Asian SF/F (not Japan)

[oyceter]

Hi! I am lazy and depending on the goodwill of the internet to help with research!

So: tell me about Asian SF/F!

It must be:

• Created in Asia by Asians


• NOT from Japan


• Any medium


• Bonus points if I can get my hands on it (I am in the US and read/understand Mandarin Chinese)


• Extra bonus points for SF/F from and/or about Southeast Asia or South Asia

I have a slightly better sense of SF/F created in Asia and popular in the US, though if you have notes for your specific country, that would also be good! Please note: NOT from Japan.

For self: rachelmanija's notes on Indian SF/F

ETA:
Korea:
- Pahanjip (Korean folklore + Tang China ghost hunters, manhwa)
- Bride of the Water God (Korean folklore (?) + alternate world + beast bridegroom, manhwa)

China:
- Swordsman II

Comments

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Would the six book series that included "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" count as fantasy?

[oyceter]

I... don't know. I don't count all wuxia as fantasy personally, but I do count things like Swordsman II (Asia Undefeated/Dong Fang Bu Bai) as fantasy, given the magical transgenderism and etc. What fantasy elements are in it? I don't remember much from the movie, but that's all I know.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

[totally spying on the replies]

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

yours is the first comment I got from tracking this post. Damnit, I'm not the only one...

[vonnie-k.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, there is a fairly robust horror-movie tradition in Korea. Some of that might fall into SF/F stream, like the mega blockbuster Host (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_%28film%29), which is sort of like a Korean version of Godzilla. It's a fun flick, even for those who don't like monster movies. It's meatier (heh) than how it looks in the first glance and works well as both a satire and an excellent family drama. It should be readily available on DVD.

The paranormal romance Lake House, starring Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves, was based on the Korean movie It Mare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Mare). It might be netflixable, although I fear the movie may be a bit too fluffy for Wiscon.

[shewhohashope.livejournal.com]

Krrish and Koi... Mil Gaya?

I am drawing a blank mostly. 'Return of the Condor Heroes' goes from wuxia to full on fantastic when a giant talking eagle mentors the hero?

[chomiji]

I haven't thought of him for years, but are you familiar with Thai writer Somtow Sucharitkul (a/k/a S. P. Somtow) ? I enjoyed a couple of his things way back when (Light on the Sound comes to mind), although he tends to be a bit too horrific for me.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I read part of his memoirs, Jasmine Nights, about a decade ago - IIRC he was born into a very traditional upper-class (possibly noble; I don't remember) Thai household. I read his SF book Mallworld long and long ago, and loved it and reread it lots, but it's been over a decade since the last time I've read it.

He's also the artistic director of the Bangkok Opera and Siam Philharmonic Orchestra (http://www.somtow.com). A multitalented fellow.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

I picked up a K-drama called something like Wang: 4 Gods (from what I could pick out of the english on the box). Definitely fantasy.

Steven Chow's Chinese Odessey (yes, it's based on the Monkey King, but oh so, loosely, Pandora's box is used to travel through time in this)

A Chinese Tall Tale (has aliens vs. wuxia heroes)

Legend of Zu (wuxia, but fighting formless evil, plus evil fairy!)

Wesley's File ( terrible terrible sci fi w/Shu Qi)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

"called something like Wang: 4 Gods (from what I could pick out of the english on the box). Definitely fantasy."

Full translated title is "The Legend of the First King's Four Gods," usually shortened to "Legend" or "The Four Gods." (Watching it now myself.)

Hong Kong science fiction movies

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Heroic Trio (three female superheroes battle a villain with a flying decapitator); Wesley's Mysterious File (incoherent but definitely sf; not saved by the presence of Andy Lau.) Lots more; those are just the two that immediately come to mind.

Essential HK movie site: http://www.lovehkfilm.com/

Re: Hong Kong science fiction movies

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, how could I forget Heroic Trio, it's a classic!

More recent, and in more of a Twilight Zone/M. Night Shyamalan sort of horror vein, The Eye (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eye_(2002_film)); blind Hong Kong violinist gets a cornea transplant, but along with her restored vision she's now seeing ghosts and having premonitions of disasters; the corneas are traced back to a poor village girl in Thailand who'd had the same unwanted talent and was viewed as a witch because of it...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmm...you might try the kdrama I'm watching now, Legend. It gets called wuxia, but really isn't. More epic fantasy based on Korean history and mythology set in ancient Korea. It was huge, so will probably get a stateside release soon, but can be DLed/burned now. There's also the Dokebi Bride and Land of Silver Rain manhwa's, which are based on the same folklore, but very, very different. Both are licensed.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

HIGHLY HIGHLY SECOND the Dokebi Bride rec.

[jiawen]

I don't mean to spill any beans, but have you read any Ni Kuang 倪匡? He writes honest-to-goodness SF in Chinese. I think I have a book of his stuff -- I should really try to read some of it. I'll bring it to the panel.

