본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

A New Materialist Analysis of Bo-young Kim’s Ecological SF - Focusing on Whale Snows Down(2025)

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.81~108
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.2.003
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : May 10, 2026
  • Accepted : June 15, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Namkyung Yeon 1

1이화여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

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.

Statistics

  • 7 Viewed
  • 7 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2024 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search