켄 리우의 「북두」와 조선스팀펑크 연작에 나타난 전통의 재구성

초록

This article compares Ken Liu’s silkpunk short story Beidou with the Joseon steampunk series produced by contemporary Korean genre writers, in order to examine how tradition is reappropriated in East Asian alternate history narratives. Alternate history may be understood as a genre that reconstructs latent possibilities of the past by positing alternative choices at specific historical junctures. In the East Asian context, tradition functions as a central narrative resource, representing layers of time that have been disrupted or transformed through experiences of modernization, imperialism, and invasion. Based on this perspective, the article analyzes how both Beidou and Joseon steampunk draw upon premodern East Asian history, technology, and cultural elements, while adopting different strategies in their genre-based organization of these materials. In Beidou, tradition serves primarily as a symbolic and philosophical resource through which the Ming empire reflects on technological power and ethical choice, and alternate historical intervention remains limited to the level of world-building. By contrast, in the Joseon steampunk series, tradition is directly integrated into major historical events of Joseon, functioning as a narrative device that reshapes internal historical causality, while technology is reappropriated as a medium for exploring possibilities of social change and structural transformation. Through this comparison, the article suggests that East Asian alternate history narratives tend to present two broad trajectories in their engagement with tradition: a transnational, imperial mode and an internally oriented, vernacular mode of rewriting national history. This observation highlights the spectrum of ways in which East Asian genre narratives organize historical consciousness and technological imagination through tradition. In this respect, the present study may serve as a case that extends discussions on the contemporary use of classical and historical materials from a genre-theoretical perspective.

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