10 ms·

North Korean science fiction

193 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

gumby 3y ago
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.
- calimoro78 3y ago
  Can you share some examples of Soviet SF? Should be quite exciting.
  - AdamH12113 3y ago
    "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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      I read Roadside Picnic a few months ago, and yeah, it's very good stuff. While there's a lot to be said for the context in which it was written, I think it also holds up on its own even if you're not very familiar with the history.
    - narrator 3y ago
      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.
      - devindotcom 3y ago
        Now watch the film adaptation, Stalker - even more depressing!
      - the_af 3y ago
        The novel itself and the setting are not about communism though, not even in disguise. It would have to be in disguise because the setting is an unnamed North American (possibly Canadian?) city, but even if it was, the themes are not about communism. Agreed about the melancholy.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        Yes, that's Russian literature. Even before communism the melancholy is strong.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
        Try their other book, "The Doomed City". it's as upbeat as the title suggests.
  - throw1234651234 3y ago
    "It's Hard to be God"
  - tetris11 3y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City
    - er4hn 3y ago
      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 official first contact.
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        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.
        CrazyStat 3y ago
        What's deep about that?
        thriftwy 3y ago
        You will never know until you read the book. That's the deal with good books.
      - elgenie 3y ago
        Technically, 'The Doomed City' was released in Soviet times, not in the post-Soviet one, as a result of Glasnost'/Perestroika. It was published in serialized form in "Neva" magazine in '88-'89, then in book form, while the USSR would still be a going concern for a couple more years.
  - pigscantfly 3y ago
    "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is a fairly unique sci-fi noir also from the Strugatsky brothers that was my first introduction to their work. It interested me enough that I read all their other books afterwards -- worth checking out! 1. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-must-read-of-soviet-sci-fi https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-mu...
    - karaterobot 3y ago
      Err, that's just a regular detective novel, no SF elements at all, you must be mistaken (nudge nudge)
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 3y ago
    For specifically Soviet look for Ivan Yefremov, "The Bull's Hour". Other interesting authors could be Genrich Altov and Sever Gansovsky.
  - jvb1000 3y ago
    Kurt Vonnegut was accused once of ripping off George Orwell's 1984 with Player Piano. He responded by saying that he and Orwell had both just ripped off Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Soviet author who ran afoul of Stalin and wrote We inspired by his perspective of the revolution.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      I saw a We play a year back, and it was highly contemporary with its office-style glass walls, mixed-use spaces and complex rituals around dating.
      - jvb1000 3y ago
        That's probably a testament to the criticism. Interesting that what Yevgeny Zamyatin presents as a clear, almost too on the nose dystopian satire has been repackaged as a desirable work environment.
      - jvb1000 3y ago
        For those not aware, despite it seeming highly contemporary, the first English translation of the book was published in 1924.
  - winrid 3y ago
    The Inhabited Island is an amazing book with a great ending. SF, government conflict/war, weird and fun machinery, etc. Others are suggesting Hard to Be a God by the same authors, which is an okay book, but it's not really SF as most people think of SF IMO.
    - allarm 3y ago
      > it's not really SF as most people think of SF As well as the Roadside picknick, the Doomed city, A billion years before the end of the world, the Ugly swans, etc etc - really most of their books - it’s a good literature and not a sf in its usual sense.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    One example would be "The Invincible" by Stanisław Lem [1]. Worth noting that a video game [2] based on the novel (which looks very well produced) is releasing in November. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08
    - troupo 3y ago
      Lem's Invincible, Solaris and Eden form a trilogy of "what if we meet a civilization so alien to humans that we can't establish a contact with them"
      - oceanofsolaris 3y ago
        Also „Fiasco“, which is depressing and great. For a more recent take on a similar theme, see also „Blindsight“ by Peter Watts.
        inkcapmushroom 3y ago
        Here is Blindsight, free to read online from the author (and with PDF/ePub versions): https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
  - totetsu 3y ago
