KJCKorea
Journal Central

The purpose of this paper is to explore the popular narrative significance of works from Jung Bo-ra’s early and mid-career fantasy fiction that employ the conventions of horror, using a cultural genealogical approach. Chapter 1 critically examines the impact that the judging panel’s description of Jung Bo-ra—as “an author who traverses the boundaries of magical realism, horror, and science fiction”—made when Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker International Prize, on subsequent research trends, and presents the rationale for analyzing Jung Bo-ra’s novels through a cultural genealogical lens. Chapter 2 examined how the genre conventions of K-horror, epitomized by Home of the Legends, and J-horror, referred to as Japanese ghost stories, form the foundation of Jung Bo-ra’s horror. Chapter 3 focuses on Jung Bo-ra’s background as a scholar of Eastern European literature and translator, analyzing how Slavic fairy tales and folk tales, as well as the tragic events of modern and contemporary Eastern European history, are appropriated in her novels as forms of alienation and horror. Chapter 4 examines how Jung Bo-ra appropriates Stephen King and Viktor Shklovsky—whom she herself has identified as creative sources of her horror—to explore what Jung Bo-ra’s horror ‘defamiliarizes’ and what kinds of fears it generates through this process. As of 2026, Jung Bo-ra occupies a unique position within the Korean literary and cultural landscape. Much like the labels ‘socially critical horror’ or ‘the protesting writer’ that follow her, Jung Bo-ra’s novels are often understood—or misunderstood—as a utilitarian form driven by the objectives of social criticism and transformation. However, a review of Jung Bo-ra’s early and mid-career works—produced primarily for the online literary magazine Mirror since her debut in 2007—reveals that the origins of her fiction lie in a fascination with the sheer pleasure derived from scary and bizarre stories. The fact that the horror provided by Jung Bo-ra’s work can offer readers a unique kind of satisfaction demonstrates one way in which horror today gains vitality by intertwining with adjacent genres and being reproduced.

In this paper, I aim to discuss how utopia and heterotopia are not concepts that stand in opposition to one another as fantasy and reality, but rather how heterotopia can exist even within utopia, and how the two are in a mirror-like relationship, much like twins. I seek to demonstrate that a utopia transposed into reality is not a beautiful and peaceful place, but rather one that overlaps with heterotopias of crisis and deviance. Furthermore, I aim to show how an individual emerges from their inner heterotopia to confront society. Every individual possesses an inner heterotopia for personal growth, but every society possesses a heterotopia of crisis and deviance that serves to maintain its order and well-being. Moreover, these spaces are inevitably linked to utopia. I intend to discuss the two spaces—utopia and heterotopia—which are presented in the science fiction works of Kim Cho-yeop and Duna as if they were the two sides of a mirror. First, using works such as Kim Cho-yeop’s Why Don’t the Pilgrims Return? and Duna’s Crossing Beyond the Mirror as examples, I would like to discuss those who leave utopia to confront the real world. While those sent to utopia are the disabled, the poor, and the sick, it is primarily children who occupy the spaces of the attic and the basement. I will illustrate how children escape from the heterotopias of the attic and basement to encounter a “different” world through Lee Gyul-hee’s The Attic Alien and Duna’s Where’s Your Dad? and The King of Heaven. In this paper, heterotopias—which create fissures in utopia and challenge other places in reality—are viewed as “spaces of subversion” against the existing order. Change in the world does not originate from the “center” but rather from the “periphery”—that is, from heterotopias. It is for this very reason that this paper focuses on those who venture “outside” Utopia and those who step “outside” from basements and attics. Moving beyond the off-Earth utopias of science fiction from around the 2020s, we must address the issues facing marginalized groups—such as women, the elderly, people with disabilities, children, and adolescents—through the heterotopic spaces that constitute “other” places right here and now. This raises both the necessity and the imperative to geopolitically reposition them from the periphery to the center.

Recently, Bo-young Kim's works have not only encountered the SF phenomenon as a form of domestic speculative feminism but are also moving toward demonstrating a clear ‘response-ability’ to global ecological trends. This paper analyzes her works that address the ecological crisis through virtual reality, artificial intelligence, deep-sea organisms, and space fungi—products of high technology—focusing on her recent collection, Whale Snows Down(2025), through the lenses of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad. In "Loosely Identical You," a future where transmitters are commercialized reveals the illusion of individualism through the chain of extinction and creation at the atomic level, making us realize that we are nomadic beings becoming ‘other’ as the Zoe(vitality) of the life-death continuum. "Ghost Forest is Falling" utilizes the multi-species agency of a closed space habitat to restore an Earth where the principle of symbiosis has been broken due to war and the mass production of non-degradable plastics. ‘Sancheon,’ a space for both scientific and thought experiments, is reborn as a symbiotic ecosystem of eating, being eaten, rotting, and generating, suggesting the possibility of partially restoring the Earth. Finally, "Looking at the Flat Rock" and "Even If It’s Just a Shell" embody the quantum mechanical principle of "intra-action"—a mutual constitution where the act of observation intervenes in the process of materialization within a virtual world of data. These stories highlight the agency of artificial intelligence, which creates new narratives with the deceased in virtual reality, and the people who protect a village’s communal rock over private property even under capacity constraints. Through this, we can confirm the importance of discourse involved in the ethical generation of the material world. As such, Kim's recent SF demonstrates a philosophy of connection that traverses diversity and heterogeneity from the perspective of New Materialism, representing ‘otherwise stories’ that confront the crisis of the Anthropocene. These are stories of non-humans becoming-with humans, and ‘geo-stories’ on a planetary scale that engage in string figuring across borders and species boundaries. By weaving together the materiality of refugees, AI, virtual worlds, and ecology with the philosophies of care, connection, and symbiosis, Kim shares the wisdom needed to break through the current predicament of the Anthropocene.