Scheduling an interview with the author known only as Djuna is a complicated affair. For starters, South Korea’s most prominent sci-fi writer doesn’t do in-person press. Or phone calls. Or Zoom meetings. They’ve been working under a pen name for more than two decades, publishing beloved short-story collections and novels and accumulating ardent admirers while living their day-to-day life in peaceful obscurity. But after reading their new novel Counterweight—a jaunty cyberpunk thriller about memory implantation, space colonization, and identity—I had so many questions, I knew I had to try to connect with them.
Djuna is a literary giant in Korea, but thus far, most of their work has been inaccessible to English-language readers. Today, that changes, when the brisk, propulsive translation of Counterweight hits stores, ready to earn Djuna an even wider audience. The story takes place on Patusan, a fictional tropical nation that doubles as the home of the world’s first space elevator, constructed by a Korean mega-corporation called LK. Mac, the book’s narrator, is a disillusioned LK executive investigating a lower-level employee’s increasingly bizarre behavior—and how it ties back to the recent death of the company’s CEO.
In a search for answers to all my questions about Counterweight, I asked Djuna’s English translator, Anton Hur, to act as a go-between, and the author agreed to an email exchange.
WIRED: What’s the origin story behind your pen name?
Djuna: When I bought my first computer, I joined an online service called Hitel and needed a screen name for it, and the first name I thought of went over the eight-character limit. I thought of this name then, and I’ve been using it on various services. I did not intend it to be my pen name. I would’ve spent more time on coming up with it if I had.
Where does the name itself originate from?
“Djuna” is from the American writer Djuna Barnes. But I knew it first from an Ellery Quin novel, a Romani character who is a boy. That child goes on to have his own series, which means it’s also the name of a famous literary detective. The “j” in the name is spelled with a vowel when it’s written in Korean. There’s no other special reason for the name.
What spurred your decision to publish pseudonymously? Have you ever thought about revealing your identity?
It wasn’t my intention. I used a perfectly good Korean name when I first started working. But at some point, my editors and publishers started preferring Djuna and started using that name without discussing it with me. They probably liked how it stood out. I gave up and accepted things as they were. Now I’m quite fond of it. It kind of sounds like a K-pop idol name.
Has it been difficult to protect your identity? I know there has been a massive campaign to unearth the person who publishes as “Elena Ferrante,” and I am curious if you’ve experienced something similar, and whether attitudes towards your pseudonymity have shifted since you became a public figure.
It wasn’t that hard. I guess people aren’t that interested in me. The advantage of writing under a pseudonym is that you can free yourself from Korea’s violent hierarchies surrounding academic records, where you grew up, your age, and your gender.
The disadvantage of working under a weird pseudonym is that people obsess more over it than your work. For a while, I thought I would be forever trapped in that Monty Python Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson joke.
Recently, there has been an increase in writers here in Korea who are active under pseudonyms. Last year, the nominees for the Korean Sci-Fi Awards’ webnovel category included CatG, ISteppedOnLego, Hongbi, Neon Sign (Nehreuk), Shipstick, Yeonsanho, 2-ga 0, Songeum, Sanhocho, and Choongek. Only the winner, Yeon Sanho, had a normal-sounding Korean name. So I am no longer considered to be in the realm of the unusual.
You published your debut short-story collection Butterfly War in 1997. How has the science fiction scene in South Korea changed since you began writing?
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
The current crop of science fiction can trace its lineage to the online services of the ’90s. In the 1990s, Korean sci-fi was just beginning. It’s not that we didn’t have writers. Han Nakwon was garnering notice for his YA sci-fi in the 1960s, and Bok Geo-il’s alternate history In Search of the Scream was also being noted. But there were very few instances of classical sci-fi being translated, save for a few condensed editions for young readers, which meant introducing those works first was a top priority.
Nowadays, the works of contemporary sci-fi writers writing in English is done regularly enough, but back then, we tried to start with the classics. Contemporary writers were slowly introduced later, and I will never forget my first encounter with Connie Willis’ works translated by amateurs on the online services. Willis to this day has many die-hard fans in Korea.
Were there any specific kinds of stories you remember taking off in Korea?
There was a sci-fi genre that mainstream writers were very serious about, and that was romance comics (soonjeong manhwa). You can’t discuss the history of Korean sci-fi without mentioning manhwa artists like Kang Kyeong-ok, Kim Jin, or Shin Il-sook. And there’s Cheon Gye-yong’s Netflix drama Love Alarm, which is the natural descendent of those works.