    "the heart of a dog" is quite a good example of sci-fi as social critique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog_(1988_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog_(1988_film)
- worrycue 3y ago
  > 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.
  - throw1234651234 3y ago
    Is it even worth reading? Genuine question. I thought it was campty sort of satirical old-timey stuff, but I never read it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - piperswe 3y ago
      Are you talking about Soviet sci-fi or speculative sci-fi? If the latter, there's plenty of speculative sci-fi worth reading. I'd recommend giving "I, Robot" a read - much of it is about reasoning through a sort of moral philosophy, through the lens of robotics.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      Sci Fi is often a way to talk about the present without getting bogged down in the minutae of accurate facts and "what's realistic" for critics. Whether that's worth reading depends on you. It's a big genre too, different authors and works don't all cover the same themes. If you want to see someone experience about what it's like to be a foreigner in a racist society, Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series explores that. If you want to read an optimistic vision of how computation could look and what ethical implications follow from that (set against a massive backdrop of geopolitics), read Ian Banks's Culture series. If you want to read a discussion of how society shapes our thoughts and beliefs, read pretty much anything by Ursula K. Guin (though The Dispossessed comes especially to mind). If you just want to explore the implications of different physical laws, Greg Egan. And of course, there's plenty of the campy stuff too. You don't always need to read high-minded narrative philosophy with sci-fi if you don't want to.
- Mainan_Tagonist 3y ago
  Well, for the soviet equivalent to James Bond, look no further than Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov, better known as Max Von Stierlitz. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    Stierlitz is a typical noir character, entirely different from Bond. The entire premise of the James Bond series and of course Bond's lifestyle were completely incompatible with the ideology, so no real equivalent was possible.
- rexpop 3y ago
  > 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?
  - anon25783 3y ago
    SF is set in the future. But its meaning is more directly relevant to the time in which it is written than the time in which it is set. Take for example, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. If people in the actual literal 25th century are able to read about Buck Rogers at all, they will probably be reading it to better understand the 20th century, not their own.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      One of my favorite examples is Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits”. Read as a prediction of the future, it’s kinda shit. Unremarkable at best. Read as a way to show us the time when it came out (roughly now—it’s not so old) from a perspective skewed enough that it might prompt us to re-evaluate our own normal, it’s pretty damn good.
    - totetsu 3y ago
      A good demonstration of this is the differences present in any sci-fi that got a remake 10-20 years after it was first written. The setting may well still be the far future .. or long long ago.. but that future has changed to match the present. The foundation TV series comes to mind. it's veeery different from the original novels.
  - the_af 3y ago
    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 invasion, or social alienation, or consumerism, etc. The most obvious (but least interesting) example of this is how all those "Mars attacks" / alien invasion / body snatcher stories really were about the Red Scare, basically "what if Communism was infiltrating our society!"
- failuser 3y ago
  “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.
  - NumberCruncher 3y ago
    What a surprise to see “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” being mentioned on HN. I read some Soviet SF as a kid, unfortunately this is the only one I can recall by title.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > 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 its focus on natural resources, but back when it was written (long before the Oil Crisis) that wasn't really a political hot topic, or even something that most people thought about at all.
  - ShinTakuya 3y ago
    Dune very much commented on the contemporarybproblems of its day. A big theme was around the scramble for Africa which, while over, was still affecting the continent in various ways as decolonisation continued. I agree that the extent of the commentary varies, and Dune is light handed in terms of political hot topics, but it was certainly there.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
      > A big theme (of Dune) was around the scramble for Africa An extractive industry moves into in the desert for an extremely valuable substance that is vital for transport, while the indigenous inhabitants are overlooked. Religious fervour and holy war. I think that the Middle-east and oil are the most obvious parallels. It is indeed "commenting on the contemporary problems of its day".
  - weregiraffe 3y ago
    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.
5040 3y ago
