Do Not Fear the Future! The Legacy of Confucian Optimism in Modern China: A Response to “Science Fiction in South and North Korea”

摘要

Dong-Won Kim’s article compares the reception of science fiction (SF) on the Korean peninsula in two traditions that are—not surprisingly—shaped by different ideologies. Broadly speaking, since its inception and translation in East Asia in the late nineteenth century, science fiction can be understood as a form of predictive imagination of possible futures, both in the technological and ideological sense. The author argues that the popularity of science fiction is undoubtedly culturally contingent, and it is for this reason that he identifies a considerable gap between the presence of science fiction novels and short stories in the regions north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel. While the translation of Russian SF literature in North Korea since the 1950s and its film adaptations in the 1970s under the rule of Kim Jong-Il have been particularly successful, the capitalist South seems to have shied away from fantastic imaginations of possible futures despite its tremendous achievements in technological modernization.