Script

This is My Dark Path.

As an author, I love stories of action, adventure, and daring. I enjoy science fiction and thrillers. (Tangentially, you should go check out my novels, Like Clockwork, Seeing by Moonlight, A Sickness in Time and Arcade, all for sale on the My Dark Path website). But for now, I want to tell you about someone else’s story, a sci-fi thriller about espionage. In this story, a young female scientist discovers an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid is estimated to contain thirty-billion tons of rare minerals that could be used to improve life for everyone on earth and transform the world by ensuring enough resources for everyone. She proposes moving the asteroid into geosynchronous orbit above Earth as a second moon, albeit on to be mined and the minerals easily transported to Earth then for peaceful use. The scientists of an evil rival space program from a terrorist nation do everything they can to stop the plan and steal the asteroid for their own selfish purposes, but a patriotic male astronaut is able to help her secure the asteroid over their heroic and altruistic nation. Peace reigns, and a brighter future is guaranteed for all, despite the actions of the rogue nation.

This story is called Course No. 651 and it is by Li Geum-Cheol, one of North Korea’s most popular and prolific writers of science fiction. The rogue nation in the story is the United States, where the evil NASA attempts to steal the asteroid from the patriotic scientists and astronauts of North Korea. The story imagines a future in which the center of science is not in the United States, Europe, Japan or China, but in North Korea, whose technology, use of space, and benevolence towards the people of the world make it a beacon for scientific, medical, and technological progress.

Here on My Dark Path, we’ve looked at some dark stories from North Korea – assassinations, abductions, and the problematic actions of the rulers of the Hermit Kingdom, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK.  But today we look to see how the people of North Korea imagine the future, how these stories are not too different from speculative imagining that writers engage in across the world.  In short, we’re going down a not-so-dark path to the future with North Korean science fiction.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to My Dark Path where I explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll check us out on X, Youtube and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com. We also want to thank our growing group of Patreon supporters.  Check out our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow that we’re calling “Secrets of the Soviets.”  If you’re interested, head on over to our website and think about becoming one of our Patreon supporters.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s head to the stars with North Korea in episode 59, Secret Visions – the Untold Stories of North Korean Science Fiction.

PART ONE

The Korean Peninsula has a long and storied history, the people there developing their own language, alphabet, religion, culture, and arts despite being, and influenced by two powerhouses on either side: China to the North and west and Japan across the Sea of Japan to the East.  From 1910 to 1945, Korea was a Japanese colony. Japan, as we discussed in our episode on the North Korean abduction project, attempted to assimilate Korea into Japan and eliminate Korean language and culture. During the Japanese occupation, all education was carried out in Japanese, all government documents were in Japanese, the Japanese were completely in charge of Korean government and any and all Korean elites were Japanese-speaking individuals who had assimilated well.  At the end of the war, the Soviet Union entered the Korean peninsula from the north and the United States had entered from the south, meeting up at the 38th parallel. Each side sought out like-minded Koreans to help them set up their style of government, matching what was occurring in Germany in Europe at the time. The difference is, Germany was a defeated enemy, occupied by the victors. Korea was a nation colonized and enslaved by Japan and now occupied by two other foreign powers.

Supposedly the occupying powers were only present to help Korea achieve independence and get back on its feet after decades of Japanese occupation, but the Cold War had already begun, and the so-called first and second worlds were already working hard to develop spheres of influence. Under the Americans and Soviets, two incompatible governments were set up in the South and the north. The Americans were convinced by their allies in the south to give South Korea independence at the earliest possible date, free from both American and Soviet domination. The Americans agreed, but the Soviets believed the Americans had broken the agreement to make a unified Korea that could select its own form of government, and were trying to separate the south from the north, believing all of Korea would be communist when the opportunity arose. Korea then become the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north.

War ruled the Korean peninsula from 1950, when the North, believing the Soviets and Chinese would aid them no matter what, invaded the South, to 1953, when the South had pushed back to the 38th parallel and the conflict seemed a stale mate, so a cease fire was declared. Under the terms of the armistice, a four-kilometer strip between the two nations was established, known as the DMZ – the demilitarized zone.  A “truce village” was established at Panmunjom in the DMZ where exchanges can take place.

