Over a recent lunch, the Robot Alien Prophet mentioned a new project based on the novel The Odyssey by the mid-20th century Korean science fiction writer Seokjin Bu (more properly, Bu Seokjin).

Bu, I soon discovered, was born in the city of Daegu in 1935. His father was a Korean businessman and local politician of some renown; his mother was an American missionary. Bu grew up under the Japanese occupation of Korea and learned Japanese at school, English at home, and Korean from relatives and neighbors. Barely more than a teenager when the Korean War broke out, he volunteered as a translator for U.S./U.N. forces; after an intensive training period on an American military base, he spent much of the next three years on U.S. and British naval vessels. His mother sent him a Bible and a book of Greek mythology through the military post, which he devoured repeatedly. He was known as friendly, hard-working, and a team player. But he did not drink, play cards, or wrestle, which set him off a bit from the sailors around him. They did, however, gently tease him out of his straitlaced upbringing long enough for a furtive trip to a brothel on shore leave. He seemed to have a good time, but on returning to the ship he was more withdrawn than ever.

When the war ended (as much as it ever did), Bu might have been expected to return to Daegu and settle down — certainly, that appears to have been his parents’ expectation. Instead, he booked a gig on a merchant ship bound for the U.S. and ended up in San Francisco. He spent three years driving a cab and occasionally picking up modeling jobs in Hitchcockian 1950s California before driving out into the desert and becoming first a valet and then a concierge at the new Sahara in an emerging Las Vegas. Bu liked the hustle and noise of the casino, and even more he liked a steady flow of strangers: as he wrote to his father, “People driving into Vegas roll toward me like waves onto the beach; there’s a moment when our connection crests — usually when I’m solving their problem — and then it falls and dissipates, and I never see them again.”

Bu joined the Mormon church while in Las Vegas, becoming passionately religious for a few years. The clean-cut, business-minded Mormons reminded him of his parents. But after an initial wave of limerent enthusiasm, he found it hard to fit in with the culture of the church. He spoke English fluently but was not quite American. He felt his job in the gambling industry was at least covertly frowned upon. And his private but strong resistance to getting married and fathering children made him an oddball, a lonely thirty-ish bachelor in a social matrix geared toward families. In 1960 he quietly slipped away from the church and Vegas and took to the sea again, picking up a merchant vessel in San Francisco and sailing a circuitous, year-long route, ultimately landing again in Brazil.

On the bright white shoreline of Bahia, for the first and only time (as far as is recorded), he fell in love, with a black woman who provided tours of local churches to tourists. He took tours of the same buildings three days in a row. According to letters, Bu and Maria talked about his fall away from the Mormon faith and her slow realization that the Catholic churches she loved had been built by slave labor. The two seem to have had a fast and deep connection, but in the sixth month of their relationship she contracted a severe form of dengue fever and died. Bu himself was severely ill for several months.

When he recovered, Bu traveled inland and eventually found a job managing a small mining operation. This was a dark time in his life. Grieving over the rapid loss of both his religious identity and his lover, he also once again found himself culturally isolated. He had been hired for his fluency in both Japanese and English, but he fit neither with the Japanese workers (who saw him as Korean and resented his elevation to management), nor with the white Brazilians who formed the rest of the management class (who saw him as close enough to Japanese to be more like one of the workers), nor with the largely distant American and British owners. Out of spite, or grief, he took up the habit of descending into the mine with the swing shift workers (after working a full day in the office above ground), doing manual labor into the evening. Shortly before midnight he would crawl back out of the mine and head to a bunkhouse where he would smoke and read pulp science fiction magazines. This continued for two years.

Sometime in the middle of this period, Bu began writing a series of “myths,” as he called them — novels drawn in spirit from his beloved Greek tales. The hero of these stories was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a young man uprooted from his childhood home and taken to a school called “The Citadel” where he was indoctrinated and trained as an “interplanetary linguist” to interface with alien cultures.

In the first book, the young hero, Xed, is taken on board the “legendary frigate of Sir Strident Jimcloth.” He travels the universe in a bucket-of-bolts first-generation warship; unravels the code of deep space “sirens” that jam the ships instruments, sees combat against gibbering pirates that hide among the asteroids, and enjoys the company of the freewheeling (but highly competent) sailors on the crew. It’s a fast-paced, slim volume: the adventures are brisk, and the heroes and heroines speak in bright declaratory sentences (even about things they shouldn’t — like sex). Nothing comes particularly hard for Jimcloth and his sailors, and they always readily do the right thing (within the value system of mid-century science-fiction optimism). Problems are solved, opponents defeated, muscular rocket-age scientism embraced.

