For decades, women have played a key role in the regeneration of speculative literature, imagining alternative worlds that question the established order. The new dystopian novels from South Korea share this critical and visionary perspective, laying out terrifying futures that may be closer than we think. Two representatives of this group who put women at the centre of the action are Yun Ko-eun, who in The Disaster Tourist (Serpent’s Tail, 2020) draws on satire and disaster tourism to portray the absurdity of mass tourism, and Choi Jin-young, who in To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021 ) creates a female road novel in a world ravaged by a mysterious virus. 

This conversation, moderated by Roser Cabré-Verdiell, one of the heirs to this dystopian tradition in Catalonia, aims to explore the limits of this genre and its potential for imagining the present and anticipating the worst futures.