big skY 1 asia Gravitas . . . Gravitas . . . No, Don’t Help Me, I’ll Get It In A Moment . . . 1 contents

Emigré Peter Young 3

Fanzines Over Astrakhan Peter Young 7

Mirai-ki: The Forgotten History of Japan’s Early Science Fiction Jess Nevins 11

Science Fiction in Hindi: A Critic’s View Arvind Mishra & Manish Mohan Gore 15

Chinese Space Children pictorial 21

Dop’s House of Anime Antony J. Shepherd 28

Time Zone: reviews Peter Young 37

Cornucopia: reviews Peter Young 51

Feet of Clay S.P. Somtow 60

Distant Barking Dogs Peter Young 65

Hermeto’s Giant Breakfast Peter Young 71

Part-genzine, part-perzine, variable sercon/fannish content. If you are not satisfied with this product please contact your nearest Big Sky dealer. Letters column in the next issue – please be part of it. Send all Letters of Comment, articles and artwork to [email protected].

Cover: Mothership — MRT Expo Station, Singapore, January 2008 Edited and published by Peter Young Page 79: Planet — over Ethiopia, August 2005 Fanzines in trade can be sent to: 2013 136/200 Emerald Hill Village, Soi 6, Hua Hin, Prachuap Khiri Khan 77110, Thailand All photography and art appears under a Creative Commons licence except: or if postage is less:

Big Sky cover & page 79 — © 2008 & © 2005 Peter Young c/o 22 Tippings Lane, Woodley, Berkshire, RG5 4RX, England

page 2 — © 2013 Sue Jones, used by permission page 64 — © 2012 Loke Inkid, used by permission page 75 — © 2004 David A. Hardy, for the book Futures: 50 Years in Space, Thanks to all contributors for use of their articles, photography and artwork.

Sue Jones used by permission See page 77 for full copyright details on the contributed articles. 2 emigré

Peter Young O (BECAUSE THIS IS one of those fanzine articles that begins with “So”), what’s with a ’zine that appears out of S the blue like this, with the name that it has? So, going back a bit: Zoo Nation #7 came out in April 2006, and I was planning #8 for November that year in time for Novacon. At which point, roughly, real life took over, and #8 got shelved, then shelved indefinitely, then quietly dropped, so I ought to apologise now to those fen who took the trouble to send a LoC. Fanzines for me aren’t just strung together with whatever material I can throw between two covers; the overall end result has to take some kind of cohesive shape. I think #8 just never had time or space to form in my head: ‘real life’ in this instance involved getting over a knee injury that plagued me for a year, getting hitched, selling house and car, moving 6,000 miles East, buying a new place and having a kid, all while holding down a job 6,000 miles back West. Quite enough to be getting on with, thanks. So, since Zoo Nation #7, things haven’t been completely quiet. Guest editing Journey Planet #3, #7 and #12 was an enjoyable way to keep my hand in, and it was fun working with James, Chris and Claire to produce three great issues I’m genuinely proud of. Plus working on Journey Planet in an A4 format instead of A5 was also a subtly liberating experience, and it’s the single reason I’ve gone A4 for Big Sky. So (again). The name: some background. Whenever I look up at a those impressive cloudscapes in the skies over Thailand, usually before or after some seriously major rainfall, I mentally describe this place as the ‘Land of Big Skies’. I’m pleased to call it home now. Therefore, Big Sky also feels like a good name for a fanzine that focuses on a worldwide genre – a genre that, figuratively, has a sky big enough to contain anything we care to fill it with, and with enough conceptual space to fill a fanzine with all my genre interests. So, I don’t see ‘world SF’ as the focus here so much as the background, populated with some varied

2010 investigations in various directions (such as pulp SF and B-movies, no doubt forthcoming in future issues), plus frequent glances back to Western SF and, most notably, Asian speculative fiction, which I expect I will run with ’til I decide to call it a day. So I’m kicking off Issue #1 with four articles specifically related to Asian SF.