There are some other assorted Chinese SF things I'll bring, too.

2046 probably counts, too.

By the way, I'm planning on bringing a CD of Taiwanese pop music for you. :)

[oyceter]

By the way, I'm planning on bringing a CD of Taiwanese pop music for you. :)

Eeeee! Thank you! Also, oooo, I have been trying to Google short SF pieces I can read online. Will email you all links when I have read through to weed stuff out.

[bravecows.livejournal.com]

Not sure if this quite counts, but since somebody mentioned horror, Russell Lee's True Singapore Ghost Stories (http://www.flameoftheforest.com/books/books1.html) formed a significant part of my childhood reading. "Ghost stories" is something of a misnomer -- I recall reading essays about how the hidden Satanism in pop music as well as stories about the various local hantu (ghosts/demons)!

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

It's very sad that the only remotely SF/F item I can think of from the Philippines is Dyesebel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyesebel), and that's not exactly easily accessible. I fail in this regard. (Though I will say that there is a current discussion within Filipino literary circles about what SF/F is to them and defining it, so perhaps there is a reason I suffer from epic fail.)

This is more along the lines of horror but there is Island, a manhwa by Kyung-Il Yang and In-wan Youn. It has demons, ghosts, exorcists, and an undead serial killer who used to be a Buddhist monk (Esoteric Buddhism, specifically). It also explores the legacy of cultural hatred between Korea and Japan. It used to be licensed by TOKYOPOP but unfortunately, it's since gone out of print.

The creators also have another series called Shin Angyo Onshi which, despite being published in Japan (though I think this is a case of simultaneous publication in Japan & Korea), draws upon all sorts of Korean folklore, myth, legend, and history that I don't even know where to begin.

[oyceter]

Though I will say that there is a current discussion within Filipino literary circles about what SF/F is to them and defining it

Really? That is awesome! Are there links or anything? I have zero idea of the state of SF/F in Asia in general, so people there talking about the genre and how they fit in would be MADE OF WIN!

[jiawen]

Here's another good resource I just found.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/early-bengali-science-fiction.html

Found it!

This is effing awesome. Read!

EDIT: http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/where-women-rule-and-mirrors-are.html

This too.

They were in deadbro a looong time back, and yay finding them.

[shati.livejournal.com]

Eric Gamalinda has a lot of work posted on his website (http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeslrlq/gamalinda/id9.html), including a bunch of sf short stories. ("People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)" [here (http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeslrlq/gamalinda/id53.html)] is the only one I've read. It is creepy and compelling.) AFAIK, he was born and educated in Manila, and is in the US now.

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

Comics-wise, just read "Ramayan 3392 AD", a could've-been-cracktastic postapocalyptic future version of the Ramayana. But the writing (by Deepak Chopra) was so abysmal that I can't recommend it, even though the art was lovely. (Well, mostly lovely, but I was annoyed by the American comic book trope of every woman in the piece being stacked to here and prancing around in various forms of bikini. The men were equally buff and half-naked, which I find almost as annoying, and overall cliched.) The dialogue went beyond wood into petrified wood. I'm told there's a do-over out there somewhere with better writing, but I'm afraid to try it after being burned this badly.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Oh, damn, I was looking curiously at that.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

You probably know more about manhwa than I do, but I really like:

Min-Woo Hyung's Priest series. It has a pretty neat art style that is both angular and gorgeous. The protagonist is a priest who made a deal with a devil, as is now undead. The non-linear plotline takes place primarily in the American Wild West, but also in the Crusades and the modern day. The story is very much about redemption and faith, and there are angels as characters. I should note that there's violence, though, if that bothers you.

Kang Won Kim's I.N.V.U. and The Queen's Knight. I.N.V.U. read a lot better when I was in high school, but The Queen's Knight is about a protagonist who is visiting Germany when she falls into a cliff and is transported to another world, where she becomes a queen. I've only made it through four volumes so far, but it seems like it has the potential to be a fun romance.


Also....I will be naughty and slip in a recommendation for CLAMP's 1-volume Legend of Chun Hyang, which is based on a historical Korean figure. But, alas, it is from Japan, so I won't go into detail.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Are you interested in painting? Some of my favorite SFF digital painters are Asian (mostly Chinese, now I think of it). I can look up some websites if you like?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Piggybacking on this comment: Comickers Magazine put out two artbooks with articles and some tutorials that have been translated into English and published here. One of them is all Japanese artists, but the other has Chinese and Korean artists as well (http://www.amazon.com/Comic-Artists-Manga-Manhwa-Manhua/dp/0060589248).

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's any good, but I have had Deepak Chopra's Arthurian novel kicking around on my huge stack of Arthurian research for a while now.

