koreaherald / April 24, 2014

Two books written by Korean author Bok Geo-il have been published in English, the Literature Translation Institute of Korea said. One is Bok’s sci-fi novel “The Jovian Sayings,” which the author first penned in Korean in 2002. Bok translated the novel into English himself. The story is set in the 29th century, where robots and human beings live on a satellite near Jupiter called Ganymede.   Source : http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20140424000935

koreatimes / April 27, 2014

Also, Bok Geo-il's English novel "The Jovian Sayings" and play "The Unforgotten War" have been published by the Stallion Press in Singapore. The publisher was founded in 2002 with overseas branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Hong Kong and India. It has published seven translated titles of Korean literary, historical and cultural writings with support from the Literature Translation Institution of Korea (LTI) since 2010.   Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/culture/2014/04/386_156175.html

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A Cartographer’s Dream by Bok Goe-il Author's Profile By Bok Geo-il on Oct 25 2014 04:45:50 Vol.24 Summer 2014 My image of myself is as a shabby cartographer haunting the wharves of Lisbon or Amster-dam at the dawn of the Great Seafaring Age in the 16th century. This cartographer patiently fills up blanks and redraws contours on his map, guessing the shapes of distant continents with tips gleaned from sailors that have crossed the dangerous seas. Though he cannot compete with the official cartographers that are supported by the royal courts and he barely makes a living, haunted by unknown continents that slowly reveal their shapes, he has dedicated his life to making a map of the world. A shabby cartographer is an apt metaphor. From my childhood I was fascinated by knowledge and aspired to be an intellectual. As George Orwell said, the most prominent feature of an intellectual is the love of knowledge that has no practical use in everyday life. But such useless knowledge is essential to make a map of this world. In the 19th century the high waves of European civilization suddenly arrived and overwhelmed East Asia. The encounter and merger of the two great civilizations was a fundamental force that shaped East Asia’s modern history. It was so vast a process that it couldn’t have been anything but all-encompassing and violent. Since the first Opium War between China and Britain erupted in 1839, all the wars in East Asia, including the civil wars of Japan, China, and Korea, came out of such encounters and syntheses of civilizations.

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Postcoloniality and Imagining the Post-human: Bok Geo-il's In Search of an Epitaph and Djuna's The Pacific Continental Express   By Kim Dongshik on Nov 02 2014 00:26:58 Vol.20 Summer 2013 Throughout the modernization of Korea, there was little time for the fantastical imaginings that guided science fiction, yet despite prejudice and misunderstanding, the genre broke boundaries during the dawn of the information age through two influential writers.     The Status of Sci-Fi in Korea Gongsang (daydreaming). Until the 1990s, that particular word was the prefix of the Korean expression for the English term, “science fiction.” Of course, it is clearly untrue that Koreans are somehow culturally predisposed to dislike or think less of science fiction. However, for some time, it was true that science fiction works were considered fantastic stories, out of daydreams. For the past 100 years, Koreans have experienced a string of dramatic changes: Japanese colonization, subsequent liberation, civil war, division of the country, dictatorship, democratization, and industrialization. Considering the harsh realities that Koreans were facing, it is easy to see how stories with robots, space travel, clones, cyborgs, and time-travel seemed like far-off daydreams, lacking a foundation in reality. The Korean people had to soldier on through difficult challenges whose solutions had no connection to the world created by science fiction. Because of these challenges, it was understandably difficult for Koreans to seriously consider and reflect on the effect of science and technology on their lives.

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Standing Alone Like a Rhino’s Horn: An Introduction to Writer Bok Geo-il   By Park Sang-joon on Oct 25 2014 03:05:34 Vol.24 Summer 2014 Bok Geo-il, as a novelist and social critic, holds a distinct and unique position in Korean society. He has mostly published science fiction, an unpopular literary genre among Korean readers, and has been well known for his outspoken comments on a variety of controversial social issues. There are several elements that clearly distinguish him from other Korean writers. And these elements are intimately connected. First, Bok debuted as a writer after going through a fairly unusual process and then instantly established himself within the literary community in Korea. Bok debuted in his early 40s, a relatively older age for a new writer to enter the scene. He worked as a salaryman for many years before starting his career as a novelist. His first novel In Search of an Epitaph was published in 1987. His debut work came out in book form from Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd., a leading publisher of literature in Korea. In most cases, new writers start their professional writing careers by publishing a short story in a newspaper or literary magazine. However, the writer as newcomer received exceptional treatment from Moonji; in turn, the publisher’s bold attempt was a huge success. What made this exceptional treatment and process possible is that Bok Geo-il had long built extensive knowledge in the social and natural sciences as well as literature, and trained himself to be a writer. Second, although his first work In Search of an Epitaph is an SF novel that takes the form of an alternate history, his book was highly received by the mainstream literary establishment. In Search of an Epitaph is set in an imaginary history. The story of this novel develops under a hypothesis that Japan was not defeated in the Second World War and accordingly Korea is still under Japanese colonial rule until the late 1980s. As the author mentions in the novel’s preface, such an alteration of a historical event is a literary device frequently used in science fiction. However, at that time, Korean society had little awareness and understanding of the SF genre, and so In Search of an Epitaph was widely regarded only as lowbrow genre fiction. As a result, the general public paid more attention to the writer and his work rather than to the SF genre itself, which has remained relatively underdeveloped in Korea.

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The Journey of a Science Fiction Writer: Novelist Bok Geo-il Author's Profile BY KO DOO HYUN ON NOV 12 2014 09:24:22 VOL.24 SUMMER 2014 Bok Geo-il is widely considered to be a writer who has ushered in a new epoch in the Korean SF genre. Having made a spectacular debut with the novel In Search of an Epitaph, Bok has continued to expand the horizons of Korean SF by making use of distinctive literary devices such as time reversal or the reverse of history.   Ko Doo Hyun: You debuted as a writer at age 41 with the novel In Search of an Epitaph published in 1987 after you quit a pretty decent job. At the time of your debut, you were an obscure writer. What made you choose to write a science fiction novel using the literary device of a so-called “alternate history” for your debut? A lot of people wonder why you chose the SF genre among others. Bok Geo-il: At the time when I started to work on my first book, Korean society was in an extremely oppressive atmosphere. My first book was published in 1987. At that time, the Fifth Republic of Korea had been established by a new military group, which lasted from 1981 to 1988. Under the authoritarian regime, which was established as a result of a military coup, it was very difficult to depict Korean society as it was. I thought that under such circumstances it would be unwise to opt for a mainstream literary technique to reflect and portray the reality of Korea. So I decided to reverse the concept. That is, I attempted to draw attention to the fact that the era of the Fifth Republic shared something in common with the Japanese Imperialist era.   Ko: If your debut novel In Search of an Epitaph can be taken as a “reverse of history,” then A Traveler in History published in 1991, four years after your first book, could be a “reverse of time.” It was first published in three volumes. Now more than 20 years later, you are going to publish the fourth volume. What has driven you to follow up with this sequel? I was told that after you were diagnosed with liver cancer, the first thing that came to your mind was to finish this series.