HipstA380 So, to fanzines. I actually hope this is not the first science fiction fanzine from Thailand, although I know of

no others, and I’ve seen fanzines here connected to other genres, notably football and heavy metal. I’d love to come upon a stash of old mimeographed SF fanzines that were cranked out on an old Gestetner in Bangkok circa 1945, kept in some dusty attic for fifty years in Chiang Mai, waiting for the likes of me to stumble upon them in some equally dusty secondhand bookstore in Chiang Rai (Hua Hin has not so many of those). They probably – Simon Bisson

4 hey, come on, certainly – don’t exist. As a historically rather isolated country, Thailand has a scant science fiction history, although other places in South East Asia are little different . . . imaginative literary life in these lands has focussed more on myth, legend, demons, spirits and, predominantly, ghosts. So, there may be any number of Western authors setting their novels in this part of the world, although how well these societies are put across to the reader is usually a matter of debate. Homegrown SF in Thailand is much rarer – the former ex- pat Somtow Sucharitkul notwithstanding – and what was put out in the past was probably done within the textus of – or at least in imitation of – Western science fictional ideas. Where’s the early, original, uniquely local stuff? So here’s a potted summary, in a paragraph: there was one Juntree Siriboonrod, the so-called ‘Father of Thai Science Fiction’, none of whose stories appear to have been translated and about whom little information exists in English. In the 1940s Siriboonrod co-published the SF magazine Witthayasat Mahatsachan (‘Magical Science’), in which his fiction appeared. Since 2005 there has been the Juntree Siriboonrod Award for achievements in the field of Thai science fiction. Then, also famed as Thailand’s PM from 1975– 1976, Kukrit Pramoj wrote the well-received SF novel The Cuckoos of Bangphleng – with less integrity than at first thought, as it turned out, and about which more can be read in these pages. In Locus #408 (January 1995), Jaroslav Olsa, Jr. comments that locally produced SF is very rare, and that it’s not understood as a genre. He laments, “Whenever I have asked for such books, I have been shown Japanese superhero comics.” At present there is the estimable Wyn Lyovarin, an author noted for his experimental fiction and the SEA Write Award-winning fictionalised history of 20th century Thai politics, Democracy, Shaken & Stirred. Lyovarin’s speculative fiction is now beginning to appear in English. There is Tew Bunnag, whose socialist fiction is peppered with ghosts and occasional speculative content; an extraordinary SEA Write Award-nominated fantasy novel by Fa Poonvoralak (reviewed in these pages), and a new writer currently well- received at spec-fic venues around the English-language internet, Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Juntree Siriboonrod, These are only a few names: there are indeed more. 2460–2511 (1917–1968) So to the contents here: while the focus for most of this first issue is clearly on Asia, a sub- header – probably appropriate for a first issue – might be ‘Beginnings’. Therefore I’m very grateful to maestro Somtow for permission to reproduce his blog post on his assessment of the origins of Kukrit Pramoj’s novel plus Sucharitkul , Jess and for permission to reproduce here their articles on the origins of early Nevins, Arvind Mishra Manish Mohan Gore

