Book Review: Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim (tr. Anton Hur)

Taking Down the Corpse-Empire

The fall of empires is dramatic, especially when it is fast and violent. Such is what happened to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich, and long before them, the Khwarezmians who were foolish enough to kill a messenger from Genghis Khan. They are times of newness, of rebirth, although not always of indubitably good things. There is certainly a schadenfreude from those victimised by the empire when everything comes tumbling down - after, of course, several had made the decision to topple it. One such story of empire collapsing spectacularly is Blood of the Old Kings, a Korean fantasy novel published in Korean in 2016 and in English translation by Anton Hur in 2024 (the second volume of the trilogy is due in English translation in October of this year).

You start off the bat with three main characters who become your viewpoint characters: Loran, a woman who makes a deal with a dragon to fight the Empire ruling her home country and vows to become king, Arianne, a student at the imperial sorcerer’s academy who had made a deal with a voice that began manifesting in her head, and Cain, a petty thief who has made deals with many in his quarter of the imperial capital who gets tangled up in broader politics when he learns that a friend of his was killed. All of these characters have made deals with somebody, and more and more somebodys as the narrative goes on. All of this is juxtaposed with the profound lack of deals - of consensus, rather - of imperial rule that has been imposed on large swathes of the known world.

The Empire that is the larger antagonist of this narrative goes unnamed. Partially this reminds me of Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, where the idea is to make the namesake state feel archetypical, foundational to the conception of its world that no other referent is necessary. Another part of me is reminded of the Race in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series, where the Race needs no modifiers in its culture as there is no other polity worth speaking of (until their armed forces happen to land on Earth smack dab in the middle of World War II). This is a world, or perhaps more accurately a corner of a world, where one polity’s tyrannical rule is so omnipresent that it needs no adjective to make clear who is being referred to. Like what d’Ormesson and Turtledove have done, Kim is forcefully using a generic term to overawe your interpretation of the world. There is the Empire, and that is all.

The Empire here feels archetypical and frankly many other things in this book feel archetypical. Reading this book felt like reading many other heroic fantasy novels of its type. Interestingly, the names of the characters (Arianne, Loran, Cain) and of regions (‘Arland’ in particular, a name mentioned a lot as it is the home region of all three main characters) sound very European. The sorcerer’s academy that features prominently at the beginning of the book takes its children from families and isolates them entirely in a way that I could not help but compare to the Jedi Order as depicted in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t know what Kim was thinking when he wrote this or Hur when he translated it, but the whole setup feels very familiar to someone experienced with the genre. It will not feel ‘exotic’ (a deeply problematic term, doubtlessly) to the Western reader, and those looking for ‘exoticism’ (a problematic urge) will be disappointed - but one must remember that those outside of the West, however you want to define that, can and do read and respond to Western texts, and more importantly are not obligated to write what we want them to.

None of the above is to say that the yarn Kim spins is a bad one; far from it. There’s a lot of very good character work here, and a lot of good displays of tensions between factions of a rebellion. The plot is one of resistance against tyranny, and this interacts in clever ways with the idea of a ‘chosen one,’ in our case Loran. She knows that she can conquer a kingdom from horseback but cannot rule from there, to quote what a Chinese advisor told Kublai Khan; parts of this are almost reminiscent of Andor, but never hugely so. Arianne fights to escape her situation, and Cain fights because he has fallen into it not unlike Han Solo.

There is one bit here that is strikingly original, and it is how this Empire sustains its power. Every sorcerer in imperial service (and, according to its laws, should be every sorcerer, but this is not easy to enforce in practice) is turned into a magical battery when they die, and these batteries are the lynchpin of their entire civilization. The implications of this system are especially stark on Arianne, who is rankled by what will eventually happen to her were she to complete her studies. There are a lot of interesting hints as to where this idea could go, and one particular character is intimately tied to it, but parts of it are clearly left for later in the series.

