North Korea
Entry updated 8 September 2025. Tagged: International.
(For sf activity before 1945, see the entry for pre-partition Korea.)
In North Korea, sf initially thrived as a genre aligned with socialist and communist modernity. Early stories – at first translations of Soviet Union sf – appeared in magazines like Kwahak ui Segye ["World of Science"]. Domestic production soon followed, with authors such as Sok Yun-gi and Pae Pung producing Soviet-inspired didactic narratives that cast science as an altruistic instrument of national and global development, positioned in stark contrast to the self-serving, profit-driven science of capitalist regimes. From the late 1960s onward, the ascendance of the Kim Il Sung personality cult sharply narrowed the parameters of permissible speculation. North Korean sf was effectively placed in a narrative straitjacket, as the regime viewed the genre's traditional emphasis on the Sense of Wonder being, if not ideologically suspect, then at least pointless. Only those works that rigidly affirmed party orthodoxy and extolled the imagined triumphs of "Juche science" were allowed to circulate – typically miraculous inventions such as Robot labourers as allegorical proof that strict adherence to party directives would ensure a radiant future.
Despite restrictions, sf did persist within North Korea's youth literature and gradually returned to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. North Korean second leader, Kim Jong Il (circa 1941-2011), an ardent cinephile and a sf fan, outlined his vision of propaganda cinema in On the Art of the Cinema (1973). He later oversaw the production of Pulgasari (1985), a Tokusatsu and Kaiju film heavily inspired by Japanese cinema. Directed by the kidnapped South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, Pulgasari has since gained cult status abroad. Likewise, Kim Jong Il was responsible for resurgence and slight liberalization of North Korean literary sf, personally endorsing Hwang Chŏngsang's Green Ears of Rice (1988), a novel about North Korean Scientists who develop cancer-curing plant. Much of North Korea's more recent sf has been dominated by the prolific Yi Kŭmch'ŏl, whose distinctive fusion of Cold War Technothriller, espionage narrative, and futuristic spectacle has defined the genre's contemporary form. His stories marry elaborate gadgets with vehemently anti-Western rhetoric, targeting the usual triad of ideological enemies: the United States, South Korea, and Japan. In The Black Fog of the Oilfield (2000), Japanese agents attempt to sabotage and expropriate the secrets of a North Korean man-made oilfield; in "Change Course" (2004 Chosǒn munhak ["Korean Literature"]), North Korean Antigravity technology thwarts an American plot to destroy a passenger plane carrying defecting Russian scientists. While such stories may provoke incredulity abroad, they are regarded within the DPRK as among the most exciting and forward-looking contributions to the national literature. By the mid-2010s, the corpus of North Korean sf had exceeded one hundred works – predominantly short stories – most shaped by didactic nationalism, though a few betray flashes of narrative ingenuity and a surprising awareness of global genre conventions. Nearly a fifth had been authored by Yi.
One of the more striking paradoxes of North Korean science fiction lies in the conspicuous absence of the Kim dynasty from its imaginative landscape. Despite being instruments of ideological conformity, works of speculative fiction avoid depicting the Supreme Leaders or their family members altogether. This omission is hardly surprising: fiction produced under totalitarian regimes is subject to both overt state censorship and internalized self-censorship, with the risks for overstepping ideological boundaries extending far beyond simple rejection. Much as Soviet sf seldom dared to fictionalize its party leadership, and Chinese sf (see China) only rarely touches upon politically sensitive alternative worlds, North Korean sf steers well clear of any scenario that might imply instability, dissent, or the nonexistence of the DPRK – whether through Alternate History, Dystopia, or Far Future projections. While the creative constraints of the 1960s and 70s may have loosened slightly, North Korean sf remains among the most rigidly circumscribed in the world – tellingly when compared to the more daring speculative traditions of its Soviet or Chinese counterparts. [PKo]
see also: Pulgasari.
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