invited to imagine yourself in that situation. Any common person who might want to limit your hypothetical powers is an awful bigot and many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers wh…

Reality: Americans have not been ruled by the superhero-like ultra rich for decades, and are starting to notice that little is improving and much is getting worse.

Aren't all recent US presidents ultra-rich?

Re: North Korean science fiction

#122

Post by worrycue »

the_af wrote: post #93
rexpop wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF is pretty much always about the current day. I can't comprehend this. Scifi is famously occupied with the future, and not the current day. Space travel, advanced technologies, artificial intelligences, and generally things that don't yet exist are par for the course. Most of SF is literally not about the present. Do you mean to say that SF's subtext reflects the zeitgeist at the time/place of its writing?

It means the future elements in scifi (when it is about the future at all; some scifi doesn't even pretend to be futuristic) are an extrapolation of the current time and used to explore an idea about today . An author's scifi "gimmick" (it can be a technology, a societal norm, an alien encounter, etc) is often the way in which the author develops and extrapolates a preoccupation about the real world, be it war, or in…

Blade Runner and the entire Cyberpunk genre* extrapolate Reagan’s America where corporations are completely unfettered, dominating the landscape and people’s everyday life in nearly every way.

* Or at least it used to. Most of today’s Cyberpunk media seems to have lost sight of that motif and really just ape the aesthetic (e.g. neon lights everywhere) - a hollow shell really.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#123

Post by worrycue »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
havelhovel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the West what’s available is the product of people making what they want to make with relatively few restrictions.

I so wish that that were true. No, a lot more is made than what is available to you.

With the internet (and image hosting sites / YouTube if you are lazy; but YMMV) making stuff available is easier than ever.

Whether your audience can find your work is a separate matter … it is available.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#124

Post by weregiraffe »

p-e-w wrote: post #116
gumby wrote: post #2

I look forward to reading some of this. SF is pretty much always about the current day. Soviet SF was quite illuminating to me (back when anybody cared about the USSR). I’ve always wanted to read a couple of the Soviet equivalent of the James Bond novels.

> SF is pretty much always about the current day. I'm not sure that's true, although in the past two decades or so it may have been. But going back to the classics of 1960s and 1970s SF, I just don't see it. Sure, The Forever War is a thinly veiled allegory of Vietnam, but how are Lord of Light , Dreamsnake , The Left Hand of Darkness , or even Dune about their "current days"? Dune seems prescient today because of it…

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai is at one point sent to a prison camp, in what is basically a communist country by a different name. Basically gulag, in Siberia.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#125

Post by globular-toast »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #26
worrycue wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF is pretty much always about the current day. SF is often speculative fiction that extrapolate current trends into the future - frequently taking them to their logic conclusion - to explore and critique. Good SF anyway.

Is it even worth reading? Genuine question. I thought it was campty sort of satirical old-timey stuff, but I never read it.

What do you read? I pretty much only read science fiction. Are you thinking it's all like Star Trek or something? It's not.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#126

Post by worrycue »

judge2020 wrote: post #57
narrator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jules Verne is fun to read in this regard because the people who organized to go to the moon in "From Earth To The Moon" were simply part of a gun club that chose to fund the effort privately, not the government. It reflects how people had a different relationship with the government in the 19th century. Before the income tax, people like Rockefeller would just bail companies out during panics from their personal ban…

While Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter, there probably are a few dozen Rockefeller CEOs of various SV/tech-adjacent companies that can and do use their power to command acquisitions of medium size startups that have promising tech but suffer from issues of cash flow or business strategy.

> While Elon is the only one with the intuition to bail out a company as large as Twitter

What intuition? Wasn’t he forced to buy Twitter by the SEC? He bought it at 4x the valuation - Twitter’s ex-shareholders made it out like bandits. Now he is losing money hand over fist thanks to Twitter - as Twitter’s ad revenue has dropped due to his changes (and big mouth) and he is paying to the tune of 1 billion USD a year in interest from the loan to buy Twitter; Twitter’s yearly income on the best of years have come nowhere close to a billion.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#127

Post by worrycue »

mcpackieh wrote: post #18
1shot37291007 wrote: post #9

> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal…

> And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society. Worse: You aren't such a superhero, but by random chance you might be chosen to become one and you are invited to imagine yourself in that situation. Any common person who might want to limit your hypothetical powers is an awful bigot and many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers wh…

> many of the stories revolve around tension between those with powers who would oppress the plebs vs those with powers who wish to benevolently rule over the plebs (but certainly not cede their power to them.)

Except not really. The most popular superheroes like Spider-Man has nothing of that sort going on. The tension in his story is the balance of his duty to use his gifts for good (with great power comes great responsibility) and the demands of his everyday life - with the latter often suffering to his detriment.

On DC’s side, Batman is probably the most popular. Frankly, Batman is more a plot device than a character, the most interesting characters in his stories are the villains.

Heck, in most cases, their super powers are not transferable.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#128

Post by worrycue »

1shot37291007 wrote: post #9

> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders." Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal…

> Both are aiming to pacify the target society

In the West it’s really to make money. No one cares if the target audience is pacified or not - might even be more profitable if they are riled up to spend more money.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#129

Post by pjc50 »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #26
worrycue wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF is pretty much always about the current day. SF is often speculative fiction that extrapolate current trends into the future - frequently taking them to their logic conclusion - to explore and critique. Good SF anyway.

Is it even worth reading? Genuine question. I thought it was campty sort of satirical old-timey stuff, but I never read it.

I find it hard to understand how anyone could possibly be this dismissive about something they have no experience of, in public?

OK, so some of it is campy adventure pulp, but fortunately someone's collated the best and most long-lived works into the SF Masterworks series for people to pick from.

Phillip K Dick would probably get the same kind of praise as Joyce if he hadn't been ghettoized as "SF".

Re: North Korean science fiction

#130

Post by pjc50 »

narrator wrote: post #34
AdamH12113 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Roadside Picnic" is a well-known novel that was the basis for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

Roadside picnic is so ridiculously melancholy. Everyone in that book is so depressed! I also don't think I've ever seen so much smoking and drinking in a sci-fi book. You could tell the brothers were really not enjoying communism.

Yes, that's Russian literature. Even before communism the melancholy is strong.
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