Science fiction has long been a popular genre in South Korea. In the early 1900s, translations of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne proliferated. By the second half of the 20th century, Korean writers of short stories, novels, and films had embraced the genre as their own. In “the 1990s, Korean science fiction blew up,” E. Tammy Kim notes in a new essay for this week’s Books & the Arts. Soon it had “matured into a distinct form, powered by the early Internet, zine culture, and networks of fan clubs.” Among the most popular writers from this boom was Djuna, “a mononymous, pseudonymous, and officially anonymous novelist and film critic who emerged in the mid-1990s as an active poster on the chat server Hi-Tel.” Over the past decade, a few of Djuna’s stories and interviews have made their way into English, but this year a novel, Counterweight, has finally arrived in an English translation. “It tells the story of LK, a futuristic Korean chaebol that’s only slightly more evil than the conglomerates of today. LK colonizes a fictional Southeast Asian island called Patusan in order to build the world’s first elevator into space,” Kim writes. This high-tech thriller, an “anti-colonial eco-noir set in a rapacious Korean corporation,” “assembles [a] fictional near-future from bits of the nonfictional present.” Read “The Enigmatic Science Fiction of Djuna”