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 could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy. I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy. https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishiguro-interview-literature-genre-machines-can-toil-they-can-t-imagine https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishig...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- contingencies 3y ago
  While that article was written in 2015 about 2007, IMHO as a recent employer there and long term resident, the issues in China also stem from a lack of creativity in the educational environment, the political weaponisation of Confucianism, government-controlled media, a closed internet and the recent and unwaveringly vicious politically motivated disempowerment of high profile entrepreneurs. Nearly every single person a young person meets before the age of 25 is likely to scold them for original thinking, dreaming or playing: from their own parents to their state teachers, and all are co-witness to the public vilification, robbing or subsuming of successful innovators by the state. Meanwhile, the increasingly authoritarian government attempts to limit children's access to simple computer games. All are taught that the nail that sticks out is the one that is hammered down. In such an environment, who would dare to be different? Ideas are generally tolerated and evaluated on short term greed potential only. More reflectively, it is such a shame to see the current situation because as Joseph Needham's classic series shows, the China region is perhaps historically the longest serving and arguably in many ways the most significant bastion of human inventive potential, period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
1shot37291007 3y ago
> "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 worlds lack others that are superior, and superheroes are loyal technocrats. Here in the West, "market driven" Hollywood insists superheroes are distinct tiny subset of humanity and that it is to our benefit that they are hidden but highly organized. And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  The difference that makes that much less logical being that in the West the government is not determining what people can watch, they're watching what they enjoy.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    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.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      And yet that doesn't support these conspiracies you and thread OP want to believe in.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        What conspiracies are you talking about? You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chompsky. Most of what seems to be a conspiracy in western media is not actually organized as a conspiracy, but is emergent behavior in a system in which individual actors have aligned incentives. Acting individually without coordination, people hire and promote people who think like them, and ape then adopt the beliefs of their superiors. I said usually western writers don't take direct orders from the government because sometimes they do, and this isn't even a secret. Hollywood lets the US military rewrite movies whenever they want access to military hardware and facilities. And during wartime, the US government employs writers to produce propaganda. Superhero comics in particular have their roots in overt war propaganda.
raydiatian 3y ago
I feel like Andy Weir did a phenomenal job with his handful of books. The Martian, Project Hailmary. Both of these felt more like team effort emphasis, which I liked.
- w0de0 3y ago
  He is a fastidious and interesting writer. I nonetheless found both these novels disappointing. They seem to be porn for engineers. Like all porn, the lead character is a cardboard cutout with monomaniacal motivation. (It seems revealing that both books place the protagonist in a position of complete social isolation.) This was a more serious flaw in Project Hailmary, in which first contact - a profound event - is treated as a lone man’s engineering puzzle. The book is a good argument for sending poets, or at least properly thoughtful scientists, to meet our first aliens.
  - raydiatian 3y ago
    Ok
swayvil 3y ago
I'd like to see what they have in the way of real science fiction. (Yes, I know.) I mean scifi that explores strange ideas. Like Egan, Banks and Hughes. Rather than the usual dramas with added futuristic technology.
bradly 3y ago
@dang, Do you know why was the title changed from "The strange, secretive world of North Korean science fiction" to "North Korean science fiction"?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  They frequently change titles to reduce sensationalism and fluff.
wrp 3y ago
I sometimes watch/read South Korean SF and this description of Northern SF sounds familiar. Yes, there are often nefarious Americans behind the protagonist's problem. Yes, the plot often makes a hash of logical coherence. I think a study of both northern and southern SF would find there is still a significant shared culture.
- zarroboogs 3y ago
  Same as Chinese SF, although they also have global collaboration saved by the Chinese people’s honour as a big plot line too. In fact it’s the same as Chinese martial arts movies too. Anyone seen the Ip Man series?

