Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

North Korean science fiction

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: North Korean science fiction

#61

Post by johnnyworker »

dotnet00 wrote: post #59
mcpackieh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just told you it's not a conspiracy, you're tilting at windmills. I have not proposed a conspiracy to create movies like this, I don't think there's a cabal of billionaires who dreamed up and coordinate this as a deliberate propaganda campaign. I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies. People who fit the mold and are natu…

I'm calling it a conspiracy not because I think you're saying there's a cabal of billionaires doing this. I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic". My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media, I think a superhero movie is just a superhero movie and that of course Chomsky sees propaganda in everything,…

> My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media

That's not disagreement, that's just covering your ears and going la la la. You're barking up the wrong tree, that book is a good primer for you to find out how, if you don't read it you're still barking up the wrong tree.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#62

Post by pessimizer »

dotnet00 wrote: post #21
mcpackieh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western writers (usually) aren't taking direct orders from the government, but that doesn't mean they're impartial weather vanes that reveal currents in society but never try to manipulate (or fabricate) those social currents as they see fit.

And yet that doesn't support these conspiracies you and thread OP want to believe in.

Op-Ed: Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’?

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-30/top-gun-mav...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaters_of_War

Pay No Attention to the G-Man Behind the Curtain

https://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2018/03/pay-n...

In the ‘90s the U.S. Government Paid TV Networks to Weave “Anti-Drug” Messaging Into Their Plot Lines. Here Are the Worst Examples.

https://www.columnblog.com/p/in-the-90s-the-us-government-pa...

Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law

https://web.archive.org/web/20100722051019/http://www.usatod...

https://www.gao.gov/products/b-305368

Re: North Korean science fiction

#63

Post by dotnet00 »

c_crank wrote: post #53
dotnet00 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're too absorbed in your own cynicisim to see the obvious. There is hundreds of thousands of hours of all sorts of content added to the internet every day from all over the world. Western governments have nowhere near the sort of control over what their people can see to pull off anything anywhere near comparable to NK's attempts at controlling their people's entertainment.

The whims of the morally aggressive Western elite substitute for heavy handed regulation from top down. Although recent moves have been made to try and institute a CCP style bureau of misinformation even in America.

While I agree that social media is way too aggressive with moral policing of content, I can still trivially watch any of the morally reprehensible stuff that would be banned from there.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: North Korean science fiction

#65

Post by dotnet00 »

johnnyworker wrote: post #61
dotnet00 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm calling it a conspiracy not because I think you're saying there's a cabal of billionaires doing this. I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic". My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media, I think a superhero movie is just a superhero movie and that of course Chomsky sees propaganda in everything,…

> My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media That's not disagreement, that's just covering your ears and going la la la. You're barking up the wrong tree, that book is a good primer for you to find out how, if you don't read it you're still barking up the wrong tree.

"Everyone who doesn't read my favorite book is just ignorant and not allowed to disagree" is not the argument you think it is.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#66

Post by thriftwy »

er4hn wrote: post #28
tetris11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were pretty prolific during this time (often writing in secret, and reciting their works only to trusted friends). "The Doomed City" is one of the best pieces of philosophical scifi I've ever read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City

The Doomed City is a bad example since it was specifically released in a post-soviet era. It had very direct criticisms of communism which lead to the authors deciding to not release it during the soviet era they wrote it. "Hard to be a God", mentioned below, is a better example. Soviet era Sci-Fi where Star Trek esque space communists try to uplift a medieval society into modern political belief before establishing…

The Doomed City is way deeper than "criticisms of communism".

People literally wake up in The Doomed City when the pandemic has started in 2020, for example.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#67

Post by HDMI_Cable »

5040 wrote: post #4

Tangentially related: NG You know, I was in China in 2007, and it was the first ever state-sponsored, Party-approved science-fiction convention. They brought in some people from the west and I was one of them, and I was talking to a number of the older science-fiction writers in China, who told me about how science fiction was not just looked down on, but seen as suspicious and counter-revolutionary, because you coul…

This seems to underlie their problem: if they're only supporting SciFi (and probably other creative outlets) as a means to an end, as a means to encourage innovation, they're doing it wrong. Asimov didn't write because he foresaw all of the tech entrepreneurs who would read his work, he wrote because he wanted to, and because the society where he wrote supported him—and promoted artistic works (though of course there is perverse incentive for art here in the West, in the form of monetary incentive for artists). If China only supports SciFi to innovate, they won't produce good enough works to innovate.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#68

Post by mcpackieh »

dotnet00 wrote: post #59
mcpackieh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just told you it's not a conspiracy, you're tilting at windmills. I have not proposed a conspiracy to create movies like this, I don't think there's a cabal of billionaires who dreamed up and coordinate this as a deliberate propaganda campaign. I assert that the Hollywood system creates movies like this because because of the way it is structured and the nature of making movies. People who fit the mold and are natu…

I'm calling it a conspiracy not because I think you're saying there's a cabal of billionaires doing this. I get that you're trying to pull the popular claim these days about things being "systemic". My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media, I think a superhero movie is just a superhero movie and that of course Chomsky sees propaganda in everything,…

It's literally not a conspiracy, you clearly want to substitute what I'm saying with your own strawman. I'm through, go talk to yourself in a mirror.

Re: North Korean science fiction

#69

Post by mcpackieh »

dotnet00 wrote: post #65
johnnyworker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My fundamental disagreement is that I don't care about what an obviously biased guy has to say about the media That's not disagreement, that's just covering your ears and going la la la. You're barking up the wrong tree, that book is a good primer for you to find out how, if you don't read it you're still barking up the wrong tree.

"Everyone who doesn't read my favorite book is just ignorant and not allowed to disagree" is not the argument you think it is.

"Everybody who disagrees with me is a conspiracy theorist, even if they explicit say there is no conspiracy. Also they're biased but of course I'm not."

Re: North Korean science fiction

#70

Post by failuser »

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.

“The air seller” by Belyayev reminded me a lot about the more wacky side of James Bond. The protagonist is not glamorous, can’t do that in USSR. But it does have a villain that tries to take over the world with revolutionary technology from his evil layer. The villain captures the protagonist to boast about his evil genius. Even a final battle between marines and henchmen is there. Could have been adapted into a golden-age Bond movie by adding a couple of tropical locations.

“The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” has a similarly grand super-villain scheme. And with more locations and glamor.

Post reply on HN