Djuna
The pseudonymous author of these stories is one of the most prolific and widely-known genre fiction writers in South Korea today. Since debuting online in 1994, Djuna has maintained strict separation between their digital persona “Djuna” and the human(s) the lay behind it. Djuna is reachable through message boards and email but unavailable offline, and essentially nothing is known of them aside from what can be guessed from their writing. Djuna’s many books of fiction include Butterfly War (Nabi jeongjaeng, 1997), Duty-Free Zone (Myeonse guyeok, 2000), Transpacific Express (Taepyeongyang hoengdan teukkeup, 2002), Proxy War (Daerijeon, 2006), The Bloody Battle of Broccoli Plain (Brokolli pyeongwon ui hyeoltu, 2011), Not Yet Gods (Ajigeun sin i aniya, 2013), Memoir of a Joseon Bride (Gubujeon, 2019), and more. Djuna has also published individual stories online and in various multi-author compilations. Although Djuna is perhaps better known to many as a film critic, their place in South Korean SF world is unmistakable, and younger Korean SF writers such as Kim Boyoung and Kwak Jaesik credit Djuna for opening new possibilities in Korean science fiction and helping the genre develop to where it is today
books
Everything Good Dies Here
Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea.
The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea’s most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.
Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Djuna’s stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.
Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna, who first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s, has steadfastly refused to confirm any personal details regarding age, gender or legal name, or even whether they are one person or multiple. Djuna is widely considered one of the most prolific and important writers in South Korean science fiction. They have published nine short story collections, three novels, and numerous essays and uncollected stories.
Not Yet Gods
In the aftermath of a nuclear explosion set off in North Korea, an ordinary South Korean high-school classroom becomes ground zero for the discovery of a radical new source of energy: children capable of conducting and amplifying the telepathic and telekinetic powers of those around them. Soon enough the race is on to exploit these newfound human “batteries” by hunting them down and harnessing their power for everything from electricity to space travel to facelifts. But the emotional stakes could not be higher. After all, what happens when the primary energy source being used to run the world is housed within the brains and bodies of teenagers, subject to hormonal shifts and eddies, family loyalties, and interpersonal conflicts? Told as a series of interlinked stories, Djuna’s fractally unfolding thought experiments cycle through genres ranging from detective procedurals to fantasy horror to speculative sci fi in order to interrogate the nature of power, disability, and illusion in the potential end of history.
praise
“Djuna’s stories are a rebirth, an unnerving resurrection of classic science fiction and horror concepts, given quivering new life by another cultural perspective. Unendingly involving, their stories turn us upside down; they require us to right ourselves, and we come out of the process changed. A powerful voice in SF and dark fiction!” —John Shirley, author of Demons and Black Butterflies
“In South Korea, Djuna is a pop-cultural savant, a public intellectual, and a literary mystery all wrapped into one. Djuna’s identity is known to no one, as the author has been writing under a pseudonym ever since their debut in the mid-1990s. Wonderfully rendered here by Adrian Thieret, Djuna’s stories are an engrossing hymn to diversity and to the hybridization of genres, teeming as they are with transgender cyborgs, vampire girls, space-faring teddy bears, and other scary-but-endearing figures of the post- human. Glinting beneath their aesthetic of the horrific, the grotesque, and the absurd is this writer’s poignant insights into South Korean society.” —Sunyoung Park, editor of Readymade Boddhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction
“Filled with bold and grim humor, Djuna’s fiction creates dream-like worlds where hardly anything looks familiar or predictable. It inspires readers to stretch their imagination and to take a fresh look at a number of the basic premises that set the boundaries of contemporary society—including those concerning gender, sexu ality, individuality, humanity, race, or ethnicity. Here is a work of a profoundly inquisitive, erudite, and creative mind. Adrian Thieret’s highly readable translation will make this anthology a gratifying read for Anglophone enthusiasts of speculative fiction and Asian literature.” —Yoon Sun Yang, Boston University, editor of Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature
Filled with breathtaking world-building, vivid characters, and a fierce exploration of the nature of power and resistance, Not Yet Gods is a thrilling and thought-provoking collection from a singular voice in South Korean speculative fiction. —Kyunghee Eo, Yale University
A new translation of an exhilarating and wildly imaginative work by the mysterious Korean SF phenom Djuna. Interlinked stories of psychics, mutants, conspiracies, dystopia, and the apocalypse that serve as timely allegories of the ills and possibilities of runaway technology in the present and the future. This collection showcases the best and the most beguiling tales of the imagination that are coming out of South Korea. —Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of the Untold Story