North Korean culture was firmly established under Soviet models.  In 1949, China had become the People’s Republic of China, so North Korea had two communist” big brothers to aid in the development of its society and culture. Under Kim Il-Sung, handpicked by the Soviets to lead the new North Korea, whose cult of personality and mythic history continued to grow even after (especially after) his death in 1994, the dominant cultural mode was called socialist realism.  All art must serve the people, and specifically the revolution, inspiring all the join the people against oppression and imperialism. The Great Leader, as he was known, encouraged following Soviet socialist realist models to develop a new North Korean culture, to separate it from traditional Korean culture.

Science fiction, as a genre, has a long and storied development in the west. If we wish to get academic we might note that science fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction, a genre of literature that encompasses all narratives that depart from ordinary reality, including horror, science fiction, alternative history, superheroes, and fantasy. Science fiction tends to focus on imaginative futures, technological advancements, space exploration, time travel, encounters with extraterrestrial life, and parallel universes. While we can look to pioneers such as Mary Shelley, the mother of science fiction with her novels Frankenstein and The Last Man in the early nineteenth century, Jules Verne, writing in the late nineteenth century, and famous for Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty-thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Around the World in 80 Days, and, of course, H.G. Wells and The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The invisible Man (earning him the nickname “the father of science fiction”), some scholars trace science fiction back to ancient myths, stories told about flying gods and advanced beings. Others look to the Renaissance and the development of modern scientific writings by Newton, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, among others. Indeed, historically there has been a link between periods of scientific advancement and a burgeoning science fiction culture. Inspired by Galileo’s invention of the telescope, for example, Aphra Behn, the first professional female playwright in the world wrote the play The Emperor of the Moon in 1687. The play tells the story of two young women – the daughter and the niece of a wealthy man who has purchased a telescope and spends all his time surveying the moon. Their boyfriends pretend to be aliens from the moon in order to convince him to allow them to marry the young women. The whole thing is played as a comedy, but it contains all the elements of modern science fiction.

Science fiction, thus, is an expansive and imaginative genre that goes beyond social reality and into the speculative, which in many ways runs counter to North Korean ideology.

Science fiction literature thus first developed in North Korea in the 1950s. During that time, the slogan “Learn from the Soviet Union” was popularized in science journals and academic publications. Kim Il-Sung pushed for scientific and technological training and innovation in the newly emergent DPRK, emphasizing that only nations with scientists, engineers and technologists were truly independent, not relying on others for advancement.  Science Fiction was viewed as a means to encourage that future. The first emergence came in the form of two volumes of Soviet short science fiction, translated into Korean. Earlier translations into Korean of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne also informed early North Korean science fiction writers. By the mid-sixties, short works of science fiction began to

appear in North Korean literary journals and youth magazines.

It was not until a speech delivered by Kim Jong-il, son and heir of Kim Il-sung and the chief architect of North Korean popular culture, including cinema and literature, that North Korean science fiction came into its own. In October of 1988, Kim called for large scale development of science fiction in North Korean literature, arguing as the foremost socialist revolutionary state in the world, North Korea should really be leading the way in imagining the future. That vision, or permission, if you prefer, is all authors needed to begun churning out science fiction novels and short stories in ever-increasing numbers. So involved was Kim within the world of North Korean science fiction literature that he personally reviewed the text of the 1988 novel Green Ears of Rice by Hwang Chongsang, in which North Korean scientists develop a form of rice that cures cancer, using his review to promote more science fiction. Four years later, Kim published Theory of Juch’e Literature, his guide to writing fiction for North Korea. Science fiction also figures heavily in that book, promoting both the genre and its use to promote Kim’s ideology.

This wave of science fiction reflected themes found around the world: space travel, underwater exploration (perhaps natural thought given the country’s position on a peninsula), the discovery of immortality, and the advancement of technology that improves society.  Perhaps more unique to North Korean science fiction is the inclusion of non-North Korean characters. More foreign characters, both allies and villains, appear in North Korean sci-fi than in any other genre in the nation. Science Fiction’s speculative and imaginative nature allows for imagining cross-border activities “in the future” impossible in North Korea’s present.