5 Hindi and Japanese science fiction. Jess’s article points at a little known, home-grown Japanese genre that owes nothing to the West. has been writing about Manga and Anime for as long as I’ve known him, so he was the Antony J. Shepherd obvious go-to person when I decided I couldn’t not have that genre covered. Of course this issue isn’t a comprehensive look SF throughout Asia: that’s impossible for one issue of a fanzine, and I’m aware of the gender imbalance in this issue’s contributors. I wish I had space and time for more of everything here, but better will come. So, semi-finally, there’s also an aspect of ‘looking back’ in this issue: some of my articles here had origins on Live Journal over the last few years, and I’ve resurrected them here as they also seem pertinent to this fanzine. I like to see book (and film and TV) reviews in fanzines. I’m not including them here to fill space; there are easier ways to do that, and I expect they’ll be pretty integral to each issue of Big Sky. in Zoo Nation I included a scant few per issue, but in my view they give a fanzine a more direct connection to the subject at hand; whether reviews are by the editor or others is irrelevant, as long as the standard is high enough (caveat: I’m making no claims here as to the quality or otherwise of my own reviewing). What you’ll find here are mostly ‘capsule’ reviews of the kind I prefer: brief, as succinct as possible and to the point, ie. pointers. Go read if the summary interests you, and I hope that brief time it took to spark your interest was worth it. I also hope the reviews add substance to this fanzine and I make no apology for plundering my rather extensive backlist, but by presenting them in a categorised way I hope this can cut down further the time needed to find something of interest (unless of course, gosh, you read them all) . . . thus giving you more time to read, y’know, books. So finally, okay, I’m already realising how it feels to have a fanzine with the dodgy initials BS. Mark Plummer can probably advise me on that. Please enjoy this fanzine, and LoC me if so “Let’s Not Be Beastly to the North Koreans...” Kim Jong Il at the Taesong Amusement Park, Pyongyang, inclined. It feels good to be back. North Korea, 2 October 1977

6 fanzines over astrakhan

Peter Young ESPITE NOT HAVING PUBBED my own ish for a number of years (Journey Planet notwithstanding), I’m rather d chuffed (well, okay, more than just rather chuffed, in fact I’m rather gobsmacked) to have been kept on a number of fan-eds’ mailing lists for sending out their paper copies, especially those that have continued to take the trouble to send them Air Mail with not much in the way of The Usual heading back in the other direction. I hope this fanzine goes some way towards saying “Thanks”, in case I never get to say it to you personally. I have a routine when I fly between London and Bangkok every month: on the in-flight entertainment I’ll watch a few sitcoms, perhaps a genre movie I haven’t seen (there are usually several available), then sleep a few hours. I never manage much of that; invariably, judging by the plane’s moving map when heading in either direction, I’ve found I always wake up somewhere over Astrakhan, Russia: roughly half way. I then grab a coffee and dig out a small pile of recently-received fanzines, in which I’ll immerse myself until breakfast. Actually, that’s not the only time I read fanzines in flight. It’s my preferred reading when I get an hour to myself half way across the Atlantic, or somewhere over the Sahara desert or the snowbound wastes of Greenland or Siberia; that is, when I’m not pointing an iPhone out of a window and experimenting with Hipstamatic and Alien Sky. Somehow, I can’t concentrate on a novel when I fly. The fanzines to have arrived in the mail on the most regular basis over the last few years are of course Mark and Claire’s Banana Wings (now at 51 issues and counting) and Andy, Randy and carl’s Chunga, now at #20. Both have become a touchstone for me (and probably for many others) for keeping up with core fandom. I’ve recently being doing some back-scanning too, and took time to dig out a small prize possession and relocate it to Thailand: the complete run of 30 issues of The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, which Paul Willliams sent to me a few years ago. A fanzine in the truest sense, the vibe that comes through is that this must have been an enjoyable labour of love to produce, and Williams had a great coterie of fellow enthusiasts and 2011 contributors upon which he could rely to provide consistently interesting material. The oddity in this set is #8, the audio cassette, one side of which has Dick in conversation with Williams, and the second side is an almost Attack stream-of-consciousness ramble by Dick making mental notes for his unwritten sequel to The Man in the High Castle. At the time, Dick couldn’t type as his shoulder was in a splint after surgery, so he had simply dictated his thoughts into a tape recorder. Further explorations of fanzine Dickiana led me inevitably to Dave Hyde’s For Dickheads Only and

Justin LynhamJustin Patrick Clark’s PKD Otaku, which recently reached #27. Otaku has come on enormously with its last few issues,

