I just finished watching Space Sweepers, a 2021 South Korean movie on Netflix which is apparently considered by some to be the first South Korean blockbuster science fiction movie. That is kind of disappointing, in a way, because I really enjoyed the hell out of it and was hoping there was a whole treasure trove of slick Korean language science fiction out there waiting for me… I guess there isn’t. I am not very familiar with Korean cinema or TV, to be honest. Japanese stuff, in my lifetime at least, has always been way more accessible and since I studied Mandarin in college I tend to gravitate toward Chinese language film and TV, especially if features martial arts (because studying Chinese martial arts is what led me to take up Mandarin in college and screw up my GPA).
Up until now, my experience with Korean TV and film can be pretty much summed up with a handful of ‘70s Korean period martial arts films masquerading as “kung fu movies,” a couple South Korean takes on kaiju (War of the God Monsters springs to mind… which the Internet says wasn’t available in the US until fairly recently but I am pretty damn sure I rented it on VHS in the late ’80s), Old Boy and the science fiction series The Silent Sea (which is also on Netflix). I skipped Squid Games, because I am quickly prejudiced against things which get as over-hyped as it was, but I really liked The Silent Sea. I am not sure how I missed Space Sweepers until now; it has been out for over a year and I looked for other Korean language science fiction after finishing The Silent Sea.
The short review of Space Sweepers is: I loved it; it got me excited the way the first episode of Firefly did back in the day. I am ready for a sequel and I think everyone should watch it. But that isn’t really what I want to talk about… I want to talk about the genre (really, probably sub-genre or even aesthetic) I place Space Sweepers in and I call that ”dirty space.” Wait, what? Dirty space? Why do we need a new sub-genre in science fiction? And it sounds like porn. We need many new sub-genres and sub-brands in science fiction and fantasy because there is just so much out there. Science fiction puts stories of daring young pilots flying spaceships that turn into giant robots and morality tales pondering the morality of genetically engineering your baby under the same tent. It gets even worse when, as was done for so many years, fantasy and science fiction are lumped together. The explosion of content cries out for organization, categorization and labeling. It has already happened to other prolific genres… witness romance where there are literally authors who specialize in Christian, bad boy, other man’s baby romances with happy endings.
Granted dirty space sounds, well, kind of like a porn flick but I don’t mean dirty as in R rated, I mean dirty as in full of dirt. Dirty space is not about spaceships like the USS Enterprise, especially the newer incarnations, where everything is bright, shiny and well lit. I am talking about science fiction where the spacestations and starships look like a cross between Das Boot and 1985 F150 with a camper shell your crazy uncle has been collecting scrap metal in since he won it in a poker game back in the ’90s. Often, as in the case of Firefly and Space Sweepers, this type of science fiction is dubbed space western. I kind of get that, especially since the granddaddy of big budget, mainstream dirty space is probably 1981’s Outland, with Sean Connery (remember that?) and Outland was basically High Noon set on a mining colony on Io. Dirty space pedants (which, given the nature of science fiction fandom probably have already sprung into existence even though, as far as I know, I literally just introduced the term to the universe a mere paragraph ago) will no doubt argue there were earlier films, 1974’s Dark Star springs to mind, which explored the concept. I will leave those arguments for the conventions and chatrooms.
If Outland, Firefly and Space Sweepers all fit the space western theme, why do we need a term like dirty space? Good question. Plenty of other things have the dirty space aesthetic without really being space westerns. The Expanse, which is more detective story than western (at least in the beginning), springs to mind. Science fiction horror movies, certainly some of the Alien franchise, overlap with the dirty space aesthetic, too.
Basically, dirty space is a vision of the future where new technologies and the conquest of space (or at least our solar system, as many things I think of as dirty space seem to keep humankind firmly below the speed of light and relatively close the Earth) have not really solved our problems. In fact, it often seems they have basically made them worse with mining colonies, spacestations and the ships shuttling between them all reflecting the very worst aspects of the third world instead of portraying the future as a technological eden which has elevated all humans into a new Eden. Space is not so great. It probably wants to kill you, or at least make you life really suck.
The reason I think of dirty space as more of a genre than a visual aesthetic is because while dirty space seems almost a visual shorthand for saying ”hey, turns out we are going to screw up space just as bad as we are screwing up Earth, maybe worse” or at the very least ”life in space is pretty crappy” it is more. It has a definite attitude; there seems little room for blind optimism in dirty space because everyone seems to really need a shower. The huddled masses are almost always oppressed and impoverished. People in a dirty space story are not going to be faced with conflict such as ”do they have the right to make a judgement on the long waging computerized war being fought with perfect civility by this newly met alien civilization?” People in a dirty space story are probably going to see problems more along of the lines of ”how can they improve their lives without ending up in space prison or being cut up to provide spare body parts for the upper class?” I also feel as though dirty space can also be found in non-visual science fiction storytelling. Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress has never, to my knowledge, been adapted for the screen but it exudes dirty space feel.
Whether dirty space is a sub-genre title which catches on… well, I will leave that to the conventions and chat rooms for discussion. But I will close my impromptu argument for the term by saying if you read this description and at any time thought something along the lines of ”he didn’t mention this movie, that show or book…” then there is probably a space in the science fiction family tree for dirty space.