Lee, Chang-rae
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1965- ) South Korean-born author, in US from infancy; the complexity of this background is reflected in his first and best-known novel, Native Speaker (1995), and underlies much of his succeeding work, none of it with any fantastic content until On Such a Full Sea (2014), a Dystopia set in a moderately distant Near Future America, in the Ecologically-beleaguered setting known as B-Mor, a Keep-like enclave built on the ruins of Baltimore, Maryland. The residents of B-Mor live under threat of a plague which inevitably kills its victims. The hierarchy-ridden world of B-Mor, whose exam-based but dubious meritocracy can be read as a Satire of South Korea today, offers successful citizens an exit to one of the "Charter" settlements, whose suburban nature is clearly satirical of modern America. The world of On Such a Full Sea (2014) is conveyed with a metaphor-prone abstractedness typical of the Mainstream Writer of SF. [JC]
Chang-rae Lee
born Seoul, South Korea: 29 July 1965
works (highly selected)
- On Such a Full Sea (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014) [hb/]
links
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