8 mostly as a result of input from Liverpool graphic artist Nick Buchanan. A further now-defunct PKD fanzine is Greg Lee’s Radio Free PKD, rather highly thought of though sadly not available online, and I’d particularly like to read this series. Since meeting both John Hertz and Fred Lerner briefly way back at Noreascon 4, they have been kind enough to continue to send me their Vanamonde and Lofgeornost respectively. Vanamonde is the kind of fanzine that has long conducted its own soundbite conversation with its correspondents in its own unique way. I sometimes feel like I need a point of entry, but no matter: this fanzine is always buzzing away off in the distance, and it’s a conversation I enjoy catching up on. Lofgeornost is a different kettle of fish entirely. Fred’s articles on his SF research – usually one per issue – are always informative and at the same time personal: they take readers on journeys they wish they could initiate themselves. Like everyone I have an unending respect for what Bruce Gillespie has achieved with SF Commentary, and the recent flurry of new issues is very welcome. The amount of sercon material is at times overwhelming in a fanzine, but in my case that’s a positive. I recently began the massive project of indexing as many of Bruce’s fanzines as possible at the ISFDB – not just SF Commentary, but others also. Some may consider that a Quixotic task but to ignore the job is to do a disservice to fandom, and I feel well-positioned to take it on. Bruce serves as an inspiration to fandom for what can be done with dedication, some far-sighted vision and the modern possibilities of self-publishing in general. Two other American fanzines I frequently receive are Rich Coad’s Sense of Wonder Stories and Robert Lichtman’s Trap Door – Bruce Gillespie recently called Trap Door “the Rolls-Royce of fanzines”, a pull-quote I wish I’d come up with. Both these fanzines seem to be classic American fanzine publications, with the editors sticking to the traditional way of going about things – of course I’m talking print, here, and occasionally in colour. I know a whole bunch of other fanzines do the same, but, as with Chunga, I like the appearance and distinctly fannish content of both. There are also two UK fanzines I want to make brief comment on, specifically because the amount of work that has gone into them clearly reflects my own design obsessions. The first is Alan White’s new Orpheum #1, the beautiful and engaging cover for which promises great things within, and he doesn’t disappoint. I don’t believe Alan and I have met, but I want to say how impressed I am with what he’s done with #1 and I look forward to more. The second is a fanzine I was not at all familiar with until recently, having joined fandom during its editor’s fourteen- year hiatus from fanac. Alan Dorey’s Gross Encounters #22 appeared out of the blue in December 2012. I doubt Alan ever saw an issue of Zoo Nation – his name was not on the mailing list – but I think it’s clear that with #22 we originate from the same mental arena, at least for the kind of material I wanted to put into a fanzine in Zoo Nation’s earlier issues. Alan has kept that rather off-the-wall, nuts-n’-all spirit far more intact than I have. Can he top it in #23? I don’t doubt it.

9 10 Mirai-ki: The Forgotten History of Japan’s Early Science Fiction

Jess Nevins HE HISTORY OF JAPANESE science fiction usually begins with the 1880 translations of Jules Verne’s From The tEarth to the Moon and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Most Japanese science fiction of this era bears Verne’s influence, most notably Shunro Oshikawa (1877-1914) and his six book “Undersea Warship” series. But this is not the entire story of 19th century Japanese science fiction. Japan has a separate tradition of science fiction which has nothing to do with Verne. As noted in Kyoko Kurita’s “Meiji Japan’s Y23 Crisis and the Discovery of the Future: Suehiro Tetcho’s Nijusan-nnen mirai-ki” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, June 2000), “in Japanese literary history, the classical genre dealing directly with the coordination of the past, the present, and (at least nominally) the future is that of the mirai-ki (records of the future).” The original mirai-ki were set in the far past and discussed the narrator’s future and the reader’s past, so that a typical mirai-ki might be written and read in the year 1000 but purportedly written in the year 800 and discussing the events of 900.

As Kyoko says: These accounts had little to do explicitly with what we consider “the future.” What is presented . . . is already the past for the actual author and reader: such a work explains, in a way that supports the author’s view of the current situation, how and why history developed as it did . . . the goal of such an activity of course, was also to 2008 re-orient the readership so as to set a new course for the future.