[deepad]

Alright, bear in mind that apparently my Indian literary memory seems to go into hibernation when I am in Minneapolis and I will probably leave out the best name, or something.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata are NOT fantasy in my opinion, nonetheless, given how predominantly they feature in 'mythical' retellings, it seems worthwhile to have read them. My personal reccomendation is slogging through translations from the critical Sanskrit unabridged versions--the character development in the Mahabharata is stunning, and the Valmiki Ramayana is far more nuanced and gray-shaded than later, more popular versions like the Tulsi or Kamban Ramayana.

Nala and Damayanti is another great love story with mythic roots (talking messenger swans! Demons disguised as dice!) It would be fun to do a retelling of that someday.

Vikram and Betaal is a long running stories inside stories collection involving a conversation between a King and a Vampire (although personally I see him more as a ghoul than a vampire in the western tradition.)

The Hitopadesh and Panchatantra are two collection of fables that feature talking animals--they are more like Aesop (for which they were the source) than contemporary fantasy, but there is magic in them.

Vikram Seth's 'Beastly Tales from Here and There' is a collection of animal stories in verse that has elements of fantasy in that they have personalities.

Sulman Rushdie's books are considered magic realism; Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses especially. His YA book 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories' is fantasy (and a great fun read!).

Subhadra Sen Gupta writes historical fiction that skirts on the edge of fantasy (but not really.)

Ruskin Bond has a collection of ghost stories that are not, imho, as good as his more realistic stories, but nonetheless well-written.

R. K. Narayan's 'The English Teacher' could be considered fantasy because i deals with life after death. (Its also a fabulous novel.)

And then there are a bunch of TV shows like Chandrakanta and Captain Vyom that I have repressed because they were so ghastly...

If I remember more stuff, I will let you know.

[deepad]

See! I knew I'd remember more after I hit 'post'.

Satyajit Ray's film 'Goopi Gain Bagha Bain' was humourous fantasy that I remembered loving when I was a wee one. He also wrote a series of detective novels about a man called Feluda, which, though my memory is misty, seemed to contain some supernatural elements. There are some good English translations of the Feluda novels and short stories IIRC, and he made a film called Shonar Kila based on one of them.

Oh! I remember a TV show way back for teens called 'Indradhanush' that had some sci-fi elements, that I remember enjoying. Perhaps Rachel remembers it?

[redrose3125.livejournal.com]

It's manhwa, I really liked Les Bijoux

[octopedingenue]

The closest I can think of offhand is Snow, Fire, Sword, which is set in faux-Indonesia and relies on Indonesian mythos; the author was born in and spent early childhood in Indonesia, but she's of French descent.

SAWNET is a great brief resource, especially for kidlit. The Essential Guide to World Comics is a decent starting point: based merely on what it gets VERY VERY WRONG about manga I would not trust the rest of its factual authority farther than I could fling it, but I plan to get it from the library again because it has lots of names of Thai/Indian/Chinese/Korean series, with scans, to start tracking down elsewhere. (It actually made me tear up at one point; in the brief (ostensibly factual?) section on Cambodian comics, there was a bit about how the section was so brief because the massacres there likely cut back development of homegrown comic artists in comparison to surrounding Asian comic scenes.)

I am totally stalking this post for book-ordering-at-work purposes, FYI. Tiny awesome indie store SFF sections FTW!

[octopedingenue]

P.S. what zomg I have been flailing through a Pahanjip pimp-post all weekend!! Posting it tomorrow before you fully eat my brain.

[magistera.livejournal.com]

My boyfriend (who is Indian) really likes the Shakti line of comics, which are based in Indian mythology, sometimes with an SF twist. Unfortunately, the only one I've read myself is The Sadhu, and frankly I can't recommend it (rape for the purposes of manpain is a squick of mine), but he swears the other titles are better, so I guess that's a sort of secondhand rec. They're on my to-read list, anyway.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

OK, this is not going to be useful, but if you or anyone else knows it, I'd love to find this: once, on play.com,* while I was buying Shiri (http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/122750/Shiri/Product.html) (Korean film about an assassin) I saw a link to another Korean film set in the mid 21st century, and featuring timetravel back to our present. I think it was a sort of "time corps protecting the timeline/good cop-bad cop" type of film.

*(playusa.com has region 1 dvds).

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I've asked my flist (http://daegaer.livejournal.com/887035.html) to chime in if they know anything that would fit requirements.

[giving-ground.livejournal.com]

Wonderful Days (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0353014/) which was released in English as Sky Blue. Korean animated sci-fi, futuristic setting, Earth heavily polluted, etc. Just thought I'd mention it. (Linked over here by daegaer.)

[melannen.livejournal.com]

All I've got is The City Trilogy (http://www.librarything.com/work/2153344/book/23752835) by Chang Hsi-Kuo, very much written in an SFF genre, which was published in China in the 1980s and came out in an omnibus English translation a few years ago - I have no idea how easy it is to find in the original, but the English translation occasionally turns up at libraries and used book sales.