193 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

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.

calimoro78 3y ago
Can you share some examples of Soviet SF? Should be quite exciting.
- AdamH12113 3y ago
  "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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    I read Roadside Picnic a few months ago, and yeah, it's very good stuff. While there's a lot to be said for the context in which it was written, I think it also holds up on its own even if you're not very familiar with the history.
  - narrator 3y ago
    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.
    - devindotcom 3y ago
      Now watch the film adaptation, Stalker - even more depressing!
    - the_af 3y ago
      The novel itself and the setting are not about communism though, not even in disguise. It would have to be in disguise because the setting is an unnamed North American (possibly Canadian?) city, but even if it was, the themes are not about communism. Agreed about the melancholy.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      Yes, that's Russian literature. Even before communism the melancholy is strong.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
      Try their other book, "The Doomed City". it's as upbeat as the title suggests.
- throw1234651234 3y ago
  "It's Hard to be God"
- tetris11 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City
  - er4hn 3y ago
    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 official first contact.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      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.
      - CrazyStat 3y ago
        What's deep about that?
        thriftwy 3y ago
        You will never know until you read the book. That's the deal with good books.
    - elgenie 3y ago
      Technically, 'The Doomed City' was released in Soviet times, not in the post-Soviet one, as a result of Glasnost'/Perestroika. It was published in serialized form in "Neva" magazine in '88-'89, then in book form, while the USSR would still be a going concern for a couple more years.
- pigscantfly 3y ago
  "The Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is a fairly unique sci-fi noir also from the Strugatsky brothers that was my first introduction to their work. It interested me enough that I read all their other books afterwards -- worth checking out! 1. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-must-read-of-soviet-sci-fi https://www.npr.org/2015/03/19/392634682/mountaineer-is-a-mu...
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Err, that's just a regular detective novel, no SF elements at all, you must be mistaken (nudge nudge)
- Mikhail_Edoshin 3y ago
  For specifically Soviet look for Ivan Yefremov, "The Bull's Hour". Other interesting authors could be Genrich Altov and Sever Gansovsky.
- jvb1000 3y ago
  Kurt Vonnegut was accused once of ripping off George Orwell's 1984 with Player Piano. He responded by saying that he and Orwell had both just ripped off Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Yevgeny Zamyatin was a Soviet author who ran afoul of Stalin and wrote We inspired by his perspective of the revolution.
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    I saw a We play a year back, and it was highly contemporary with its office-style glass walls, mixed-use spaces and complex rituals around dating.
    - jvb1000 3y ago
      That's probably a testament to the criticism. Interesting that what Yevgeny Zamyatin presents as a clear, almost too on the nose dystopian satire has been repackaged as a desirable work environment.
    - jvb1000 3y ago
      For those not aware, despite it seeming highly contemporary, the first English translation of the book was published in 1924.
- winrid 3y ago
  The Inhabited Island is an amazing book with a great ending. SF, government conflict/war, weird and fun machinery, etc. Others are suggesting Hard to Be a God by the same authors, which is an okay book, but it's not really SF as most people think of SF IMO.
  - allarm 3y ago
    > it's not really SF as most people think of SF As well as the Roadside picknick, the Doomed city, A billion years before the end of the world, the Ugly swans, etc etc - really most of their books - it’s a good literature and not a sf in its usual sense.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  One example would be "The Invincible" by Stanisław Lem [1]. Worth noting that a video game [2] based on the novel (which looks very well produced) is releasing in November. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7Ca6kXz08
  - troupo 3y ago
    Lem's Invincible, Solaris and Eden form a trilogy of "what if we meet a civilization so alien to humans that we can't establish a contact with them"
    - oceanofsolaris 3y ago
      Also „Fiasco“, which is depressing and great. For a more recent take on a similar theme, see also „Blindsight“ by Peter Watts.
      - inkcapmushroom 3y ago
        Here is Blindsight, free to read online from the author (and with PDF/ePub versions): https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
- totetsu 3y ago