The first mirai-ki were attributed to Shotoku Taishi (574-622), beginning in the Heian period (794-1185). Shotoku was considered for centuries to be the “Buddha of Japan” and to have superhuman abilities, including the power to foretell the future, and mirai-ki supposedly written by him were little different from the prophecies he had supposedly uttered during his lifetime. A revival of the practice of writing mirai-ki began in 1054 after a stone box was dug up at a construction site

Door Detail, Koganei, Tokyo at Horyuji Temple. Per Kyoko, “the text predicts its own discovery 430 years after . . . Shotoku’s death (ie.

approximately at the time it was unearthed) and further predicts that a king and his ministers will build a temple tower to pursue Buddhist teachings.” During the Edo Period (1603-1868) the mirai-ki became a tool for farce and social satire by kibyoshi (picture books) and kabuki authors, a practice that continued into the early Meiji period

Bert Kimura Bert (1868-1912).

12 However, in 1874, a Japanese translation of Dutch scientist Pieter Harting’s The Year 2065; A Glimpse Into the Future (1865) was published, and this sparked a vogue for a type of mirai-ki which not only explain the past but describe the future. In The Year 2065 the narrator dreams that he is in “Londinia” (London) in the year 2065. He takes a dirigible trip from Londinia to Melbourne, accompanied by Roger Bacon, the 13th century philosopher, and by Phantasia, a young woman from this future, and Phantasia tells both Bacon and the narrator about life in the future. Harting’s concept of a dream encounter was widely adopted by Japanese romance writers. But more importantly as far as science fiction is concerned it was taken up by political writers and adopted for use in mirai-ki. As Kyoko says, “Early to mid-Meiji Japan was an age of radical disjuncture, when it became clear that the nation had to be liberated from its past to survive. Japanese realized that – no matter how vaguely or simplistically – the future had to be imagined and created.” The popular vehicle for imagining and creating the future was in futurological novels: future history mirai-ki. Over one hundred future history mirai-ki were published, with twenty appearing in 1887 alone. However, following a very public 1888 denunciation of the future history mirai-ki by the influential novelist and critic Tsubouchi Shoyo, who had himself written a popular future history mirai-ki in 1887, the popularity of the future history mirai-ki rapidly declined, although it never entirely died off and in fact underwent a brief revival in the early 1900s. As Kyoko describes them, the future history mirai-ki were not explicit descriptions of the future, and did not spend time describing possible changes in technology or society, but instead were focused on describing the political future of Meiji Japan and how the country’s future government should be run. Set in the near future, their concern is to justify the co- existence of a Diet System alongside the Emperor and to describe the ideal Japanese constitution and Diet. The most popular of the future history mirai-ki was in fact a dystopia. Journalist Suehiro Tetcho’s The Year 23: A Record of the Future (1885), set in 1890, became a national Prince Shotoku Taishi

13 phenomenon for its description of the way the Diet, which was much discussed and anticipated in 1885 but which did not become a reality until 1889, was a dysfunctional, chaotic mess. The Year 23 is pessimistic: “it is painful to think of how little progress we made in that time, in cultivating our knowledge and skills.” But Tetcho’s concern is purely political, focusing on the need for governmental reform and for the public to abandon its political apathy and become involved in crafting Japan’s future. Tetcho is unconcerned with describing a future, although he does predict the spread of newspapers and their integration into people’s daily lives. Most of the future history mirai-ki are science fictional only with regard to setting and the forecast of the government’s development. But two novels strike overtly science fictional notes. Suehiro Tetcho’s Setchubai (1887), set in the year 2040, briefly describes the city of the future, although Tetcho can only envision it as full of working electricity, trains connecting all the cities of Japan, and Japanese battleships covering the ocean. More intriguingly, Ryuso Tsubouchi Shoyo Gaishi’s The Year 23: A Record of the Future (1883) begins with an introduction that voices an approach similar to Asimovian psychohistory. The introduction claims that all phenomena work according to logical principles, and that therefore humans could predict the future:

Everything in the world, whether organic or inorganic, changes according to a certain principle. If the proper computations are conducted, based on a study of such principles, is there anything in the world that cannot be predicted?

