#minsoo kang

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Melancholy of Untold History | Author: Minsoo Kang | Publisher: William Morrow (2024)

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Melancholy of Untold History: A Novel

By Minsoo Kang.

[curlyhairedbibliophile]

Cover Art | New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl

“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” proclaimed Octavia E. Butler.

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color showcases emerging and seasoned writers of many races telling stories filled with shocking delights, powerful visions of the familiar made strange. Between this book’s covers burn tales of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their indefinable overlappings. These are authors aware of our many possible pasts and futures, authors freed of stereotypes and clichéd expectations, ready to dazzle you with their daring genius.

Includes stories by Kathleen Alcala, Minsoo Kang, Anil Menon, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Alex Jennings, Alberto Yáñez, Steven Barnes, Jaymee Goh, Karin Lowachee, E. Lily Yu, Andrea Hairston, Tobias Buckell, Hiromi Goto, Rebecca Roanhorse, Indrapramit Das, Chinelo Onwualu and Darcie Little Badger.

Artwork by Yoshi Yoshitani

Release date | Mar 12, 2019 Goodreads

[mirkokosmos]

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines        Minsoo Kang | Harvard University Press

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton - better known today as the robot - has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu

[anditendshowyoudexpect]

The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang

[rhetoricandlogic]

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang

August 26, 2024Gary K. Wolfe

Early in Minsoo Kang’s remarkable first novel The Melancholy of Untold History, a character known only as the historian makes an interest­ing observation about how civilizations tell their own stories. First, he says, come ‘‘tales of gods, monsters, and heroes,’’ followed by historical narratives of ‘‘important personages of the past who achieved great things in the world,’’ finally settling into the modern concern with ‘‘the lives of ordinary people, including their inner thoughts and feelings.’’ These are all, of course, varieties of storytelling, and while the argument isn’t exactly new (you can trace variations of it at least as far back as the Victorians), it also describes the basic structure of Kang’s multipart narrative, which relentlessly questions the relationships between myth, history, and fiction. The historian even suggests a few hybrid categories, like ‘‘critical fabulation’’ and ‘‘fabulist history,’’ both of which involve using the techniques of fiction to illumi­nate history and vice versa. At one point, musing about the anonymous and forgotten figures of history, the historian thinks ‘‘perhaps fiction is the only way their stories could be told.’’

Kang, a historian as well as a fiction writer (he published a collection in 2006, and has appeared in F&SF, Lightspeed, and elsewhere), is clearly fascinated by these questions, but his novel is anything but a series of dry intellectual debates (though it did seem to me to have a few dusty corners). Instead, it’s an energetic and ambitious epic covering some 3,000 years in the history of The Realm of the Grand Circle, most of which consists of a series of dynasties that evoke aspects of East Asian traditions. We’re first introduced to this world by a once-famous storyteller – now one of those nameless figures from history – who is summoned before the emperor to entertain him, on the condition that the stories never repeat themselves and are all wholly original. The tales that the storyteller concocts, involving squab­bling gods and goddesses who inhabit a nearby mountain called the Four Verdant Mothers, comprise the second and liveliest narrative bloc, spinning a convoluted and often hilarious tale involving the theft of a peach, a burping dragon, and a resultant falling out among the gods. A third narrative line follows the history of the successive dynasties of the realm and their various wars and diplomatic tricks, and military strategies, largely as understood and recreated by that contemporary historian, who teaches at Dragon Child National University–whose name makes it clear that this society is a modern descendant of those earlier dynasties. The historian made his reputation by proving his bold assertion that several centuries of his country’s accepted history were entirely fabricated by an earlier ruler, at monstrous cost to those involved. The striking image which recurs and links these disparate narratives and eras is a strange purple cloud with red lightning.

If the storyteller’s tales of gods represent myths and the historian’s discoveries represent histori­cal narrative, the historian’s own tale reflects the ordinary-people focus of the contemporary novel – almost to a fault. The central relationship – the historian’s affair with a younger colleague (conducting her own research on the suppressed history of women) – could almost be borrowed from half the academic novels ever published, and the characters tend to talk at each other in paragraph-long explanations, sometimes resort­ing to therapy-speak. Fortunately, both figures are highly articulate people with ideas that I found interesting enough to keep me intrigued. At times during these chapters, our own world seems to bleed into the tale in subtle ways; there’s a brief reference to Borges’s Tlön (from one of the most famous stories about an invented country), and the historian alludes to the Pacific Ocean and to characters from Proust and Somerset Maugham. Kang seems determined to show us that Story is as much a web as a cauldron, connecting the most ancient myths and the most contemporary anxiet­ies, with what we think of as history as a kind of mediator. Since it’s almost impossible to read The Melancholy of Untold History without coming away haunted by these questions, he’s succeeded brilliantly, and given us one of the more inventive and intellectually provocative fantasies of the year.

[sungjwoo]

Roundup of 2023’s Best Books by Korean Americans

Turns out there were a whole bunch of novels and short story collections by Korean American authors last year, quite likely the most ever — and I was one of them! Super cool news — read all about it.

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[tsanasreads]

#ReadShortStories that are technomagical (16 to 20)

This batch includes the last piece from Meet Me at the Intersection, which I have already reviewed in full, but I didn't want to skip including the last story in my roundups. I also have for you this week the first three stories from a new anthology, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. Then I accidentally started reading the John Chu story when I was having a look at the new epub format Tor.com is using to put out bimonthly groups of their published short stories (for example, January to February is here). And that's the story of how I came to read these stories.

Border Crossings by Rebecca Lim — Another autobiographical essay, this morning me focusing on our interactions and reactions to the world, especially with respect to language. Source: Meet Me at the Intersection edited by Rebecca Lim and Ambelin Kwaymullina

The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex by Tobias Buckell — What if a lot of different aliens all decided that Earth was a perfect tourist destination? Find out how mere humans live on the edges of a society that mainly relies on tourist income to Manhattan. Interesting parallels as well as interesting aliens. Source: New Suns edited by Nisi Shawl

Deer Dancer by Kathleen Alcalá — A story about a collective living arrangement in some sort of post-apocalyptic future (climate change I think). It was mostly slice-of-life, interesting but lost me a bit towards the end. Source: New Suns edited by Nisi Shawl

The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations by Minsoo Kang — I originally started reading this story on the second of two long-haul flights and it transpired that I was far too tired to take the story in. When I restarted it later, better rested, I realised I had had no idea what it was about from the first attempt. It doesn’t help that it’s written in a very dry style, in the manner of a non-fictional historical essay, and that the story itself emerges gradually. Once established it was a very interesting and amusing read, if not exactly an exciting one. Source: New Suns edited by Nisi Shawl

Beyond the El by John Chu — A story about crafting food (technomagically?) and the scare family can leave us with. And moving on. A gorgeous story, as I have come to expect from John Chu. Source: https://www.tor.com/2019/01/16/beyond-the-el-john-chu/

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