Coming into the 21st century, Korean sci-fi began to settle in, meaning that Korean sci-fi entered the mainstream for Korean readers. Nowadays it’s not unusual to see a work of Korean sci-fi on the bestseller lists. Sci-fi also gained popularity outside of literature. Since we do live in the country that made Squid Game, we can’t talk about Korean sci-fi only in terms of books anymore.
I read that you initially conceived Counterweight as a movie. Could you tell me more about how you originally imagined the project, and how it turned into the novel it is today?
Ten years ago I had a discussion with director Kyu-dong Min about making a mid-budget sci-fi movie. That’s when I thought of the space elevator, which is a grand and beautiful idea that’s been in science fiction before. But it’s not exactly cinematic, and there’s nothing much you can do with it in a movie.
I wrote a short story around the idea as a proof of concept, and wrote that out into a novel later on so I could add details. But I don’t really consider this novel as having been written for an eventual movie adaptation. Because at whatever stage of the writing, I just wrote it the way I wanted to write.
Say it is adapted into a movie, though—any dream casting or directing choices to share?
When I was writing the short story, some actors did come to mind. There was a popular Korean drama titled Super Rookie about a man who becomes a new employee at a chaebol company due to a computer error giving him full marks on his entrance exam. The chaebol in the drama was named LK, and I’ve appropriated that name to use whenever I needed a chaebol in my stories. When I was writing that story, I imagined the three main actors of that drama as my characters. But I deliberately tried not to do that when I was writing the novel version. More than anything else, it was very important that I didn’t know anything about the way the narrator Mac looked like.
Sumac Grasskamp is a character I wrote into the novel version, and I imagined Kristin Scott-Thomas in that role. I do like her as an actor, and hers was the face that first came to mind when thinking of a European woman of a certain age. But I didn’t go out of my way to make the character resemble the actor.
In Counterweight, a Korean conglomerate called LK is essentially colonizing a fictional Southeast Asian island called Patusan; a rebel force called the Patusan Liberation Front tries to sabotage LK. How would you describe the novel’s politics?
The most important thing for me was to deeply consider the relationship between Korea and the Southeast Asian countries. Until fairly recently Korea was like an isolated island, with no wherewithal to think about other countries. But the world has changed, our neighboring countries have become closer, and Korea has become something of an “advanced nation”—which led latent prejudices regarding other Asian nations to become clearer and more violently present.
I find this extremely alarming, as its mechanism is similar to the Japanese’s entrenched hate towards Koreans. These forces also serve as the constituency for Korea’s far-right government. But being a sci-fi writer, I wasn’t thinking of portraying Korea’s current situation. I wanted to depict the next step.
The next important thing was my personal experience. When I think of Southeast Asia in the 20th century, my mind goes through the filter of Western male writers like Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, or Graham Green. Which means I’ve internalized the perspective of the West. A most abnormal and ridiculous situation, which I felt I needed to somehow untether myself from.
This doesn’t change the fact that the novel is a kind of pastiche of past Western novels. Korean literary aficionados like to joke that “reading Western novels makes you start speaking like a middle-aged Englishman.” I did try to imbue as much meaning to this pastiche as I possibly could.
One of the most fascinating ideas in Counterweight is that of companies creating “virtual personas” for their own purposes—ghost workers who exist only on paper. What inspired this invention?
When you’re online a lot you tend to experience all sorts of weird and uncanny things. There were some incidents that gave me direct inspiration, but I won’t get into that too specifically. But those ideas are more realistic than they appear.
If you were putting together a science fiction syllabus for people who want to understand your influences and work, which books and films are classics in your personal canon?
Setting aside the obvious classics:
“Revolt in the Fifth Dimension.” The only episode I remember from the animated Spider-Man series by Ralph Bakshi that ran from 1967 to 1970. The sole survivor of an alien civilization laid waste by a fifth-dimensional dictator named the Skeletal Infinata passes on a library that contains all the wisdom of that fallen civilization, and Spider-Man comes into confrontation with Infinata. I was a kindergartener at the time, and the psychedelic experience of that episode was on par with what the Spider-Verse is like now.
Born in 1990. This is a sunjeong manhwa (romance comic) by Shin Il-sook published in 1988. At the end of the 20th century, aliens attack Earth, and Earth children with superpowers start being born in 1999. The main character, Crystal, is one of these 1999-born super-powered people, and she is stationed at the front lines where there are only men, and she falls in love with a drill sergeant. And there’s a twist. For a while, I’d forgotten everything about this manhwa except the main story. But upon rereading, I realized how many action descriptors I had borrowed for my works Not a God Yet and The World of Mint.