In the second book, Xed, released from military service, wanders aimlessly in a pleasure town for a while, briefly holing up in a hazy religious commune/opium den with other veterans. But this is all just prelude: the main body of the book begins when our hero finds work in an exotic space casino, where guests bet on things like “Calethian Pachinko” and “the Wheel of Doom.” In this incarnation, Xed is a smart, multi-lingual concierge, the calm and resourceful Jeeves to a rotating cast of — well, not Bertie Woosters, exactly, but human and alien criminals, card sharps, plucky young things, royals, sex workers, spies, out-of-place mathematicians, bellhops, and the occasional musician. Each chapter is a comic short story, a little packet of character, tension, and gentle resolution — often drawn, again, from some of the shorter Greek myths. (A recurring trope in the stories is that Xed has been given a list of onerous tasks by his supervisor; these turn out to mirror the Labors of Hercules.) It’s the most purely pleasurable of the four books.

Yet running in the background of these amusing little tableaux is something more disturbing. Repeatedly, the guests — so full of life and individuality away from the casino floor — are painted quite unflatteringly when actually in the gaming rooms. Unsurprisingly, the Lotus-Eaters and Narcissus both make appearances (as a tour group that won’t leave the casino and a handsome model who becomes obsessed with a pinball game with his face on it). The casino is in a nebula cluster known as “Death’s-Head Calypso,” suggesting the endless limbo of Odysseus’s stay with the sea nymph. There is also a game designer punished, like Arachne, for her pride in creation; she arrogantly designs a game without the help of the casino’s ludological computer, Minerva, which leads to a disastrous miscalculation of probability. And a slick gangster, who also turns out to be an tribal separatist rebel, quotes a saga of his tribe to Xed, a story in which a great chieftain muses:

I do not value love. Love is a feeling. Feelings change from day to day and minute to minute. One day I’m angry with my wife — the next day I’m enamored of her again. Over the course of a short hour, my son is, to me, a youthful fool, a fast friend, a petulant child, and a capable warrior. My planet is my childhood home and my prison; I am not always happy there. I am not married to my wife for love; I am not a father to my son for love; I am not a patriot for love. It is the opposite — it is my loyalty to wife and son and world that enable me to return, again and again, to the flush and fever of love. Don’t tell me about your passionate love for me; tell me about how you have been loyal to me. Then I know we are bonded; then I feel safe.

The third book was what we would now call a “prequel” — it starts on Xed’s childhood home and his deeply religious upbringing, then traces his apprenticeship to the Citadel of the Interplanetary Linguists, where he studies languages and becomes a situational convert to the linguists’ humanistic, atheistic creed — an optimistic view of the power of the mind, preached by the erudite Dr. Coleopter. But Xed and another young linguist from the same planet keep practicing their religion in secret, and as teenagers they sneak away together to a seaside cave and recite what prayers and catechism they can remember from childhood. (In the cave they must keep one eye on a radiation counter, as the surface of the planet outside the Citadel has been repeatedly bombarded by angry empires — it is hinted that the linguists are both necessary and distrusted.) Naturally, the children fall in love, but upon graduation they are separated, placed by a central computer on different ships, heading to different quadrants of known space. Before they embark on their journeys, they agree to meet again back on the home world in 21 years.

In the third book we also discover that Xed has actually heard the chieftain’s speech on love and loyalty long before the gangster quotes it to him in the second book; his lover recites it to him in the cave, along with the chieftain’s wife’s response:

Loyalty is for the weak — for those who cannot hear the call of their own hearts, but can only put one plodding foot before another in a journey whose purpose they have forgotten. Loyalty without love is a dried-out squash shell; it may be hard, but nothing in it is nourishing. Loyalty speaks the language of the marketplace, of duties precisely calculated; not a penny more is given than is owed. Love gives everything it has and refuses to hear talk of exchange. I do not want your loyalty.

The fourth book finds our hero friendless, grieving, and sinking into middle age. (The tone here is scarcely recognizable from the upbeat rocket-age confidence of the first book or the more mature but still joyful narrative play of the second.) Xed abandons his post at the casino and uses his small savings to travel back across the universe, unwinding his life and searching for something to fill the emptiness. He goes back first to the veterans’ commune, which has descended into drug-addicted rot. He makes an arduous space journey back to the Citadel of the Interplanetary Linguists, only to discover that the citadel is crumbling and overrun with wildlife, long ago the victim of a violent end; in the library, old language recordings play on intermittently, but there is no librarian to hear them. Finally, he flees back home, hoping to reconnect with his childhood church. But his home planet, too, has been fundamentally altered from what he remembers; far from being the peaceful and innocent Eden he recalls, it was a culture built on the oppression and subjugation of the predominant ethnic group, the Hardi. In an angry confrontation with several Hardi in his childhood church, Xed discovers that that the beautiful churches of his homeworld were all built by slaves, and that the slave artisans tasked with covering the interior from floor to ceiling with gaudy gold sculptures had creatively subverted their instructions by carving hideous parodies of the gods in dark corners of the church. The Hardi mock Xed’s childish memory of his faith, and their jeers chase him out of the church. He emerges from the church, stumbles onto a nearby beach, and… vanishes:

…Xed dropped to his knees on the sand, weeping for his many lost loves. As he cried into the salt-crusted sea air, nothing left of him, no solid foundation left to his existence as a man, he dissolved away, atom by atom, like a dandelion in the wind, and was no more.