Robots are big in the literature as well. Okay, time for a historical tangent: the term “robot” comes from a 1920 play, R.U.R. by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Capek coined the term “robot,” which means forced laborer, to replace earlier words for subservient machines such as “automaton” or “android.” While the latter is still in popular use, most notably as a kind of phone, “robot” has become the dominant term for mechanical beings. The idea of robot as forced laborer and therefore metaphor for the proletariat made “robots” very popular in socialist science fiction, and after the rise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the iron curtain across Eastern Europe, robots became very popular in Soviet and socialist nation science fiction.  North Korea was no different.

North Korean sci-fi frequently employs robots, and North Korean robots are often altruistic, supportive of humans (particularly those doing the work of the revolution and in support of North Korean ideology), and highly varied. 

Lee Geum-cheol’s “Mysterious Medicine” features nanobots taught to cure diseases.

Extraterrestrials, on the other hand, are conspicuously absent from North Korean sci-fi, a fact justified by sci-fi author and theorist Hwang Jeong-sang due to “the lack of scientific proof of a developed extra-terrestrial life.” While robots and space flight are realities, aliens (thus far) are not, and thus North Korean socialist realism cannot bend that far to accommodate them. Robots make sense under the Stalinist government of the DPRK, intelligent life forms from elsewhere in the galaxy, not so much.

PART TWO
Science fiction seems to be an acquired taste. In the American education system you might learn about who Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were, and perhaps read a story or two from Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clark (the ABCs, as we call them), but for the most part science fiction readers are a self-selecting bunch, drawn to the science, the speculation, the imagination, the aliens, the spaceships, the robots, the laser guns or light sabers. They argue about the merits of space opera versus “hard SF,” or whether or not Ray Bradbury should even be considered a science fiction author, since none of his work is the aforementioned “hard.”  I’ll take a moment for self promotion here to say that my fifth novel will be out this year and firmly fits into the space opera genre.  Sf fans are often stereotyped as nerds or geeks and are frequent targets of humor on such shows as The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live.

Yet there is a significant stream of science fiction called social science fiction which focuses on visualizing and imagining future (or alien) societies – rather than foregrounding technology rooted in actual science, as hard SF does, social science fiction focuses on the cultures, politics and societies of the future or other worlds, and often uses them to provide social commentary on our own. These include works of utopian and dystopian societies.  Indeed, Sir Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia (from which we get the word) is considered an early version of the genre.  H.G. Wells used science fiction to comment on Victorian Britain. At the heart of The War of the Worlds, a novel concerning technologically advanced Martians with superior weapons invading Earth to exploit our resources, is the question of what would it be like if someone did to the United Kingdom what the United Kingdom was doing in Africa and Asia? American science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin wrote many novels using social science fiction to critique American attitudes and culture, such as in novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Word for World is Forest.

North Korean science fiction is in a decidedly social sci-fi realm, especially since the 1988 speech by Kim Jong-il, visualizing North Korea as a socialist utopia and the rest of the world as dystopian. The term for the genre Kim employed was “science fantasy,” which is a direct translation of the Russian term for science fiction. In 1993, writer Hwang Jeong-sang published a how-to book based on Kim’s ideas and encouragement. Entitled “Writing Science Fantasy Literaure,” the book extensively quoted Kim and taught North Korean writers how to apply Kim’s ideas and North Korean juch’e philosophy (the word, coined by Kim Il-sung, means “self-reliance” and refers to the idea that North Korea had to do it all by and for themselves) to works of speculative fiction.

Kim stated that science fiction was necessary for the development of imagination to visualize the future of North Korea. He said, “If we publish more books on science fantasy it will not only greatly help the development of science and technology but also make our teenagers have more scientific imagination.” The idea of science fiction encouraging young people to go into the sciences is one long seen in the west, but the DPRK truly emphasized this idea, as I will discuss in a moment, using children’s magazines to really promote science fiction, or science fantasy, as the Koreans say, to promote science.