Kim, rendered through Hur, is very good at depicting action. Never at any point in this novel did the detailed descriptions of violence make me zone out. The whole thing is very clear, very visceral, and it keeps the plot moving forward. This pays off at the end when almost all of Chekhov’s guns you see on the wall in the first half are fired and you get a spectacular ending scene that works both as raw spectacle and as a culmination of the theme of making deals (in particular there is a small bit that feels like a commentary on the tendency of resistance movements to splinter into a variety of teeny tiny factions but that goes by quickly). Kim via Hur reminded me of Robert E. Howard at his absolute best, and fortunately without all the racism (it’s there in the Conan stories and incredibly obvious in the Solomon Kane stories).

As of now I am waiting eagerly for the next book in this series. I absolutely see why this story became a big thing in South Korea. It is perhaps not the most original heroic fantasy novel (although I give Kim major props for letting a woman be a king, which has all sorts of interesting undertones) but it does what it does very well. Those who want that sort of thing will be well served here and will likewise look forward to the next volume.

--

Reference: Sung-il Kim, Blood of the Old Kings, [Little Brown Book Group, 2024], translated by Anton Hur

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: Red Sword by Bora Chung (tr. Anton Hur)

A gut-punch in book form.

A while ago, Molly Templeton wrote a piece at Reactor about not needing to understand everything in a book that I vibed with so very hard - I am quite a "roll with it" reader in many ways, and it is lovely to have someone put good words around an experience you've had. It came back to me as I was reading Red Sword, the new novel from Bora Chung, because not only is it a story without a lot of handholds to find while reading, but is in fact one where the confusion is emphatically part of the point. It is a story that languishes in that feeling of ignorance, of lostness, and does something fantastic with it.

The story begins with ignorance - the protagonist is on an alien world, at a loss about most of the details, knowing only that she has been brought there by an imperial power who have violently coerced her into this place to fight. What then proceeds for a large chunk of the novel is action absolutely devoid of context. Things... happen. The protagonist endures and experiences. We the reader experience alongside her. We have just as little context as she does, must endure the bafflement along with her. The events that she experiences and endures are confusing, traumatic, violent and often horrible. The novel is full of sequences of fighting, of death. People - many of whom the protagonist knows by description rather than name - are forced to fight an overwhelmingly superior enemy without guns, and die horribly in the act of it, beginning in the first few pages with an unnamed man the protagonist has come to love during their mutual imprisonment on the ship that brought them to this planet to fight.

Her experience then is shaped not by understanding but by inexplicable bloodshed and death. For a cause she doesn't know, let alone support, in a place she doesn't know, with rules she doesn't know. But she keeps being pushed back into these violent encounters, suffering at the hands of the imperials who brought her here as well as the mysterious white aliens they fight.

Already, I think it's clear this sounds like a grim story. It is. It's apparently inspired by the stories of Korean soldiers who were sent to fight in Russia for the Qing Dynasty, and that sense of powerlessness, of being dragged into an outside conflict, comes through at every turn. But it's not just the events and the thematic resonances of this that reinforce it. It's the language.

This is a translated novel, so it's never going to be clear (particularly to me, who speaks no Korean), the extent to which the object that comes into my hands owes its phrasing to Bora Chung or to the translator, Anton Hur. But whatever portions they poured in to the alchemical pot that made this worked perfectly, and particularly in one specific way: the sparseness of the prose. Now I am normally a fan of ornate. Give me something deliciously overwritten and I will, like as not, go mad for it. But Red Sword goes hard in the opposite direction, and is just as brutally impactful for it as something embracing adjectival rococo. To the extent that... I don't even quite understand how it's doing it. How using simple sentences, direct statements, with flat tonality, somehow turns into an emotional gutpunch. There are brief moments that make sense - after a paragraph of text, the contrasting bluntness of a single, brief sentence character death obviously has the benefit of contrast. But it's not just those individual moments. It's the whole thing. All of it is in this almost detached, distant, plain language. And yet it manages to be some of the most emotionally affecting.

To give a specific example, there's a long section in the middle of the book, where the protagonist is thrown from violent situation to violent situation on a foggy field of battle. She doesn't know where she's going or what's going on, and she is simply trying to survive situation by situation. It culminates with a scene of her smashing a weapon into the body of an imperial soldier over and over and over and over again, before cutting to a section break, and then opening the next with her being distracted from almost a reverie by a female scream.

I put the book down after reading that section, hit with a sudden certainty that what I just read was a vivid depiction of someone in shock.

