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On the Origin of Species and Other Stories

Author:
Translated by: ,
Publisher: , 2021
Original title: 진화 신화 | 멀리 가는 이야기, 2010
Link to online store *

The debut English-language collection of one of South Korea’s most distinctive and accomplished sci-fi authors

Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.

Bo-Young Kim (born 1975) won the inaugural Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Award with her first published novella in 2004 and has gone on to win the annual South Korean SF Novel Award three times. In addition to writing, she regularly serves as a lecturer, juror and editor of sci-fi anthologies, and served as a consultant to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho’s earlier sci-fi film Snowpiercer. She has novellas forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2021. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea, with her family.

Source: publisher’s website

LKL adds: the collection contains the following stories and essays. (We assume that all translations are by Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell except where specifically credited otherwise)

  • A Brief Reflection on Breasts
  • Scripter
  • Between Zero and One (tr Eunhae Jo and Melissa Mei-lin Chan)
  • An Evolutionary Myth (tr Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar)
  • Last of the Wolves
  • On the Origin of Species
  • Star’s Shine in Earth’s Sky
  • On the Origin of Species – And What Might Have Happened Thereafter
  • Afterword (by Sunyoung Park)

LKL says:

An amazingly inventive and imaginative collection of short sci-fi stories

LKL rating: score-2score-2score-2score-2score-2. Read our review of this book here.

External links:

* Where the book is available from a number of sources, they are prioritised as follows: (1) Amazon UK site, or Bookshop.org for the more recent uploads (2) Amazon US site (3) Other sites in US or Europe, including second-hand outlets (4) LTI Korea, where the title is advertised as available from there (5) Onlines stores in Korea. Links to Bookshop.org and Amazon UK site contain an affiliate code which, should you make a purchase, gives a small commission to LKL at no additional cost to you.