Book Review – Principals: A post-K-pop novel

21 hours ago 9

Kpopalypse is back with another book review! This time we’re reading “Principals: A post-K-pop novel” by Dienw Neb!

I thought I’d take a little time out from writing my own k-pop books to check out some of the k-pop books other authors had written for a change. I was just thinking about where I should start with such a venture when a friendly and brave author sent me a copy of a self-published book they had written. I love it when decisions like this are easy! So let’s take a look at it – does it meet required standards?

PRINCIPALS: A POST-KPOP NOVEL

Author: Dienw Neb

No Shelter, 337 pages, Kindle Edition

ASIN: B0DD8JDLQ6

eBook RRP: $0.99 USD

Paperback RRP: $12:99 USD

Amazon link so the author doesn’t hate me for this snarky review and can still make a buck

Have you ever wondered what a k-pop fiction novel would be like… if it was also a dystopian science fiction novel? You probably haven’t, and…well, to be honest neither had I, but I certainly started wondering a lot more about it when the author of this book reached out to me. How was something like this even going to work? Is any of this even going to make any sense? Let’s find out.

We’ll start with a brief plot synopsis that I’ll make as spoiler-free as I can. The book contains not one or two but three stories happening concurrently in the same setting, none of which interact with each other directly:

The main story is of two girls, Jűn-Fi and Agati, who live with their mother in a country called Ibban which is presumably a post-war dystopian future-Korea of some type. They all work in a crappy warehouse or something and experience bone-grinding poverty and things are very dystopian and bleak. Through a series of events they predictably get scouted to be part of an unnamed I-pop group (I assume that’s “Ibban pop”, not “International-pop”) and they find out that things are very dystopian and bleak. This story takes up about 60% of the book.
There’s a second story that takes up maybe about 30% of the book, following a songwriter/producer from a foreign country who is invited to go to Ibban to receive an award. He finds out that things are very dystopian and bleak.
The remaining approximately 10% of the book is a story about some unnamed Ibban rebels who document in the first-person their various procedures to attempt to sabotage the very dystopian and bleak dystopia.

There’s also some chapter epigraphs, extracted from a completely different companion book by the same author called Principles: On the Art of the Effective Self-Motivated Life, and this book is an Ibban-dictatorship-authorised instruction manual for how to run a dictatorship effectively or something, featuring practical as well as ideological instruction, like a future Mein Kampf or similar.

If you’re starting to think “gosh, that all sounds like quite a bit to take in”, you’d be right. Here’s the people, places and unique terms that you as a reader are introduced to just in the book’s first scene, which is about five pages long:

Jűn-Fi – a main character, a teenager, kind of the chaotic misbehaving Chuu-energy one.
Agati – her sister, the more chill one. The other main character, the book focuses more on Agati.
Omoni – the mother, who ticks all the dystopian mother boxes by being appropriately worried about everything the kids do and that’s pretty much the extent of her character but that’s okay, the story isn’t really about her.
Autremonde by Sapwa ft. Ymako – an I-pop song.
APT Sphere – an apartment, but it’s also a… sphere, maybe… that hangs over the city or something, and also broadcasts music? I’m unsure, I read through the entire book but still only have a hazy idea of what this even is. Maybe it’s explained somewhere and I missed it.
Ibban – the country the story is set in. Presumably it’s the completely unified Korea after the “War Of Unification”, which we don’t read about until later, but this is never directly stated (not even a glossary entry) and real-world borders are not referenced. Indeed the word “Korea” is nowhere in the entire book, not even in a past tense historical context. I guess the author wanted the book to feel appropriately alien, which it does.
Ibbani – this adjective of “Ibban” is introduced slightly before “Ibban” in the book, let’s just say that caused some confusion.
Great Father Cheonwan Song – there’s all these references to “Great Father” in the book and I got the feeling while reading that he occupies a similar position of reverence as North Korea’s leader occupies for North Koreans.
l’Yongeon – that’s the city they live in.
YGN13 fulfilment centre – this is where the main characters work at the start of the book.
Apochi – described in the glossary as a “hot dry weather system” so I guess it’s like an El Niño or similar… or maybe it’s the other one, I don’t know, I’m not Weatherpopalypse don’t correct me if I fucked this up cheers.
Haepali – according to the glossary: ” Floating gardens, resembling octopi. The metal for their structure and chains are cast from the war machines used in the War of Unification”.
Trooping of the Colours – I guess this is a parade of some kind, it’s never specified exactly what it is or why it’s called that or even which colours in particular we’re talking about (kudos for spelling “colours” correctly however).
Gunin – military police (in the glossary).
Pijekko – street orphans (in the glossary).
The Archy – Another concept not really explained fully but I guess this is a bastardisation of “heirarchy” and it seems to imply “the prevailing dystopian order”. People who are part of the Archy are called “Archists”, that comes up later a lot.
Piaeja – the name of some guy who got executed by hanging for being nice to poor people, I mean whatever, it’s a dystopia, that’s how they roll I guess. Not an important character.
YGN14 building – I guess that’s the building next door to the factory.
Taleun exoterrorists – Nomadic native minority peoples of Ibban (from the glossary), unsure what the difference between an exoterrorist and a regular terrorist is, I assume it’s not a love of SM Entertainment’s boy groups.
Saejjab – a vulgar pijekko slang word for the gunin (military police, above).
Ogye – the actual name for “vulgar Pijekko slang”. Like, come on, was defining this even necessary, don’t we have enough damn new words to learn.

