Negotiating the Colonial Dilemma Through Science Fiction: Translating Jules Verne in Early Twentieth-Century Colonial Korea

Abstract This article examines the emergence of science fiction (SF) in early twentieth-century Korea by analyzing the first two Korean translations of Jules Verne—Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1907–08) and The Begum’s Fortune (1908). It argues that these relay translations, produced during the years between the Russo-Japanese War and formal Japanese annexation, reveal how Korean intellectuals navigated what the article terms the “colonial dilemma”: the challenge of rethinking national identity amid accelerated modernization and encroaching imperial domination. Rather than passively importing European SF, Korean translators actively reshaped the texts through genre relabeling, annotation, and selective adaptation, using them simultaneously as vehicles of scientific enlightenment and as tools for articulating Korea’s precarious place within global geopolitics. The article further contends that the early Korean use of the term “science fiction”—predating its standardization in the Anglophone world—calls for a reconsideration of global SF timelines and assumptions about the genre’s origins. By situating Korean SF within the broader East Asian circulation of Verne’s works and by highlighting the translators’ interventions into colonialist narratives, this study demonstrates that SF in Korea emerged not as an extension of European imperial imagination but through a complex interplay of colonial, anti-colonial, and nation-building impulses.