(SFF Bingo): Readymade Bodhisattva, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park

Reading in translation is a good way to discover writers who engage with themes that aren't helplessly tied down in "terminally online US-influenced Anglophone culture wars" topics. Something translated from Chinese or Polish or German isn't guaranteed to be original or mind-blowing, but it has an increased chance of showing me a different perspective that isn't The Current Thing. So I was optimistic when I picked up "Readymade Bodhisattva," an anthology of short stories (and excerpt from longer works) originally published in South Korea from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Unfortunately, most of the stories didn't click for me, for one reason or another. In many cases, it felt like the authors were kind of regurgitating tropes without creating characters I got invested in or worldbuilding that I cared about. I don't want to generalize or jump to conclusions from these selections, of course: it might just be that the editors' tastes are bleaker than mine! But for me, there wasn't much new or exciting. Here is a brief, and jaded, table of contents:

• what if a robot achieved enlightenment (or realized it had been enlightened all along?)
• what if women solved sexism by exiling all the men, but there was still classism and economic inequality?
• what if a few underground Japanese occupiers survived in Korea after World War II and had a secret radio network where they insulted the stupid, pathetic Koreans, and pointed out that the 1960s' coups/rigged elections was just evidence that Koreans are helpless losers who can't govern themselves? (This is alternate history, so I guess it qualifies as SF, but there was very little speculative about it and the over-the-top villain narrator was just...a lot of yikes. The introduction to this piece was also a lot of pretentions academic jargon, do not want.)
• what if a woman really wanted to go to space, but then she got paralyzed? (There are a lot of Go metaphors in this one, I wanted to enjoy it more than I did--I think maybe if it had been longer and had room to be more show-y and less infodumpy? Or I just wanted more board games, whatever.)
• what if robots are like the ship of Theseus, how do you know if someone is still the same person?
• what if our bodies were still on Earth, but our minds got uploaded to a spaceship somewhere?
• what if an alien species' rite of passage was to have thirty-eight boys grow up on planets like Earth and hunt each other to the death over the course of centuries? (This was kind of over-the-top and maybe supposed to be humorous, but I couldn't really suspend disbelief for the "is this what happens to everyone?" angle handwaved at the beginning.)
• what if someone who killed themselves in this timeline is still alive in another timeline, because of, like, quantum stuff?
• what if South Koreans and North Koreans were still killing each other on alien planets, even though it's been years and no one really remembers why? (This was written in 2008, but in terms of "we're terrified of this isolated country because they're all sick with an alien virus, better lockdown really hard just to be sure" it anticipated COVID well. :/ )
• what if robots made humans obsolescent, and the robots pondered "hmm are these human feelings I have? very mysterious?" while the humans played Russian roulette to try to earn money to broker their way out? (Shades of "Squid Game." Written in 2011.)
• what if adults kept secrets from kids all the time because they're patronizing and think they know everything, but really, despite their condescension, they mean well and want to protect kids?
• what if aliens destroyed the world and I was sad so I wrote a journal about it?

I guess for the sake of whoever reads this, I'd better start by explaining in detail what happened just prior to that two-month mark. Though to be truly honest, I doubt that anyone will ever read this. I mean, who the hell is going to survive this place? And it's unlikely that anyone who does will want to read this stupid story. Why would anyone want to read something as depressing as this, a record not of hope but of despair? And yet I have no choice but to write, to record.

If this is supposed to be a takedown of the genre as a whole, it's successful! But if it's supposed to be breaking the fourth wall to be "ha ha, this is so weird, just like a movie" ...you're not making me want to read your story.

The story I found most original, by some distance, was "The Sky Walker" by Yun I-hyeong. Eight centuries after nuclear war, humans have different beliefs about how Earth bounced back--was it a dragon deity? Kindly aliens? Just human resilience? Meanwhile, in an area out beyond an enormous wall (that was originally the limits of a radiation zone), the descendants of exiles and a few others demonstrate gravity-manipulation powers that make them incredible trampolinists.

They were standing perpendicular to the Wall like a handful of nails that had been hammered into it, their bodies parallel to the ground. On the ground directly below them, the lengths of their shadows were equal to their erect bodies. For a split second, I expected them to fall towards the ground, tumbling down, but of course nothing like that happened. After slowly approaching them, I plopped myself down on the ground and sat facing the Wall. I lay back until I felt the soles of my sneaker placed firmly against the gray Wall, the ground beneath my back. By then, they'd begun heading down the Wall toward me.

And from the Dragon Scriptures:

But piercing that mantle of darkness, a colossal white Dragon flew from the sky, Its wings covered the earth and Its body glowed with light so bright that no human dared to gaze upon It. With eyes blazing like jewels and sharp fangs as hard as steel, the Serpent was merciless. As It opened Its mouth and inhaled the air, It sucked the black clouds in the sky like meek cattle into Its body. As It spread Its wings and beat the air, the sky recovered its blue and the sun regained its light. As the Serpent set foot on the earth, humans scattered away, fearing for their lives. Wherever Its breath touched, flowers rebloomed, frozen rivers began flowing, and dead animals rose to walk and roam the earth. When a few courageous humans approached the Serpent and asked for Its name, with a voice that shook the heaven and land and sea It answered, I am Drakis, who will save you from this ruin.

 

And there's even an "Ender's Game" type of "the enemy's gate is down" reorientation/perception! The end sort of trails off to something vaguely about "even if you can't make a revolutionary change in your own abilities/the social order, you can at least push the limits and create a little more freedom than was there yesterday"? But the setup was very compelling, I wanted more unique worlds like this.

Another small nitpick: the introductory essays are written in a weird font where the capital S looks more like a § (section sign). So every time they talked about §outh Korea, §eoul, or §F in general, it threw me. Fortunately the stories themselves had a different font.

Bingo: Author of Color, 5+ short stories