You may be beginning to sense the first problem that I had with this book – it does suffer from a significant case of “lore dump”. This is actually a fairly common problem with sci-fi books in general, but I feel that this book doesn’t do a lot to help the reader overcome the obstacle of having to learn a ton of new shit just to be able to read and understand what’s going on. Think about the amount of “lore vertigo” a new Kpopalypse.com reader might experience when they encounter things like “caonima”, “MRS”, and so on (which is why I have a lexicon), and multiply that by about twenty, that’s what you’re dealing with here. While reading this book, every few pages I routinely had to stop, think to myself, “wait, what the fuck did I actually just read, did I just vague out halfway through and just zombie-read it or what because I am now unsure what is happening”, backtrack a little way, read it all again, realise that there’s at least two words in there that I didn’t understand or couldn’t remember the meanings of, go look at the glossary, realise that only one of the two words is actually in the glossary but the other one was probably explained earlier, do a CTRL+F to find where that word was first used so I could remember the meaning of it, then find my original place in the book and continue. This gets tiring. I pity anyone reading this in paperback form, and it doesn’t get significantly easier as the story progresses. Maybe this is my fault as a reader, perhaps I just don’t have the brain for this book. Perhaps you as a reader love your sci-fi dystopia and read a lot of books like this, therefore you have a brain that can remember all this shit when it’s thrown at you, but I sure don’t. I didn’t remember the definitions of a single foreign word above apart from “gunin” and had to go look the rest up just to write this review. This book is extremely heavy going and if your brain is even slightly ADD-inclined, it will punish you. It’s definitely for a certain type of reader.

Having said that, it’s all beautifully written. From a “writing style” perspective, I couldn’t fault it, just on a technical level. I thought that the descriptions were great, the main characters were well-realised, events make good narrative sense, and I don’t even think it was too exposition-heavy or anything like that; the lore, while confusing as fuck, isn’t awkwardly forced but is interwoven sensibly into the scenes. If you’re a bit wary of this book as a self-published novel, worried that it might be cringe or something because of the “future k-pop” theme, don’t be. The “future k-pop training” scenes lack a bit for realism, substituting actual trainee hardships for cushier but more typically dystopian scenarios, but then it’s the future so I’ll forgive little odd details like trainees actually eating carbs – it’s still pretty well done overall. Dienw Neb displays significant craft as a writer and does pretty well to make things sound grounded and not ridiculous. The only giveaways for me that this was even self-published were the very odd choice of font for the majority of the PDF I was sent (borked kerning tbh), the fact that text wasn’t fully-justified plus the odd typo here or there (although due to the amount of weird terms this book has, I had to double-check that some of the typos weren’t actually dialect that I’d missed). The first two issues won’t even be a problem anyway if you’re reading it in ebook format (which replaces fonts and auto-justifies) and the third will probably be fixed by the time you read this as I sent a bunch of feedback to the author and I’m sure he’s tidied it up by now. So honestly, full marks for this aspect.