Despite being mostly forgotten today – a Google search for Ryuso Gaishi, for example, yields only one hit – the future history mirai-ki were popular in their day and presented the Japanese reading public with an example of native science fiction different from what was being translated from the West.

Suehiro Tetcho

14 Science Fiction in Hindi:Hindi – A Critic’s View

Arvind Mishra & Manish Mohan Gore The Beginning

LTHOUGH THE ROOTS OF Hindi science fiction could be traced in the mythical mists of ancient times especially Ain Sanskrit scriptures, the genre in its true sense only emerged with the serial publication of ‘Aascharya Vrittant’ (A Strange Tale!), by the veteran mainstream Hindi writer Ambika Datt Vyas in Piyush Pravah – a Hindi literary magazine, during 1884-88. (Mishra, 2000; Singh, 2002; Prasad, 2004). This landmark of early Hindi SF publication seems to be inspired by Jules Verne’s “Voyages Extraordinaries” and narrates the breathtaking story of Gopinath – main protagonist of the novelette, who undertakes an adventurous journey underneath the Earth. The novelette has a happy ending as Gopinath and his two accomplices somehow emerge from beneath the Earth unharmed. There are many mind-boggling scenes interwoven with mystery and suspense in the novelette. This was a kind of writing unknown to the contemporary Hindi audience. Almost fifteen years later came another adventure story ‘Chandra Lok Ki Yatra’ (A Journey To The Moon). This too was markedly influenced by Jules

2007 Verne’s writings. The story was written by Babu Keshav Prasad Singh and was published in a renowned Hindi literary magazine, Saraswati (Vol 1, part 6, June 1900). The twin stories initiated writing of an unconventional kind of fiction in Hindi which was later identified as genre SF. Many critics however consider the twin stories merely the reflection of a Western literary trend and not the outcome of our own mainstream literary movement. Doors of India Doors

Proto-Science Fiction

The penultimate and last decade of the 19th century also witnessed the profound impact of yet another kind of

Trey Ratcliff hitherto unfamiliar style of writing in Hindi termed as ‘Tilism Sahitya’ (Talisman!), and a proponent of this kind of literature was the veteran mainstream Hindi writer Devakinandan Khatri. His novels Chandra Kanta (1888) and Chandra Kanta Santati (1896) were very popular in Hindi and people from other regions and languages learned Hindi to enjoy these classics of Hindi literature. It could be argued that these novels contained certain elements of SF and therefore might be regarded as proto-science fiction (Mishra, 1984) but opinions differ (Mishra, 1989; Mewadi, 1984; Singh, 2002; Goyal, 2004). Such ‘Tilism’ stories did contain a sense of wonder and certain gadgetry descriptions often encountered in genre

Adapted from a photo by SF but lacked the sound scientific themes essential to SF stories. Although there were other mainstream SF writers

16 like Swami Satyadev Parivrajak, whose ‘Aascharya Janak Ghanti’ was published in Saraswati in 1908, only a few other mainstream authors could be credited as SF specialists. Among them, the most illustrious was the famous mainstream Hindi writer Rahul Sankrityayan. He is credited for his magnum opus SF Baisavee Sadi (The 22nd Century) – a novel written in 1924. Baisavee Sadi is an excellent example of a utopia set in the 22nd century AD in which the author beautifully describes a future society which embodied the political and social reforms of 2124AD caused by technological advancements. It appears that Hindi SF writing before the 1930s was mostly mainstream writing published in magazines that was not labelled as SF. But it was certainly a period in which Hindi SF was beginning to take shape as an identifiably distinct genre, though many favourite SF themes were produced as non-genre SF. After 1930, Yamuna Datt Vaisnav ‘Ashok’ had a profound influence on ‘genre SF’ writing, and wrote far and away the most interesting and readable real SF ever published. It was in fact due to his contributions that Hindi SF began to establish its identity amongst mainstream fiction writers.