Kim even envisioned works on terraforming, the idea that a planet could be transformed on a massive scale, right here on earth. He wrote, “We should imagine how to convert tidelands on the west coast into arable land for economic development, or how to dig up valuable minerals from the bottom of the West Sea.”  This is a perfect example of how Kim thought scientific imagination could then be converted to scientific reality.  He went on to praise specific novels that he thought were model works of North Korean science fantasy: “Some years ago I read Let’s Go to the Star, The Struggle for Speed and other books that described space travel. They were very interesting and must be read by all.”  When Kim Jong-il tells the nation they should read a book, that book is then read by all.  Can you imagine the American president saying, “Everybody should read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card,” and the entire nation then buys and reads the book? 

Given the scientific value of science fantasy to the North Korean elite, the science fantasy that was written in response to Kim’s comments is often as previously noted, highly technological, with lots of robots and other examples of technological innovation that improves North Korea. Whereas South Korean science fiction, following the west, always shows highly advanced robots as a danger or serious threat, North Korean science fantasy shows technology and highly advanced robots as always in the service of humanity and the juch’e revolution, proving the technological, ideological, and moral superiority of North Korea.

For example, in a novel called Course Change by Li Geum-Cheol, who also wrote Course No. 651, the story I began this episode with, a plane flying to the Philippines discovers there is a bomb on board that will detonate if and when the plane drops below ten thousand feet. So the story is a bit like the movie Speed…but in the air.  "The inside of the plane turned into a battlefield," the story reads. "The captain was visibly startled and vainly tried to calm down the screaming and utterly terrorized passengers." But, a North Korean diplomat on the plane keeps his cool and informs everyone that his government will take care of the crisis. He contacts North Korea and very quickly the North Korean scientists develop an anti-gravity machine that holds the plane up, unmoving, in mid-air. The passengers are evacuated and brought safely back to earth. The bomb is defused and the plane safely returned. The world celebrates North Korean ingenuity and technology.

Propaganda? Yes. Kind of silly?  Perhaps. But is it any different than Independence Day, when the United States learns how to defeat an alien invasion on July 4 and then teaches the rest of the world how to bring the ships down? Course Change was published in 2004, at the same time that North Korea was deep in its own development both of nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them. It is perhaps rather easy to draw a line between the imagined technologies and the actual technologies North Korea was working on. Kim, truth be told, was correct – science fiction encouraged and promoted scientific development to serve the nation.

The politics and messages of North Korean science fantasy are hardly subtle. There are no superhero stories in North Korean science fantasy. Instead, as Andrada Fiscutean observes, “the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.” As in Course No. 651, in North Korean science fiction, Americans are the villains who seek to get wealthy, monopolize resources, and weaponize technology to rule the world, while benevolent and learned North Koreans use technology to save the world and improve humanity.

There is, however, a hidden danger to writing about the future of North Korea.  As most forms of literature written in totalitarian systems, there is an opportunity for writers to critique North Korea, which, if it is too blatant, would get writers (and readers) in a good deal of trouble with the regime. Protagonists in these stories trust implicitly in North Korean leadership and often unironically say things like, “we do whatever the Party decides!” or “The Supreme Leader is always right and will know what to do!” Whereas western science fiction has developed a distrust of government and leadership, North Korean science fiction requires its protagonists to follow the party's guidelines blindly, without questioning its decisions or authority. Any errors are external – from American characters or misguided South Koreans. North Koreans are always right and always know. Science fantasy, however, requires the questioning of assumptions in order to move plots forward. Indeed, in science fiction there is often hidden a mystery to be uncovered, but the Supreme Leader must already know about the mystery and its solutions, which makes the story rather unnecessary, and can create a seeming critique of a Supreme Leader that knows the solutions already, but forces the citizens to experiment anyway.