That's what Chung and Hur's prose does here - it situates you emphatically in this experience of living moment to moment, contextless and confused, and by doing so in such blunt terms, hammers home the reality of that experience. Like the protagonist, you are completely at sea in the horror of it all. Her emotions echo out to the reader through this sympathetic experience. The detachment isn't detachment; it's indicative of the real emotional toll being exacted by the horrors she faces. And it is so powerfully done, it cannot be quickly consumed. For all its simplicity, it is prose you need to sit with and digest. I can't quite figure out how its doing what it's doing, but I can absolutely revel in the experience of it.

As the story goes on, some context does leak in. There is some sense of clarity and closure by the final part of the story, but even then, that feeling of being lost never truly ebbs. The bones of the context are there, but we don't have the fleshing out of exposition that would be my expectation of the usual speculative novel. There's no grand speech laying out motive. Only snippets, and even they form a small part of a larger picture unseen, only speculated. But we don't need to have the architects of all this misery come to speak their peace. We see someone experiencing its effects. What does the context matter in the face of the facts? What do the explanations matter in the face of the suffering?

A lot of this, I think, also comes down to trust. Chung lays actions out simply and clearly, with short snippets of dialogue, and mostly expects the reader to infer meaning from how they interact, how those pieces of dialogue or the rare intrusions of meta interact with one another, or to infer that meaning is, at this point, unattainable. Explanations come predominantly at the granular level - how the protagonist got out of the river, how she broke her sword, how she shot the gun. Overarching plot theorising? Not so much. But these moments piece together into a whole, and that whole shows us those effects. We see what this empire is by what it does.

And so I think this is a novel that makes an art out of incomplete understanding. It would be a worse book if the underpinnings were explained at any point, and especially the start, because it would rob us of the chance to ride along with the protagonist and be lost with her, to flow with the story as she flows with it, in shared confusion. It is that shared experience that absolutely makes the story what it is, and allows for some incredibly powerful moments. I do not think I have read scenes of violence in a story - especially as someone who generally finds battle scenes and extended fights tedious - that have affected me quite so strongly, and I think it is precisely because I have to experience them situated in the moment with the character, rather than trying to fit them into a broader context, or seeing them as a moving part in a puzzle, a set piece hurdle to traverse. They're not. The violence is, the experience of that violence, is the point. The protagonist's experience is the point. When the story reaches its conclusion, a number of questions open up about personhood, about who gets to be real, and about the disposability of human life in the endless grind of the imperial machine. Those questions are better served by the time spent paying attention to the material consequences of those imperial decisions.

Red Sword is deceptively simple. Its simplicity is its power; its contextlessness is the point. By removing all the guardrails, it forces the reader to confront the brutality of the experiences of its protagonist, and reckon with them purely as they are, before coming to any kind of broader conclusions about the wider politics at play. The human first. The real, lived moment first. The consequences first. Only then context, a little, but even that ultimately serves that larger section of the text. Chung has turned confusion into an emotional weapon, and drives it home with every brief, brutal sentence. I may not have always understood it all, but I felt it.

--

The Math

Highlights: 

• some of the best writing of violence I've come across in a book
• vivid, clipped prose that shocks you into emotions
• immersive perspective

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Bora Chung, Red Sword, [Honford Star, 2025]. Translator: Anton Hur.

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon (translated by Anton Hur)

Magical girl manga meets millennial angst

CW: discussion of character experiencing suicidal thoughts.

I can't decide if this book is very deep or just very odd. It's quite possibly both.

A Magical Girl Retires follows an unnamed young Korean girl struggling with debt and a difficult job market, unable to live up to the promise she showed in her grandfather's jewellery shop, never having become the watch designer she dreamed she would be. At the start of the story, this drives her to a bridge in the night, contemplating jumping into the water below and hoping no one notices or is inconvenienced by her. Just as she finds herself unable to do it, a stranger appears to tell her that she is destined for greatness, not this, and to come away immediately. She is thus drawn into the world of magical girls, real-life magic-wielders like the figures from manga, who use their skills to make the world a better place.