  "the heart of a dog" is quite a good example of sci-fi as social critique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog_(1988_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog_(1988_film)
worrycue 3y ago
> 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.
- throw1234651234 3y ago
  Is it even worth reading? Genuine question. I thought it was campty sort of satirical old-timey stuff, but I never read it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - piperswe 3y ago
    Are you talking about Soviet sci-fi or speculative sci-fi? If the latter, there's plenty of speculative sci-fi worth reading. I'd recommend giving "I, Robot" a read - much of it is about reasoning through a sort of moral philosophy, through the lens of robotics.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    Sci Fi is often a way to talk about the present without getting bogged down in the minutae of accurate facts and "what's realistic" for critics. Whether that's worth reading depends on you. It's a big genre too, different authors and works don't all cover the same themes. If you want to see someone experience about what it's like to be a foreigner in a racist society, Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series explores that. If you want to read an optimistic vision of how computation could look and what ethical implications follow from that (set against a massive backdrop of geopolitics), read Ian Banks's Culture series. If you want to read a discussion of how society shapes our thoughts and beliefs, read pretty much anything by Ursula K. Guin (though The Dispossessed comes especially to mind). If you just want to explore the implications of different physical laws, Greg Egan. And of course, there's plenty of the campy stuff too. You don't always need to read high-minded narrative philosophy with sci-fi if you don't want to.
Mainan_Tagonist 3y ago
Well, for the soviet equivalent to James Bond, look no further than Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov, better known as Max Von Stierlitz. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  Stierlitz is a typical noir character, entirely different from Bond. The entire premise of the James Bond series and of course Bond's lifestyle were completely incompatible with the ideology, so no real equivalent was possible.
rexpop 3y ago
> 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?
- anon25783 3y ago
  SF is set in the future. But its meaning is more directly relevant to the time in which it is written than the time in which it is set. Take for example, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. If people in the actual literal 25th century are able to read about Buck Rogers at all, they will probably be reading it to better understand the 20th century, not their own.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    One of my favorite examples is Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits”. Read as a prediction of the future, it’s kinda shit. Unremarkable at best. Read as a way to show us the time when it came out (roughly now—it’s not so old) from a perspective skewed enough that it might prompt us to re-evaluate our own normal, it’s pretty damn good.
  - totetsu 3y ago
    A good demonstration of this is the differences present in any sci-fi that got a remake 10-20 years after it was first written. The setting may well still be the far future .. or long long ago.. but that future has changed to match the present. The foundation TV series comes to mind. it's veeery different from the original novels.
- the_af 3y ago
  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 invasion, or social alienation, or consumerism, etc. The most obvious (but least interesting) example of this is how all those "Mars attacks" / alien invasion / body snatcher stories really were about the Red Scare, basically "what if Communism was infiltrating our society!"
failuser 3y ago
“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.
- NumberCruncher 3y ago
  What a surprise to see “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin” being mentioned on HN. I read some Soviet SF as a kid, unfortunately this is the only one I can recall by title.
p-e-w 3y ago
> 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 its focus on natural resources, but back when it was written (long before the Oil Crisis) that wasn't really a political hot topic, or even something that most people thought about at all.
- ShinTakuya 3y ago
  Dune very much commented on the contemporarybproblems of its day. A big theme was around the scramble for Africa which, while over, was still affecting the continent in various ways as decolonisation continued. I agree that the extent of the commentary varies, and Dune is light handed in terms of political hot topics, but it was certainly there.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    > A big theme (of Dune) was around the scramble for Africa An extractive industry moves into in the desert for an extremely valuable substance that is vital for transport, while the indigenous inhabitants are overlooked. Religious fervour and holy war. I think that the Middle-east and oil are the most obvious parallels. It is indeed "commenting on the contemporary problems of its day".
- weregiraffe 3y ago
  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.

