The Big Idea: Sung-Il Kim

In the world, some things are treated like immutable natural laws — but can change happen? And what would happen then? In Blood of the Old Kings, author Sung-Il Kim (in translation via Anton Hur) looks at what could transpire when characters crave to change the seemingly unchangeable.

SUNG-IL KIM:

When you fall, gravity is the reason you get hurt, but there is nothing you can do to stop it.

A world-system is like that. To many of us who live in it, a world-system feels just as inescapable as the pull of Earth. It’s not that we don’t understand that this system we are part of is not a natural law. We are aware of many other systems in history, and we know that there will yet be others. All the same, we struggle to imagine the ramifications of our own world-system’s absence. We may not even be sure whether its replacement will turn out to be good or bad. What we tend to be convinced of, however, is that the world-system is The Way Things Are for the foreseeable future, almost by definition.

Here, a dilemma arises: When the world-system is against you, crushing and exploiting, do you accept your fate or resist it? How do you even begin to resist what feels like gravity? Those questions were the starting point of Blood of the Old Kings.

I am a generation or two away from the Japanese annexation of Korea in the early 20th century, so I don’t have a firsthand experience of that time. But those harrowing thirty-six years linger even through my lifetime. What would I have done, had I been living those years? What did I think of all those people, each who made their choices under those conditions? If you are familiar with imperialism, I have no doubt that you have shared similar questions. (And I know there are many of you, as imperialism is very much an ongoing affliction!)

It is a scholar’s job to analyze the world and give earnest answers to such questions. As a writer of popular fiction, my first mission is to entertain, and maybe stir the reader and get them thinking. This was my license to make some wild assumptions, and most importantly, to have more hope than I would otherwise be allowed.

To talk about the world-system, the first thing I had to do was to create one. I arrived at the Empire…

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