This presentation examines the historical trajectory of South Korean young-adult science fiction (YASF) from 1960 to 2020, arguing that the genre’s evolution was driven by state policies, social movements, and cultural politics rather than technoscientific advancement alone. The history of South Korean YASF unfolds across three distinct socio-political eras. During the 1960s, literary YASF flourished in student magazines as a pedagogical tool designed to promote scientific literacy and national modernization in response to the space age and also in alignment with the government's developmentalist goals. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, literary creativity stagnated under the increasingly dictatorial state and its reinforced censorship policies. Consequently, the genre shifted toward visual media, particularly super-robot animation, which the authoritarian regime co-opted to indoctrinate youth with militaristic, anti-communist, and nationalist ideologies. Following political democratization in the late 1980s, literary YASF experienced a profound renaissance. A new generation of writers—increasingly led by women—introduced "social sf," which hybridizes science fiction with social realism. Moving away from space exploration, this contemporary iteration focuses on societal pedagogical issues and everyday teenage experiences, addressing topics such as hypercompetitive education, environmental degradation, and neoliberalism. The broader significance of this historical study lies in its advocacy of a multi-faceted analytical framework to account for sf's trajectory, departing from the hegemonic technocultural paradigm that views the genre primarily as the "new realism" of a technology-saturated era.

A/Prof Sunyoung Park

Sunyoung Park is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, at the University of Southern California, as well as the Director of the USC Korean Studies Institute. She is the author of "The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945”.

A/Prof Sunyoung Park

Light dinner provided a half-hour before the event.

Contact the host of Adventure, Pedagogy, and National Modernization Science Fiction for Young Adults in South Korea, 1960-2020

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