5040 3y ago

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 could write a story set in a giant ant colony in the future, when people were becoming ants, but nobody was quite sure: was this really a commentary on the state? As such, it was very, very dodgy. I took aside one of the Party organisers, and said, “OK. Why are you now in 2007 endorsing a science-fiction convention?” And his reply was that the Party had been concerned that while China historically has been a culture of magical and radical invention, right now, they weren’t inventing things. They were making things incredibly well but they weren’t inventing. And they’d gone to America and interviewed the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft, and talked to the inventors, and discovered that in each case, when young, they’d read science fiction. That was why the Chinese had decided that they were going to officially now approve of science fiction and fantasy. https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishiguro-interview-literature-genre-machines-can-toil-they-can-t-imagine https://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishig...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
contingencies 3y ago
While that article was written in 2015 about 2007, IMHO as a recent employer there and long term resident, the issues in China also stem from a lack of creativity in the educational environment, the political weaponisation of Confucianism, government-controlled media, a closed internet and the recent and unwaveringly vicious politically motivated disempowerment of high profile entrepreneurs. Nearly every single person a young person meets before the age of 25 is likely to scold them for original thinking, dreaming or playing: from their own parents to their state teachers, and all are co-witness to the public vilification, robbing or subsuming of successful innovators by the state. Meanwhile, the increasingly authoritarian government attempts to limit children's access to simple computer games. All are taught that the nail that sticks out is the one that is hammered down. In such an environment, who would dare to be different? Ideas are generally tolerated and evaluated on short term greed potential only. More reflectively, it is such a shame to see the current situation because as Joseph Needham's classic series shows, the China region is perhaps historically the longest serving and arguably in many ways the most significant bastion of human inventive potential, period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...

1shot37291007 3y ago

> "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 worlds lack others that are superior, and superheroes are loyal technocrats. Here in the West, "market driven" Hollywood insists superheroes are distinct tiny subset of humanity and that it is to our benefit that they are hidden but highly organized. And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society.

dotnet00 3y ago
The difference that makes that much less logical being that in the West the government is not determining what people can watch, they're watching what they enjoy.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  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.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    And yet that doesn't support these conspiracies you and thread OP want to believe in.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      What conspiracies are you talking about? You should read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chompsky. Most of what seems to be a conspiracy in western media is not actually organized as a conspiracy, but is emergent behavior in a system in which individual actors have aligned incentives. Acting individually without coordination, people hire and promote people who think like them, and ape then adopt the beliefs of their superiors. I said usually western writers don't take direct orders from the government because sometimes they do, and this isn't even a secret. Hollywood lets the US military rewrite movies whenever they want access to military hardware and facilities. And during wartime, the US government employs writers to produce propaganda. Superhero comics in particular have their roots in overt war propaganda.

raydiatian 3y ago

I feel like Andy Weir did a phenomenal job with his handful of books. The Martian, Project Hailmary. Both of these felt more like team effort emphasis, which I liked.

w0de0 3y ago
He is a fastidious and interesting writer. I nonetheless found both these novels disappointing. They seem to be porn for engineers. Like all porn, the lead character is a cardboard cutout with monomaniacal motivation. (It seems revealing that both books place the protagonist in a position of complete social isolation.) This was a more serious flaw in Project Hailmary, in which first contact - a profound event - is treated as a lone man’s engineering puzzle. The book is a good argument for sending poets, or at least properly thoughtful scientists, to meet our first aliens.
- raydiatian 3y ago
  Ok

swayvil 3y ago

I'd like to see what they have in the way of real science fiction. (Yes, I know.) I mean scifi that explores strange ideas. Like Egan, Banks and Hughes. Rather than the usual dramas with added futuristic technology.

bradly 3y ago

@dang, Do you know why was the title changed from "The strange, secretive world of North Korean science fiction" to "North Korean science fiction"?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aqfamnzc 3y ago
They frequently change titles to reduce sensationalism and fluff.

wrp 3y ago

I sometimes watch/read South Korean SF and this description of Northern SF sounds familiar. Yes, there are often nefarious Americans behind the protagonist's problem. Yes, the plot often makes a hash of logical coherence. I think a study of both northern and southern SF would find there is still a significant shared culture.

zarroboogs 3y ago
Same as Chinese SF, although they also have global collaboration saved by the Chinese people’s honour as a big plot line too. In fact it’s the same as Chinese martial arts movies too. Anyone seen the Ip Man series?