I just started book 8 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and I’m not sure if I’ll zoom through it or consume it gradually, but I’ll likely finish it next week and move directly to Shroud, then the YA novels, then the novellas and more novels time permitting.
At the same time, I’m about to go see BTS. I fell in love with K-Pop during the pandemic, when my music computer inexplicably died a month into lockdown. Re-uploading all my CDs onto the new computer was a major chore, so I got into a whole new genre of music while doing that, and then I got spoiled rotten by all that state of the art audio in surround.
While that was happening I was working on the dinosaur novel and trying to get into the main character’s head, so I was participating in K-Pop fandom in various ways. That led me to being interested in Korean art and culture in general, so I found Squid Games and Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Han Kang. Then I found Korean feminism and one particular aspect of it strongly appealed to me – the idea of encouraging women to have their own intellectual and social life that isn’t focused on men, such as enjoying musical performances together, where men are there as entertainment, and the point of the evening is more about bonding with your friends than finding romance.
Then when Parasite won Best Picture, and media like Squid Games and K-Pop Demon Hunters, took off, I felt vindicated in my future-predicting skills. Yes, indeed South Korea has been tapping into the zeitgeist.
I’ve always been fascinated by the more superficial aspects of the future. Which music will be trendy. Which movies will be blockbusters. What people will be wearing. What kind of novels they’ll read. Right now a lot of people are reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.
And they’re listening to BTS. Cities are decorating buses and trains to celebrate the three BTS shows at Stanford, the first time they’ve played here since the pandemic. I couldn’t even get a ticket when they initially went on sale – they were gone in the blink of an eye, only to reappear on resale sites at ridiculous prices. Three hundred for a nosebleed. Thousands if you want to sit on the floor.
So I lined up for the Las Vegas show, and got a ticket for Wednesday. And then a few of my friends scored Thursday tickets so I got another nosebleed for Thursday.
And then, Ticketmaster cancelled a bunch of those resold tickets for Stanford, and offered interested fans the chance to sign up for a lottery to win the chance to get them at face value, and I was fortunate enough to get one for Saturday, making a total of three BTS shows I’m seeing in the next couple of weeks.
I love BTS a lot. They’re not my favorite K-Pop group – that would be SHINee, who is streaming their anniversary concert right after I get back from Vegas, so I’ll be staying up until 4am watching the livestream. And I followed their ace dancer Taemin on his first US tour, catching him in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Honolulu. But I have traveled for BTS before.
When we all went into lockdown in 2020 I was holding a ticket to see BTS here in Northern California. It morphed into a chance to see their four LA shows during the Permission to Dance tour, and I won one of those. Up in the nosebleeds at SoFi stadium in LA, where I had never been before.
So after more than a year of solitary confinement I found myself stepping onto an airplane, checking into one of those disinfectant-smelling hotels near LAX and heading to this massive futuristic stadium where I watched the guys sing, dance, and raise energy for thousands of cheering fans. Waving my lightstick. Enjoying that “fuck yeah finally an Asian band” kind of energy from the Asian-Americans around me.
Afterwards I walked several blocks coasting on energy before sitting down on a curb to call a rideshare, watching all the happy energized music fans drifting down the sidewalk. Thinking “well that’s it, they just won music, we’re diving into a scene where music is a thing for upper middle class girls with indulgent daddies, but the South Koreans are taking it to that next futuristic stage, and I’m down with it.
I’m hoping to get lots of my Hugo reading done on the plane to and from Vegas. Transitioning from a place where I’m absolutely rolling around in media that Smells Like The Future – DC Carl and BTS – to one where I’m judging art for being future-y enough to step into those Next Big Thing pants.
A lot of art claims to be future-y but in a dishonest way, where the music of the future is exactly the same kind the author enjoyed in high school, and the plot is riffing on themes from episode twelve, season three, of something that last aired on a date beginning with 19. And it’s more of a comfort read about past futures than anything redolent with the legit whiff of tomorrow.
I was reflecting on the time I voted more out of political partisanship than appreciation of the work in question – and it did occur to me that, like it or not, the book I voted for did indeed have that “legit futurism” kind of aura, like this is definitely the sort of thing people will want to read more of. I feel that about some music, like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish – this is music people are going to be appreciating tomorrow, even if I’m not among them.
Because that’s really what’s at stake with regard to the Hugos. I’m not selecting art I personally like. I’m voting for whether I want more cozy stories about space aliens making found families, or whether I’d prefer blasphemous grimdark, or futuristic society tales, or vampire romance. Based on a prototype.
Sometimes this does intersect with art I personally like. I liked two of the short stories, about society adjusting to disability as well as to “digital people” because those seem like plausible conundrums of tomorrow but also because I liked the way the narrative unfolded. I loved both K-Pop Demon Hunters and Sinners, but the former stepped into brand new territory as far as cultural cachet, while the latter was an intersection of familiar stories grafted together in a novel way. In my mind, a Hugo selection should say “this is what we were concerned with at the time” to future generations, or maybe “this was viral” or “everyone thought this is what would happen.”
As far as the other direction, I definitely have lots of friends who love their comfort media, and enjoy re-watching TV shows while listening to music from their teenagerhood. That’s one of the main problems with awards like the Hugos, I’m convinced – the average human will usually prefer nostalgic comfort to future-y things. Such as music – most people are only receptive to new music during their peak fertility years, and I’m kind of a mutant who would rather go see BTS than listen to old white people music like most of my peers.
So that’s going to be my main Hugo criteria: does this art smell like the future? Would the people sitting near me at the BTS show like it? If so, vote yes.
Or does this art smell like some geriatric desperately trying to summon some stale aesthetic from the 1900s? Would it play better to that asshole in the viral comment complaining about whippersnappers paying through the nose for BTS when he only paid twenty bucks to see Genesis and he liked it, by golly? If so, vote no.
But first I’m going to finish DC Carl, book 8, and write a spoiler-free review.
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