Everything Good Dies Here: Tales from the Linker Universe and Beyond

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.

Source: publisher’s website

Contents

Part 1

The Rabbit Hole
Through the Mirror
Memoir of a Joseon Bride
Pentagon
Under the Sphinx

Part 2 – stories from the Linker Universe

The Bloody Battle of Broccoli Plain
Sea of Fog
Jezebel (Rrose Sélavy | Sydney | Leventon | Hogarth)