Antoine Coppola, a filmmaker that has studied Korean cinema, sums up the dilemma perfectly: “Society is perfect in North Korea; the hierarchy is perfect, so why dream about the future? How to imagine the future when society is already perfect?”  The answer, of course, is that the future outside of North Korea is imperfect, and thus DPRK science fantasy thus shows North Korea leading the rest of the world into the future and against American perfidiousness. This, however, requires depicting life outside of North Korea, non-North Koreans, and a world that lives separate from juch’e, yet another potential pitfall for the aspiring North Korean science fiction author.

PART THREE

Just five months after the end of the Korean War, Kim Myong-su, one of the leaders of the North Korean Federation of Writers, published an essay on children’s literature in which he said: “The task of correct cultivation of our children demands that we create a prosperous future for our nation and secure the happiness and freedom of our people. It is precisely children’s literature that is the national force that must play a key role in fulfilling the glorious responsibility of this task.” Science fiction, he argues, must be used to envision a prosperous future for the nation which the young will then actualize.

Before Kim Jong-il promoted science fiction for adults, the dominant form of the genre was in youth literature. Children’s science fiction rose to prominence very early in North Korea, partly as an element in science education and partly in order to reinforce North Korean ideology. Slogans like "Correcting nature's mistakes" and "Man, in transforming nature, transforms himself" were both meant to inspire young scientific minds but also indoctrinate them into what the ruling party was doing and its mindset towards science as a revolutionary tool.

Magazines aimed at children and teens such as Children’s Literature, New Generation, and Children’s Group first published translated Soviet stories, just as the adult publications did, before encouraging and issuing North Korean-written stories. New Generation would also publish short biographies of North Korean scientists, blending science fiction and science as a means to encourage the next generation to go into the sciences in the service of the state.

Nevertheless, as any Star Trek fan can tell you, science fiction can also be highly subversive, used to question ideology and power dynamics. Thus, as with adult science fiction, all stories published were carefully monitored by the government to ensure they conformed to Kim’s ideology and promoted the party line with no potential for misreading or subversion.

Science fiction got a boost in the late fifties when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. The technological success of the communist nation launching the first space vehicle to orbit the earth was seen as not only confirming the superiority of socialist technology and science, it played on young people’s enthusiasm for and interest in rockets and space exploration. One story, entitled “The Guests from Earth” was the rare North Korean tale to include aliens. In the story, a Russian rocket lands on a technologically backwards planet. The aliens befriend the Soviet cosmonauts and realize how much these men from space can teach them. The story concludes with the aliens saluting the rocket and chanting “Long Live the USSR!”  As Benoit Bertheiler observes, this story works on multiple levels. First, it celebrates socialist leadership in space exploration and rocket technology. Second, in the time honored tradition of first encounter narratives, praise for oneself is put in the mouth of strangers. The aliens recognize the inherent superiority and kindness of the Soviets from earth.  Third, the story also acts as a metaphor for the relationship between the Soviet Union and North Korea – the Koreans are the technologically backwards people who recognize Soviet leadership and will learn from them and become space explorers themselves. Later stories, such as 1965’s “Last Lifeline” will see the Soviets no longer present in North Korean science fantasy. In this story, a North Korean oncologist learns from a friend about an ancient village in the countryside where a medical scholar had been exiled by the oppressive Korean monarchy before North Korea existed. The oncologist goes to the village, studies the writings of the scholar, and discovers the cure for cancer. The Soviets are no longer needed. This is juch’e science fiction: every North Korea needs to create the future is right there in North Korea.

Children’s Literature (Adong munhak in Korean) was perhaps the premiere publisher of science fiction for youth. In 1959, Kim Tong-chon’s “Let’s Go to the Moon” envisioned the Soviets landing multiple craft on the moon, while America’s space program continues to crash and burn. Children’s Literature would serialize stories, continuing the run of the tale across several issues in order to keep reader interest. Eighteen such science fiction serials ran during the nine year period between 1956 and 1965, many, but not all of which concerned space travel.

The April 1956 issue began with a short story entitled “We Landed on Mars.” Adapted from a Soviet story, it envisions a group of Soviet pioneers exploring Mars in the year 1995. By 1960, Children’s Literature was publishing a serial about North Koreans colonizing Mars for the benefit of all humankind.

