** Instant Noodles in Space **
Ocean’s Godori and Teo’s Durumi imagine a near future where Koreans have taken over space and brought their culture with them. The mood is familiar to anybody that has seen Firefly. High-functioning angst. Tight crews. Long pauses between sentences. It’s less space opera than K-drama with airlocks.
During Ocean’s Godori, I kept thinking of the rise and fall of Sanctuary moon from Murderbot, as the series (and fictional series) lean on worn components. The villain in Durumi is a familiar type: technological genius, convinced on merging consciousness, indifferent to the people who have to die to make it happen. I guess evil Ilya Sutskever is a trope.
I’ll remember the descriptions of food most. Korean cuisine is the closest thing I know to believable sci-fi food. Portable. Improvised. Strange. Hangover soup shows up when it should. Hot-and-sour instant noodles get cooked during an awkward conversation on an alien planet.
The romance, by contrast, is a true slow burn.
I was in Big Sur during a rainstorm over this Christmas. It was a 1970s wood built hippie resort with a fireplace in every room. Our room had a ‘fire kit’ for the antique fireplace, consisting of compressed wood, wood chips, and a box of matches. Foolproof, in theory. And it should be easy for me: I was a boy scout and lit the house fire every week as a kid. Well this kit was not easy to light. The fire-starter would light, but not the kindling. Match after match gone. On the 20th try and last possible match, I dumped the bag out and finally got a blaze. Fifteen minutes later it was over, collapsed into embers. Expect this as the slow burn romance.
Still, there is something steady here.People eat. People talk past each other. Crews merge because they have to. Soup matters.