Sinister Barrier. Written by British author Eric Frank Russell, which I first read in a truly paltry condensed version for young adults. It’s very roughly written and extremely violent, but its great speed and ideas left a huge impression on young me. It hasn’t aged well, and it’s particularly criticized for its racist depiction of Asians. But you know what, back then I think I found it better for Asians to exist at all in works like this than be completely erased.
We Who Are About to … For a long time, I thought I was the only fan of this mischievous novel by Joanna Russ. It was only in the internet era when I realized how wrong I was. This book is the most ruthless depiction of marooned humans on an alien planet. Reading this book taught me that survival is not always a given, and sometimes you just have to accept death. Not to mention the fact that my living in a country where its suicidally low birth rate is being blamed completely on women makes this narrative hit very close to home.
“Is Gender Necessary? Redux.” This is not a novel. It’s an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin on writing The Left Hand of Darkness that she later expanded on. Maybe a reader with no prior knowledge of that work might mistake this writing for explosively hilarious satirical fiction. I could go on forever about The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s such an influential work for me. I recently wrote a short story with an Earthling narrator describing a world where asexual beings artificially created by human men for sexual exploitation had managed to banish all humans from Earth and create a new civilization and religion, and it would be a lie if I claimed Le Guin didn’t influence the creation of this work.
Have your feelings about Le Guin changed at all over time?
The Left Hand of Darkness is also difficult to read as is. When I first read it I thought, “Incredible how it’s possible to write a book like this in this genre,” and on my second read I thought, “Wow, this author is really white and really straight, and when she was writing this, she had no deep thoughts about her existence as a woman.” In this book, there’s a scene where an ambisexual alien with nursing breasts and a womb speaks in fascination to a Black Earthling man about the large breasts of Earthling women depicted in a photograph, and reading this part made me laugh until I almost lost my mind.
Is there any antidote for this?
The Left Hand of Darkness is a work that finds its meaning through criticism and dialog. Joanna Russ’ When It Changed, published a few years after that book, is an answer to it in a way. And there are many books coming out now that are answers to Le Guin. “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” is Le Guin’s own answer. A very slow and careful and (unintentionally) hilarious answer. The Left Hand of Darkness must be read with the short story “Coming of Age in Karhide,” which tries to correct the world depicted in the novel as much as possible. It’s not perfect, of course.
Are there any science fiction tropes you never want to see again?
All tropes have their value. It’s not a matter of which tropes one uses but how they are used. But there are tropes I deliberately avoid. Muscular, metallic, cool-masculine images. I can’t take them seriously and always end up smashing them somehow.
I’m personally glad that we are past the era where square-jawed white male characters dominated this genre. I find it fascinating how people don’t think it strange that such people stick themselves into every corner of the universe and expect everyone to just accept it. The Guardians of the Galaxy series is like that for me. Sometimes I wonder what having such unbridled confidence must feel like, but I don’t go out of my way to find out.
This seems wise.
I also want to mention an opposite experience. In Korea in 1978, there was a children’s drama titled X Squad. It was about a boy who would do the Wakanda salute to bring about his superpowers and fight bad guys. There were aliens from a planet called Ala in the show, acted by Korean male actors wearing wigs. I thought back then, “That’s so weird. Western actors ought to be used for that.” Seeing Will Poulter in golden body paint in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy made me think of that.
We are in a moment where people are speculating wildly about how generative AI will change the world, including how it will change writing. How do you think it will impact the way we live, and our creative lives?
Generative AI will provide us with the kind of luxury the Medici family were privy to in the past. We will each have a writer and translator tailored to our needs. I was especially impressed with ChatGPT and Bard’s translation abilities. The only translation programs that passed what I call “The Darkling Thrush” test were these two.
To pass this test, the AI has to translate the “thrush” in this Thomas Hardy story as the bird and not the disease when translating it into Korean. ChatGPT translated “thrush” as “sparrow,” Bard as “kingfisher.” I also ordered ChatGPT to write a mystery short story with Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert as a pair of detectives, and about three of them turned out to be rather all right.
Have all of your experiments with AI been successful?
Even with advancements in this technology, the bigger likelihood is that the work will end up as mediocre porn. The reason for this is the same as why the internet, our greatest invention that contains all the knowledge of our species, also produces lizard-people conspiracists and flat-Earthers. The things that satisfy our desires are mostly boring and horrible, and unlike the great and proud artists employed by the Medici family, AI will agree to satisfy every base desire and produce the most horrendous trash. This is what I fear more than losing my job to an AI.