Two of the serials were written by Kim Tong-sop: Youth Space Expedition Team and The Land Surging from the Sea. Youth Space Expedition Team envisions an international team of children led by a North Korean boy who travel to Mars together. The North Korean discovers a three-dimensional projection left by the original Martians that explains why they left that planet. It is revealed Mars was a glorious worker’s paradise, not unlike North Korea, but that it ran out of water, energy, and even physical space, as the workers’ paradise allowed for unlimited expansion, which eventually outpaced the natural resources. They decided to leave Mars and find a more habitable planet. As part of the projection, the Martians explained that once they had become a glorious workers’ paradise, they destroyed all their weapons. The American boy in the expedition team is disgusted – wondering why anyone would ever give up weapons. The Martians left for their new planet with a five-year plan to achieve economic development. The youth explorers then return to earth with a new sense of commitment to science, terraforming, and creating a glorious worker’s paradise.  We might chuckle, but the story is not too different than American science fiction of the time, just with a different ideological system underlying it.

The Land Surging from the Sea, on the other hand, takes place entirely on Earth. Two young North Koreans stand on a bluff overlooking the ocean and realize if the seabed were raised there would be much more arable land and all of the mineral wealth under the ocean would also become available. They offer their theory to North Korean scientists who realize they are right. The scientists pontificate about how the purpose of science is to transform nature, people and nation for the benefit of mankind. The story then shows the two children the future they have envisioned arriving, with oil and undersea minerals now easily available to a North Korea with much more farmland. The children teach the world this technology, despite the attempts of an American spy to ruin their experiments and kill them.

Both of these novels demonstrate many of the tropes at the heart of North Korean science fiction for children. First, North Korea is envisioned as a leader of exploration and discovery, both in space and on Earth. Second, both novels contain a great deal of accurate science fact, technological information and jargon. They are rooted in actual science. These stories are didactic, meant to teach and inspire. Third, the protagonists in both are child scientists. Children observe, explore, and imagine, and as a result create the future of North Korea today. They are, however, also paradoxes. They must innovate and challenge conventional wisdom in order to advance science and thus the nation, but they must also always listen to authority and follow the dictates of North Korean political and social culture. The scientists who listen to and teach the children are the ultimate authorities, and regardless of how visionary the children are, they must, in the end, be loyal to the group, and work for the betterment of all, not for their own selfish individual reasons. Lastly, as always, Americans are the villains, the bad guys, and are continually demonstrated to be greedy, lazy, stupid and dangerous to the point where they are actually cartoon villains at best. They prove to be an object lesson for how communist villains have been presented in western films in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. It is interesting to see how North Koreans see us, particularly when we see nothing of ourselves in their depiction of us.

PART FOUR

In January of 1978, South Korean film star Choi Eun-hee disappeared while in Hong Kong. Her estranged husband, South Korean director Shin Sang-ok went looking for her and in July of that year also vanished from Hong Kong.  The actual, exact details may never be known, but Shin later claimed both he and Choi had been kidnapped by North Korean agents at the request of Kim Jong-il.  They stayed in North Korea from 1978 until they escaped while at a film festival in Vienna in 1986. We told their tale in our episode on North Korean abduction project. Here, however, I want to focus on their science fiction film Pulgasari.

Kim the younger was a huge cinephile, with a private library of over fifteen thousand films. His favorites included Doctor Zhivago, First Blood, the James Bond films, The Godfather, Friday the 13th, and Gone With The Wind.  He was deeply frustrated with North Korean cinema, which he felt lagged behind western, Japanese, and even South Korean cinema. He inserted himself in the film industry to “improve” it, joining the Propaganda and Agitation Department in 1966 and was named the director of the Motion Picture and Arts Division. In 1973, he published Yŏnghwa yesul ron, known in English as The Art of the Cinema.  He ordered Choi kidnapped and then Shin when he came looking for her.  The two of them spent three years in separate North Korean prisons and then were reunited and introduced to Kim who ordered them to make movies in order to gain global recognition for North Korean cinema.  They made a series of films over the next eight years, including North Korea’s greatest science fiction film ever. 