This is, of course, a very odd ending for what had been, up to this point, a more-or-less “hard” science fiction series. Granting that the first book is largely a space opera — apart from Bu’s idiosyncratic prose style and the idea of space linguists, it seems little more than undigested Heinlein (before Heinlein discovered drugs and free love) — nothing magical happens in any of the preceding thousand or so pages that would prepare the reader for this sudden and dramatic shift. Indeed, one could be forgiven for feeling cheated.

And, unfortunately, here we come to a second cheat. The subjects of Bu’s novels are so obviously and intimately drawn from his own biography that I would like to be able to tell you what happens next. I would like to be able to tell you that his wandering heart settled down in Brazil; or that he finally returned to Daegu, made peace with his parents and his religion, became a pastor or a carpenter, married, had children; or, at the very least, that the fourth book in the Xed series was a suicide note — a grim conclusion that would, nonetheless, be a conclusion.

But I can’t. In 1974 Bu Seokjin simply disappears from the record. Unlike Xed, Bu does not appear to have retraced his steps or returned home. Although he would only be in his mid-seventies now, I cannot find him using any of the usual modern methods. I have had extensive back-and-forths by email and by phone with his publisher. I have written to the mining company, as well as the various shipping concerns that Bu had sailed with before and others that maintained a presence in the Brazilian ports in the 1970s, asking them to send me personnel records. I have, at some expense, engaged a translator and researcher to make inquiries in his home province in Korea. I myself did a good bit of looking through as-yet-unscanned microfiche of old newspapers at the U.C. Berkeley archives and interviewed an elderly man in Miami who was one of the original valets at the Sahara (and who had some very interesting stories about the early, Mafia-controlled days in Vegas that are themselves worthy of a separate investigation). I cannot find any trace of him after the publication of the fourth book.

The disappearance is not much remarked-upon in the literature; not much scholarship, to be candid, has been expended on a little-remembered, midlist author with four books in his catalog. (One must remember that there were thousands of similarly-situated men and women in the heyday of paperback science fiction publishing, whose books sold well enough to satisfy publishers, fill shelves, and put food on the table for at least some time, but who lacked the talent or self-promoting instinct to become a “name” even on the lips of convention-going genre devotees, let alone the public. Or, to be slightly more charitable and philosophical, perhaps they had plenty of talent, but that talent simply never met the zeitgeist.) The only scholar to take on Bu’s work in a meaningful way, Rebecca Liang (editor of Asian-American Science Fiction in the 20th Century), from whom I learned much of the biographical detail in this essay, was as unable as I to trace Bu’s later years.

I asked the Robot Alien Prophet, in putting together these notes, “Do you have any favorite theories about what happened to Bu? How does this all end? It’s very unsatisfying, you know, and” — I added this part a bit peevishly — “you’ve put me in this position.” But the Robot Alien Prophet just pulled at one ear and then the other, suggested that maybe some things — like Tom Bombadil, or the Colorado Kid — aren’t meant to be fully explained, and went back to editing audio.

I don’t know about that.

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Track listing is below, with lyrics/spoken word content where applicable. (Note that Dr. Coleopter’s commencement speech is adapted and condensed from a speech in the third novel; the other lyrics are original to R.A.P.)

BOOK ONE

1.1 The Clipper Ships

1.2 Crewman on the Legendary Frigate of Sir Strident Jimcloth

1.3 The False Electromagnetic Voices of the Ice Ring Sirens

1.4 Strident Jimcloth and the Asteroid Belt Robbers

BOOK TWO

2.1 Killing Time in the Alleyways of Rahet City

2.2 The Cavernous Mouth of Sharadd Shek, Part 1

2.3 Seven Years in the Pachinko Parlors of Death's Head Calypso, Part One

2.4 Seven Years in the Pachinko Parlors of Death's Head Calypso, Part II

2.5 Seven Years in the Pachinko Parlors of Death's Head Calypso, Part 3

BOOK THREE

3.1 Childhood Prayers

3.2 Apprentices Spitting into the Engine Well of the Transport from Cleanath IX

3.3 The Funktastic Seductions of Dr. Coleopter

3.4 The Lamentation of Renunciation in the Citadel of the Interplanetary Linguists

3.5 The Autumn Smog on Sirius, The Year We Had An Affair In A Cave Near The City, Near The Shore

BOOK FOUR

4.1 Taking Over the Galactic Indemnity Services Corp. from the Inside

4.2 The Cavernous Mouth of Sharadd Shek, Pt. 2

4.3 Falling Leaves and Susurrations in the Citadel of the Interplanetary Linguists

4.4 On the Pleasure Planet, Praying in Temples Built by Slaves

4.5 The Lonely Ophicleide of Orpheus Above Ground