Having said that, I really didn’t enjoy most of reading this book, despite the fact that I thought it was written brilliantly (often way better than my own writing just in terms of sheer wordcraft… mind you I am usually writing first-person from the point of view of social-media-damaged teenagers so I’m dumbing down my wordcraft to the floor often on purpose). Did I mention that this book is very dystopian and bleak? Well guess what – it is. Now that isn’t a problem in itself, I think the issue I have is the book doesn’t have enough light and shade in it to make slogging through the bleakness palatable. Everything is bleak, bleak, bleak with very little hopefulness and almost no humour whatsoever. One of the best parts of the book was somewhere in the middle where the girls trapped in trainee hell decide to form some type of “resistance organising committee” and there’s a bit of humourous back-and-forth as they clumsily work through how they’re going to run it. Here I thought “finally, our author is onto something engaging with a bit of humour” but that scene only lasts a few sentences before our main character nopes out of the whole process and then it’s back to the flat, dystopian grind. Another rare humourous highlight was when the rebels start doing radio announcements. Also, the chapter epigraphs I thought were a great addition, apparently they are unpopular with other readers but I thought the shift in tone was a very welcome break from the main story’s relentless dourness. However, these moments of lightness are very few and far between.

Most frustratingly of all, the book misses opportunities to add some dynamics to the story in places that I felt were screaming out for them. Just one example (which I’ll keep light on detail): there’s a scene where our songwriter/producer touches down at an airport and struggles to deal with some unhelpful staff; he eventually gets fed up with the bullshit and proceeds to a destination on foot, walking a long way in the desert heat. All of the bureaucratic dicking-around is done via narrative “tells”, whereas once he sets out on foot, that’s when “show” really kicks in and then we get descriptions of how he’s struggling in the heat and so on. To me this is ass backwards. Him walking in the heat really isn’t that interesting. Meanwhile the airport dick-around could have been expanded greatly with dialogue and cynical humour that could have entertained the reader as well as expanded on how visitors experience the system and why the bureaucracy is so fucked up, instead it’s just kind of skimmed over with minimal detail. This happens time and time again over the course of the book, the aspects of the story that are the least interesting are given airtime at the expense of potentially more entertaining stuff that’s just skimmed over. In a story that is at least 98% cold, unrelenting bleakness, as a writer you don’t want to just constantly skip over opportunities to keep your readers engaged. I felt like maybe the author thought that because it’s a dark story, lighter moments had no place in it, but I think the opposite is true, and that in a dark story, balancing lighter moments is essential if you don’t want the reader to just put the book down because it’s making them miserable.

The other thing that annoyed me was that the three main stories don’t link in any kind of direct way. I don’t mind spoilering this aspect because honestly had I known than the characters in the three stories were never going to meet, I would have enjoyed reading the book a lot more (or at least not enjoyed it a lot less) without that false hope hanging over it. As it stood, I felt frustrated; I spent the whole book thinking to myself “this book sure is a slog at the moment but I can’t wait until these characters finally meet up, things are sure going to get a lot more interesting then” and then it never happened. I wish that the book had made it clear from the outset that the three stories were all completely separated, because it’s at least implied that the protagonists of the first two stories might meet (one is a trainee performer and the other is a producer headed roughly to their location, after all), and being cockblocked out of The Big Meeting Dialogue felt really shitty. The endings are kind of unsatisfying too, even the few parts that end with a little bit of hope just finish immediately afterward because OH GEE GOLLY NO WE CAN’T HAVE THE STORY CONTINUE EVEN ONE SECOND AFTER SOMEONE SMILES, THIS IS A DYSTOPIAN BOOK SO WE CAN’T WRITE ABOUT NICE THINGS, CAN WE, OH NO argh the more I think about this book the more it pisses me off…

Some more positive stuff to end on – the third story was by far the best, I enjoyed the detached way in which it was written which compensated somewhat for the severe lack of dynamic contrast in the main stories, plus I learned quite a few new things about how rebel forces behave when faced with a technologically superior enemy, this was genuinely interesting. Full marks here for excellent writing and maybe even more excellent research (unless the author just made all that shit up in which case they are absolute genius and deserve credit anyway). Pity it’s only 10% of the book.

Overall I respect the ambition, the concept and the (honestly superb) craft of this book, the writer is a genuine talent and I hope they write more. However I absolutely did not enjoy most of the content whatsoever and had to rely on extreme caonima determination to even finish it. Two “dead dogs” out of five (you’ll have to read the book to get the reference), but add an extra two “dead dogs” if you’re reading this review and thinking “Kpopalypse you big pussy, it’s not the author’s fault you’re an ADD fuckwit who can’t pay attention to things and doesn’t like being sad”. In any event if this review has you intrigued, the ebook is only a dollar so it won’t cost you much to find out for yourself how you feel about it if you’re curious. If you’re a k-pop reader who likes books it’s probably worth a punt at that price just to see if you disagree with me. Woof woof.