North Korean cinema first and foremost must promote Juche, Kim Il-sung’s philosophy of Marxist-Leninist self-reliance.  While people’s revolutions against oppression, feudalism, colonization, and capitalism can and must be shown, the historical ones can never be shown as succeeding, as they lacked Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il to lead them.  This philosophy presents itself in North Korea’s answer to Godzilla, Pulgasari.

Pulgasari was directed by Shin and was the film for which he was best known internationally. Kim wanted a North Koream dai-kaiju (giant monster) film. So Shin convinced Kim to fly fifteen special effects artists from Toho Studios, the same company that made Godzilla films. The actor who played the title monster in Pulgasari, Satsuma Kenpachiro, had also played Godzilla several times. He later wrote a book about his experiences making the film called North Korea Seen through the Eyes of Godzilla.  At least Satsuma knew he was in North Korea – several of the Japanese techs working on the film were told they were in China working on a Chinese film with a Korean crew.

Set in medieval Korea, the king’s soldiers confiscate all the iron in the countryside, taking tools and implements from farmers and peasants. Cooking pots and plows are all taken, making it impossible for the people to live.  The king wants the metal to make weapons; but the blacksmith he has impressed into service refuses to forge the swords from the farmer’s tools. When the soldiers leave, the blacksmith returns the pots and tools to the people, so he is arrested and sent to prison. While there, he sculpts a dragon-like biped creature and throws it out the window of his cell to his young daughter, Ami.  He dies in prison, but when Ami pricks her finger sewing, the blood drops on the figure, who comes to life and begins eating iron.  The more metal he eats, the bigger he becomes.  This growing-metal dragon monster is Pulgasari, As he continues to eat metal and grow he matures into a giant metal monster resembling Godzilla. Pulgasari leads the farmers in rebellion against the king, destroying the palace. However, he cannot stop devouring metal, including the very pots and pans and tools whose theft by the king caused the rebellion in the first place. Ami sacrifices herself by hiding inside a giant bell and when Pulgasari eats it, he thus consumes her as well. Since her blood brought him to life, killing her poisons him and he explodes.  She dies happy, knowing she saved the people.

Shin Sang-ok escaped while in Vienna while Pulgasari was in post-production, so the film had to be completed by his assistant director, Chong Gon Jo, whom the North Korean government credited as sole director of the film.

When first released, the film was largely ignored outside of North Korea. However, historic changes in the 1990s resulted in another chance for Pulgasari to gain global recognition for North Korean cinema. Kim Dae-jung was elected president of South Korea in 1998 and following the model of East and West Germany from the previous decade, sought to open relations with North Korea under what was called “The Sunshine Policy.” North Korea by that point was experiencing a terrible famine, and Kim Jong-il was desperate for help but also wary of it. He took money, food and support from South Korea but refused any kind of opening to the South, as he had seen that when East and West Germany developed relations it was the communist nation that was absorbed into the democratic capitalist nation.  Of course, its instructive to recognize that in communist and totalitarian states…the purpose of walls is to keep people in, just as the Berlin wall did.

In that same year North Korea reached out to Japanese film critic Edoki Jun.  This was the man North Korea approached about building an audience for Pulgasari thirteen years after it was made. Edoki formed Raging Thunder, a film distribution company, for the sole purpose of marketing and distributing North Korea’s only dai kaiju film in Japan.  The film, despite its lack of sophistication and decades out of date special effects, was a huge hit in Japan, so South Korea then paid North Korea a good deal of money for the South Korean distribution rights. In the summer of 2000, Pulgasari became the first North Korean film released in the south, where it flopped tremendously. In the first week only five hundred tickets were sold – in a nation of 47 million at the time.  Five hundred.  Johannes Schönherr argues the film flopped for two reasons.  It had been a huge hit in Japan as filmgoers there had appreciated it as camp – they found it endearingly silly and ludicrously tragic. South Korea had no culture of camp and could not take the film as a straightforward drama.  More importantly, however, until 1999 South Korea prohibited the importation of Japanese films, so no one in the nation had seen any Godzilla or other dai kaiju movies. Pulgasari only works if one knows the tropes of giant monster movies.  So South Korean audiences had no way to understand the film other than as North Korean propaganda, and not particularly well made propaganda at that.

