Bae Myung-hoon

Bae Myung-hoon is a South Korean science fiction author whose satirical, politically charged stories have made him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Korean SF. His story collection Tower — imagining a tower so tall it constitutes a separate nation-state — established him as a writer with a gift for extrapolating the absurdities of modern institutional life into genuinely unsettling speculative scenarios.

His work belongs to a generation of Korean SF writers who use genre conventions not for escapism but for social critique, skewering bureaucracy, nationalism, and the logic of late capitalism with a dry, relentless wit. Bae has also worked as a physician, and his scientific grounding gives his speculation a particular kind of solidity.