The narrowness of speculative fiction on Korea
North Korean nukes, spies, and despot thrillers have as much depth as a sneaky nose pick in a busy cafe.
For a country as geopolitically charged and historically complex as Korea, one might expect a rich tapestry of speculative fiction — alternate histories, emotional futurisms, surreal dystopias — flowing from English-language writers. And yet, what we get instead is a narrow, anxious tunnel: nuclear flashpoints, espionage thrillers, evil generals with strange ideologies, and the ever-lurking threat of a rogue regime pulling the trigger.
The imaginative range is constrained, the emotional spectrum even more so. There is little in the way of subtlety, yearning, or contradiction. Unlike the richness of Korean-language fiction, English-language speculative work rarely captures what it feels like to live in the unresolved limbo of division.
When Korea appears in English-language speculative fiction, it is often not a setting but a problem. A crisis to be solved. A trigger point in a larger world order. Whether in dystopian futures involving North Korean invasions, or Tom Clancy-style thrillers where spies save the peninsula from itself, Korea is reduced to a stage on which American or Western actors perform geopolitics. The narratives are simple: good vs. evil, nuclear or not, with little time for internal complexity.
North Korean nukes, spies, and despot thrillers have as much depth as a sneaky nose pick in a busy cafe.
This stems from how Korea has been framed historically in English-speaking media and policy discourse.
The Korean War is the “Forgotten War,” and the peninsula remains stuck in a static conceptual role: a Cold War holdover, frozen in time.
It’s lazy and it’s financially convenient. There’s the Kim family ultimate evil dictatorship memes; and the Asian enemy that is not China, Hollywood tropes.
Fictional extrapolations of Korea then follow that path: static, militarized, haunted by nuclear dread. There is no room for speculative tenderness or intergenerational ache. There are almost no what-ifs about slow reunification, emotional reconciliation, or deeply personal reckonings with memory and identity.
Contrast this with Korean-language fiction — both speculative and realist — which is often saturated with themes of longing, division, and quiet tragedy. The speculative elements in Korean works rarely center on spectacular apocalypse. Instead, they evoke muted, aching futures: siblings divided by a line on a map; towns caught between surveillance and forgetting; youth haunted not by nuclear fire but by the mundane impossibility of visiting their grandparents.
Korean speculative fiction on division explores dislocation and identity through deeply personal, sometimes surreal, lenses. Even stories about defectors or inter-Korean tension often linger on interiority, not ideology. The anxiety is not about an imminent nuclear war, but about whether one can trust the memory of a border, or whether love can survive across lines that are both geographic and psychic.
These stories don’t make for easy Hollywood plots. They are not built for spectacle. And that may be why they rarely translate into English — or when they do, they are sidelined in favor of louder, cruder fare.
Another key issue is the persistence of Orientalist tropes. In much Western speculative fiction, the East is mysterious, dangerous, and emotionally unreadable. Korea — or at least the North — is treated as a cipher, an unknowable threat that resists humanization. The result is a genre that reinforces geopolitical caricature: inscrutable leaders, emotionless soldiers, cartoonish nationalism.
Rarely does English-language fiction consider what it feels like to be Korean. The longing of families separated by ideology. The generational trauma of colonialism, war, and rapid modernization. The anxiety of young people born into an unresolved national question. The fiction doesn’t ask, “What do they fear, hope, or dream?” It asks, “How do we stop them from launching missiles?”
A comparison can be made with two books from roughly the same period. Jang’s novel depicts a dystopian future unification scenario and the social impact on North and South Koreans. Lewis’ novel depicts a dystopian future conflict scenario and how an accidental war starts between the US and North Korea. What we can see is a US conceptualization of North Korea in a narrow, security frame emphasizing conflict risk and a South Korean conceptualization of North Korea in a much broader frame, emphasizing social and economic challenges of unification. At the heart of it, these two novels have fundamentally distinct conceptualizations of North Korea.
There are structural reasons for this lack of emotional range. Most English-language speculative fiction about Korea is of course written by outsiders — often with a policy or military background — who see the peninsula through the lens of strategy, not sentiment. Meanwhile, Korean authors who do write speculative fiction often don’t get translated, or if they do, are marketed narrowly as “rare peeks into a closed world,” rather than voices of human complexity.
Moreover, the U.S. and its allies still dominate publishing, and their geopolitical anxieties shape what kinds of speculative futures get imagined. Korea is not a site of quiet wonder or internal transformation. It is a buffer zone. A flashpoint. A question of what Washington should do.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Korea is full of speculative potential — technological, emotional, temporal. What would a reunified peninsula actually look like after 50 years? What happens if the border vanishes overnight, but no one knows what to do with the silence? What if ghosts walk freely from Pyongyang to Busan, demanding stories instead of surrender?
Yet these kinds of questions rarely get asked in English-language fiction. The dominant stories remain stuck on loops of missile tests, espionage, and closed-off regimes. The peninsula is imagined as a place of impending explosion, not lingering ache.
Somewhere between the real DMZ and the imagined one, a gap opens — not just in language, but in tone, in temperament, in the willingness to dwell in sorrow instead of spectacle. And in that gap, something quietly human remains untranslated.