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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/08/the-strange-secretive-world-of-north-korean-science-fiction/ [arstechnica.com]

A plane is flying to the Philippines, gliding above "the infinite surface" of the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, a few passengers start to scream. Soon, the captain announces there's a bomb on board, and it’s set to detonate if the aircraft drops below 10,000 feet.

"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."

Only one person keeps his cool: a young North Korean diplomat who has faith that his country will find a solution and save everyone. And he’s right. North Korea's esteemed scientists and engineers create a mysterious anti-gravitational field and stop the plane in mid-air. The bomb is defused, and everyone gets off the aircraft and is brought back safely to Earth.

This story, Change Course (Hangno rǔl pakkura) by Yi Kŭmchǒl, speaks about solidarity, peace, and love for the motherland, displaying an intricate relationship between literature and politics. It was first published in 2004 in the Chosǒn munhak magazine, only to be reprinted 13 years later, around the time North Korea claimed it was capable of launching attacks on US soil.

"Political messages in every North Korean sci-fi can be hardly missed," historian of science Dong-Won Kim, who taught at Harvard University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, told me.
[...]
Change Course and other North Korean sci-fi works can seem perplexing to people who have spent all their lives in the West. Protagonists of these stories are often caught between two versions of themselves: They question everything regarding technology, disputing every preconception for the pursuit of scientific truth. At the same time, they follow the party's guidelines blindly, without questioning its decisions or authority.

In science fiction, "the ideal hero has a strong faith in the Supreme Leader ideologically, so they don't get confused with justice and truth," said Jang Hyuk, the math graduate who defected a few years ago. "The value systems of North Korea are quite different."

With the image of the Supreme Leaders looming large and the propaganda machine pushing slogans like "we do whatever the Party decides!" or "self-reliant prosperity," writing about the future can be challenging. In some cases, imagining how great North Korea could be might draw attention to its current flaws.

"Science fiction is about anticipation, and this is a big problem," said Antoine Coppola, a filmmaker who has studied cinema in both North and South Korea. "Society is perfect in North Korea; the hierarchy is perfect, so why dream about the future? How to imagine the future when society is perfect?"

The contrast between the stories sci-fi literature tells and the daily lives of the people has only become sharper. "Since at least the 1990s, there has been not simply a gap but an abyss between the rosy future depicted in North Korean science fiction and the reality of life in North Korea," Harvard historian of science Dong-Won Kim wrote in one of his papers in 2018.
[...]
As North Korean writers become more exposed to the West, the stories they write are slowly changing.

"Recent sci-fi has that sort of sensationalism, the suspense, the conspiracy motif, probably tied to the increased availability of foreign media in the country," Berthelier said. "To me, it's revolutionary because there isn't quite anything like that in the country's literary history."

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