Interestingly, in 2001 Pulgasari received a VHS release in the United States, making it the widest viewed North Korean film in the US, becoming something of a cult film.  In the wake of Pulgasari’s first release, North Korea co-produced a science fiction film with Italy called Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission, filmed and released in 1988,  An Italian exploitation film, Ten Zanportrays North Korea as a futuristic utopia. Scientists in the west experiment on abducted girls, and a team of mercenaries rescue the girls and bring them to North Korea.  Italian writer/director Ferdinando Baldi had been hired by the North Korean government to create a sci-fi action film, but the North Koreans then completely rewrote the script before he filmed it, and then recut the film after he had edited it.  As a result, the film makes almost no sense. The bad guys are seeming Americans, the good guys are hired to break into the lab and rescue girls, but the dialogue and action scenes suggest many other things are going on.  Oddy enough, the North Koreans kept Baldi’s title, Ten Zan, which is the Japanese nickname of Iwo Jimi where Baldi’s film had been set. It was never released in Italy, but has been shown in North Korea.

The popular image of North Korea promoted by the media and American politicians is one of a rogue nation, part of the “axis of evil,” forever testing rockets, nuclear weapons and western patience. A convenient bad guy for movies, whether the James Bond film Die Another Day, the remake of Red Dawn, or the comedy The Interview, in which Seth Rogan and James Franco play a talk show host and his producer recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jung-Un. North Korea objected most strongly to the film and before it was even released, Sony Pictures IT systems were hacked by a group calling itself “Guardians of Peace” or GoP, which complained about the pending release of the movie. The FBI has blamed North Korea for that cyberattack. The entire incident reinforced the image of North Korea as a humorless, dangerous rogue state.

The problem is, as Donald N. Clark points out, while many of the stereotypes of North Korea are rooted in a demonstrable truth, and the nation has engaged in morally repugnant behavior (see the My Dark Path episodes on North Korean assassinations and the North Korean abduction project), public ignorance about North Korea by Americans both allows politicians and the media to “get away with sloppy analogies to make dubious points” and will prove challenging when North Korea finally opens up to the rest of the world. But demonizing the people of North Korea helps no one.  In looking at the science fiction stories North Korean artists and writers have told to their people, we get a sense of their hopes for the future. It is one filtered through the philosophies and ideologies of the Kim family and juch’e, but under that, like much science fiction around the planet, it reveals a snapshot of hope for the future. The term “science fiction” has fallen out of favor recently, in favor of the more expansive term “speculative fiction,” which might be the better term for what North Korea produces. Speculative fiction is a thought experiment. It asks “what if…?” It shows what could be. In his book on Korean history, historian Donald N. Clark argues that North Korea’s biggest problem is “regulating change.” Beginning in the nineteen nineties when the communist nations of Europe, including the Soviet Union collapsed and transformed into capitalist democracies, North Korea did not know how to respond, as communist societies were supposedly the pinnacle of social evolution and could not, as a matter of principal, collapse. Yet the Soviet Union, one of the largest supporters of North Korea, did. North Korea was no longer protected by the Soviet nuclear umbrella. The newly emergent former communist nations lined up to do business with South Korea, requiring North Korea to re-evaluate the world. Then, in 1994 came the death of Kim Il-Sung, which shocked the nation. Rapid developments in information technology and global connectivity further challenged the North Korean regime to maintain its 1950s, Stalinist approach to nation and culture. A black market for cellphones, datasticks with western movies and media, and other devices to connect to the world outside the DPRK means North Korea can no longer maintain some of the facades it requires for its citizens to remain compliant.  Speculative fiction allows North Koreans to imagine change, to imagine a different world in the future. More recent science fantasy from the DPRK has shown influences from other Asian and western writers. The greater the exposure to outside influences, the more DPRK sci fi becomes like western sci fi. It just may prove to be a useful tool to return the northern part of the Korean peninsula to the world, and to a more humane and free future.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our engineer and creative director Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

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Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.