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SEA Quest: Malaysia and Singaporean SFF anthologies

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Southeast Asia is a region rich in cultures and mythologies woven together by migration and trade routes. Its people are both indigenous and diasporic. The countries are born from syncretism, synthesis, assimilation and integration. Likewise, there have been colonizations, wars and occupations, with all these traumatic periods impacting the psychological, emotional and cultural landscape. Our fiction is a product of these shifting tides and collective psyches, joined by the sea and grounded by the land beneath our feet.  Our ideas are a mishmash of (often) conflicting identities and motives. We speak in English, the dominant tongue used by the British. Many also use Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French, also languages of the various colonizers who made their mark in many countries. These tongues collide with our own native and diasporic languages, producing identities that are indeed biracial, variant and syncretic.

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The Intersection: Day of the Dove

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“And so we drift in space… with only hatred and bloodshed aboard.” —Captain Kirk, “Day of the Dove,” Star Trek 1968 2017 has been a hard year to be a writer and not only because the Trump administration has been doing its best to remove all options for affordable, effective healthcare—something that freelancers depend upon entirely (and all professional fiction writers are, in fact, freelancers)—but also because with horrific event after horrific threat (Hello, North Korea), fiction writing begins to feel superfluous. Worse, if you’re like me and you enjoy writing stories about people trying to be their best selves in extreme situations like war, then you start to wonder if you’re contributing to the problem. They’ve been daunting, these thoughts. The only ray of light is the knowledge that I’m not the only one. In any case, I needed to stop thinking about the shooting in Las Vegas for a while. Star Trek, particularly original Trek, is comfort viewing. Interestingly enough, the episode I happened upon was one of the particularly fitting ones. It’s titled Day of the Dove.

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Book Review: At the Table of Wolves by Kay Kenyon

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Spies and Espionage are a genre of novels that is irresistible to science fiction and fantasy writers who want to mix some peanut butter in their chocolate. Cloak and Dagger, hidden agendas, betrayals, allegiances, loyalty and the glamour and seduction of the spy’s life. James Bond and his competitors, clones and remakes are just a fraction of what can be tapped, especially once someone adds science fiction and fantasy to the mix. At the Table of Wolves by Kay Kenyon is the newest in that tradition, combining 1930s British espionage with superpowers. In the world of Kenyon’s novel, superpowers, here called Talents, started appearing after the devastation of World War I. How and why precisely this Bloom occurred is not explained in detail. It’s taken as a fact, and the repercussions of that event are playing out, more than a decade later. Intelligence agencies, governments, and just plain ordinary people are dealing with the fact that some people can now show feats of precognition, or reading objects, or seeing crimes, or, perhaps, having the preternatural ability to get people, without their volition, to spill things they would never dreaming of confessing. And it is that last talent that brings us to the heroine of the novel.

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Movie Review: "Blade Runner 2049" (‘As clear as dreaming’)

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I can’t remember ever being as disturbed and enthralled at one time by any movie as by “Blade Runner 2049.” That makes it fine art in my eyes. The movie is disturbing because it so explicitly poses questions about personhood, objectification and empathy. I gasped a few times and flinched several more times, and so did my companion. Besides the consent issues, the violence in it is also disturbing, and this vision of 2049 is even more dystopic for PoC and women; however, I saw those elements not as gratuitous, but rather as deliberate showcasing of the problems of society. I’ll discuss that more after the spoiler warning. The movie is enthralling because it is so well done. I said before that it “poses” questions instead of “asks” them, because aside from some brief future-history infodumping, there is a whole lot of show-not-tell in this movie, the opposite of the much-derided voiceover in the 1982 movie’s theatrical version. I suppose a person who’s oblivious to social issues could take everything that happens at face value, as though the viewer is supposed to be okay with the situations and choices being shown, but it seems obvious that a person who thinks about them is supposed to be cringing.

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Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (reviewed by Penny Reeve)

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Carmen Maria Machado’s writing has — very rightly so — been receiving a lot of attention recently. Readers have been champing at the bit for more of Machado’s work since she set the literary world alight in 2014 with the incredible short “The Husband Stitch” and now we’re rewarded with a collection of her short stories with Her Body and Other Parties, which I’m already slating as one of my top reads of 2017. Machado has some serious literary strings to her bow, having written for NPR, Electric Literature, VICE and the New Yorker. Her short stories have appeared numerous anthologies including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and Best Woman’s Erotica. The new collection, featuring the aforementioned “The Husband Stitch” — which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and Nebula awards, as well as being longlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. and winning a Pushcart Prize special mention — has received praise from just about everyone, including author du jour Roxane Gay, LA Times and Kirkus, which shortlisted Her Body and Other Parties for their annual titular prize, despite it only being published October 3.

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