Kim Jong Un saves the world!
This bit in Ars Technica about North Korean Sci Fi (yes, it’s a real thing) is great fun.
The main themes of early North Korean sci-fi revolved around the lives and struggles of ordinary people who used science and technology to better themselves and the world. Plots of man taming nature were frequent in both North Korea and the Soviet Union, which had slogans like "Correcting nature's mistakes" and "Man, in transforming nature, transforms himself."
…
Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.
But it did make an interesting point about the familiarity of the tropes. In Change Course (Hangno rǔl pakkura) by Yi Kŭmchǒl, a plane glides above the Pacific Ocean towards the Philippines. Suddenly, screams erupt as some passengers panic. The captain reveals a bomb onboard, set to detonate below 10,000 feet. Amidst the chaos, a calm young North Korean diplomat stands out. He trusts his country to build an anti-gravitational field, and, my friends, he is not wrong!
I ROFL’d heartily, but as Ars points out, would any of us even blink if the diplomat was American. Or the plane was a bus, and the hero was Keanu Reeves?
Are Western stories much different? There are a plethora of Anglo science fiction stories that have the people rising up to overthrow the corrupt oligarchs and corporations. Sadly I am now motivated to seek out North Korean Science Fiction and disprove my wife when she says I could not be a more pretentious wanker.
Really the only thing that makes a story about a calm and heroic North Korean diplomat jarring for a Western audience is our conscious and unconscious biases about North Korea. It's hard for us to square the circle of a heroic diplomat when our perception of his country is as an undemocratic tin pot dictatorship that needs to be overthrown. Ironically it's how North Koreans would probably view the same story with an American or British diplomat as the hero...