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The Dilemma of Survival in “The Silent Sea”
Barrenness, abundance, and water as life and resource
What if the moon’s Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility — the huge dark spot on the moon’s northern hemisphere, and famously Apollo 11’s landing site — turns out to be a literal sea?
The moon’s seas are not actual seas, but barren, lower altitude plains that look like dark basins when seen from earth.
“Long ago, Galileo thought it was all water. That’s why he decided to name it the Silent Sea. But once we got to the moon, there was no water.” — The Silent Sea, 2021
In a poignant flashback scene, the Song sisters, who will both grow up to be talented astrobiologists, are looking up at the moon as Galileo did. In the post-apocalyptic earth of The Silent Sea, the rains have stopped, the seas are drying up. In a dystopian world where water is exotic, the sisters dream of visiting the moon for its seas.
Choi Hang-yon’s The Silent Sea comes on the heels of Squid Game and Hellbound, two South Korean serials that trended one after the other on Netflix. The Silent Sea plays with this idea of the moon’s “seas” as possibly holding a revolutionary and permanent solution to…
