A distinctive feature of twenty-first century feminist South Korean science fiction is that the novum, the strange newness that sets the text’s story world apart from the reader’s empirical reality, often relates to sensory perception. Literary theorist Darko Suvin famously defines science fiction as the “literature of cognitive estrangement.”  But we might just as accurately characterise the science fiction and fantasy of South Korean women writers like Bo-Young Kim, Bora Chung, Choyeop Kim and Amil as the literature of sensory estrangement. For these writers often make perceptual novelty and the “reshaping of existing orderings of sensory experience” the bases of their science-fictional thought experiments. In this paper, I am interested in how writers use the SF narrative device of the perceptual novum to express ecological understandings of identity, care and protection. Stories featuring perceptual novums often depict intimate sensory encounters between subjects that belong to very different orders of being and time. The subjects encountering one another might belong to different species of animal, different ontological orders (biological and mechanical, animate and inanimate) or even different times (past and present). But in the brief and fleeting moment of their close sensory contact, the ontological differences between these things and beings are abolished, and they start to resemble one another and share a common existential destiny. In these fables of posthuman care and protection, as I call them, marginalised human characters find themselves temporarily cared for and/or protected by members of the more-than-human community after being abandoned by the human community. The character’s novel sensory encounter with a nonhuman subject is liberatory and redemptive in the sense that: (1) it restores a previously severed connection between the human and more-than-human world and (2) it returns a situation to a time before things went bad.

Chris Danta is a professor of literature in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University. He calls himself a literary anthropologist and his research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science, and theology. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Blanchot (2011) and Animal Fables After Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (2018). He is currently working on a book titled Future Fables: Literature, Evolution, and Artificial Intelligence. Chris was recently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, 2021–25.