Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but r...

Spanning more than a half-century of South Korean sci-fi, this massive anthology documents a unique convergence of culture and genreReadymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction presents the first book-length English-language translation of science and speculative fiction from South Korea, bringing together 13 classic and contemporary stories from the 1960s through the 2010s. From the reimagining of an Asimovian robot inside the...

An epoch-marking alliance of laborers, students, dissident intellectuals, and ordinary citizens was at the heart of South Korea’s transformation from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy during the 1980s. Collectively known as the minjung (“the people”), these agents of Korean democratization historically carved out an expanded role for civil society in the country’s politics. In Revisiting Minjung, some of the foremost experts in 1980s Korean history, literature, film...

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of speculative fiction in translation (SFT). Rachel Cordasco examines speculative fiction published in English translation since 1960, ranging from Soviet-era fiction to the Arabic-language dystopias that emerged following the Iraq War. Individual chapters on SFT from Korean, Czech, Finnish, and eleven other source languages feature an introduction by an expert in the language's speculative fiction tradition and its present-day output. Co...