Which sounds... well, there are some obvious places that story can go, and this isn't quite any of them, though it does follow some of their themes some of the time. But the narrative never quite sticks to any of the expected paths, winding in between them but never fully committing, and what you get at the end is instead a strange, dreamy and meandering study of a character reassessing her place in the world and her relationship to her self-image, to her abilities, and to what power means. The depth of it all sort of sneaks up on you on the way, presenting itself gently, subtly.

And that approach bears out in other aspects too—especially the worldbuilding, such as it is. It's a story that very much assumes you know what magical girls in manga are, how they transform, and approximately what they do, because it has little interest in spelling out the basics for you. If you've ever watched a few episodes of Sailor Moon, that's more than enough, but in the actual text of the book there's very limited interest in drawing that picture for you then and there. The focus instead is far more on the mundane sides of the job —because it is, in this story, very much a job— from conferences and job fairs to unions and international co-operation and jurisdictions. Without going full ham with it, Park does a lot of work to undermine the sparkle of it all, tying it back to the most uninteresting basics of life, money, food, housing, the day-to-day grind and what do you actually do. This becomes especially true through the protagonist's perspective, as her precarity, her knowledge of how precipitous her own situation is, casts a shadow of realism over everything she encounters. Her fridge —the source of a good deal of her debt at the start of the story— recurs at several points as a touchstone for these themes, constantly bringing the reader back to the realities of the story.

And in this lies its strength: it is, by and large, a story about all that angst, that daily life stuff, with the magic... not exactly sprinkled on top, because it's fundamental to how the story is being told, but ultimately in service to the angst rather than the other way around. It's not about magical girls, not really; they're just the way Park is making the key points.

And those key points live or die on how relatable —distressing to use this particular word, but needs must— you find the unnamed protagonist. If you've ever been stuck at a pointless, rubbish job with a ridiculous boss because you need the pittance it pays, if you've ever been stuck at a point where the basics you assumed everyone have start to seem more luxurious than you'd ever have expected —like a fridge, for example— then her motivations and her journey are incredibly effective. It's a story calling out to lost twenty-somethings who feel adrift in the world, no longer steered by the guidance provided in childhood, not yet acquainted with the more self-assured situation of the thirties and beyond.

And by using a framework intrinsically tied to childhood, as magical girl stories so often are, it really dials up the pathos, even as it twists those girls into something more mundane and adult. Only magic can bring you unionisation, a good credit score, and a well-paying job with long term prospects, it seems to say.

This is before we even get into the climate crisis part of the narrative, which is... well, it's blunt, let's say that. The magical girls are all well aware that the planet is doomed at its current rate, and are doing everything they can to fix it. As part of this, they know they need the magical girl with the power to control time, as only she can prevent the inevitable planetary apocalypse that's coming to us all.

Wow, that sounds miserable when I type it out. And I won't lie; it is, by turns, quite a depressing book. But those other turns more than make up for it.

Because the other main thread running through it is that of relationships, the need for people in one's life, and what they can bring, even to someone right down in the pits of it all. There are two that figure most strongly: that of the protagonist with her deceased grandfather, and his memory, and with the magical girl who finds her on the bridge, Ah Roa. Ah Roa has the gift of prophecy, and is our protagonist's cheerful, knowledgeable guide into the world of magical-girling. But she is also, instantly but quite understandably, very fond of her too. And throughout the story, that fondness, alongside the often-prompted memories of a loving, nurturing and proud grandfather, serve as a balm to all the grimness, and slowly, very slowly, pull our main character out of her hole and back into the world again.

Against the background of climate change and an unexpected, rather more immediate, magical threat to all of humanity, that's what this story is about: surviving precarity day by day, the solace we take in those around us, and one person steadily pulling herself out of a hole and remembering to dream of the things she can do with her tomorrows. Despite the glittery transformations and mirrors that see the future, it is a story about a little life, finding little steps into progress, in ways many of us will find something comforting, familiar or recognisable. It uses the trappings of childhood magic to highlight some very grown-up problems, and the delicacy of that contrast is beautifully handled throughout, ending up packing far bigger a punch than its short size might suggest.

Highlights: meaningful character relationships; intensely likeable main character; lovely art pages

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Park Seolyeon. A Magical Girl Retires [HarperVia, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social