Prominent Writers

The prominent writings of Yamuna Datt Vaisnav ‘Ashok’ include, Asthi Pinjar (1947), Apsara Ka Sammoohan (1967), Chakshudan (1948) and Himsundari (1971), all anthologies containing beautiful SF stories. It is evident that he wrote genre SF in a continuous and sustained way and on a variety of themes from technological inventions and their associated impact on the political and social systems of predicted human societies. Therefore before the 1960s there existed sporadic and isolated works of an interrupted tradition of SF writing, with the only exception being the contributions made by Yamuna Datt Vaisnav ‘Ashok’. He is also credited to have inculcated a sort of “Indianness” in his stories. Dr. Naval Bihari Mishra’s noteworthy contributions to enrich the genre of SF in the 1960s also demand a special mention. Inspired heavily by Western SF writing movements he accepted the challenge of enriching Hindi literature further with this relatively new kind of fiction. His many original contributions and translated versions of Jules Verne’s voyage stories appeared in Vigyan Jagat (Indian Press, Allahabad) and Vigyan Lok (Mehra Newspapers, Agra) during the 1960s. Other welcome incursions of SF into Hindi writing were also made by a few well-known Hindi litterateurs who usually worked outside the genre, notably Dr. Sampurnanand (Prithvi Se Saptarshi Mandal, 1953), Aacharya Chatursen Shastri (Khagras, 1960). They also persuaded other contemporary Hindi literateurs to enrich this emerging genre in Hindi, but to no avail for a long time.

17 The First Boom

The first boom in genre SF writing in Hindi took place in the 1970s with the appearance on the scene of prolific writers like Kailash Sah, Maya Prasad Tripathi, Shukdev Prasad, Rajeshwar Gangavar and Devendra Mawadi, who among others regularly contributed to the enrichment of Hindi genre SF writing. Devendra Mewadi’s contributions inspired many younger writers, including the authors of this article, to the wonderful world of Hindi SF writing. His two anthologies Bhavisya (1994) and Kokh (1998) are immensely popular among Hindi readers. The SF writers of the 1970s set the stage of genre SF writing and the trend now became almost a mainstay in Hindi literature. But SF writing by and large still did not enjoy due consideration by the literary Hindi circles. The scenario called for an organized effort to popularize Hindi SF writing amongst not only the limited readers of the genre but also amongst Hindi literati, and a campaign to this effect was initiated by the first author in the late 1980s, culminating in the establishment of a fully fledged SF writers’ organization – Indian Science Fiction Writers’ Association (ISFWA) in 1995 as an autonomous body registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. ISFWA brings out Vigyan Katha, a quarterly which has been fully devoted to SF since 2002 under the main editorship of Dr. R.R. Upadhyaya.

The Second Boom

A second boom in SF writing in Hindi began in the late 1980s with the publication of ‘EK Aur Kraunch Vadh’ by Arvind Mishra in the renowned Hindi literary magazine Dharmyug. Many more new authors appeared afterwards, most of them being the members of ISFWA. The prominent ones among them were Dr. Rajiv Ranjan Upadhyaya (President of ISFWA), Harish Goyal (Vice-President of ISFWA), Kalpana Kulshrestha, Zakir Ali ‘Rajnish’, Zeeshan Haider Zaidi, Manish Mohan Gore, Swapnil Bhartiya, Visnu Prasad Chaturvedi and Ajai Kumar. The most gifted Hindi woman SF writer is Kalpana Kulshrestha, the first woman to publish a Hindi SF anthology of her own selected SF stories, named Beesavi Sadi Ki Bat (2005). Her stories are usually concerned with social aspects of human society and she herself coined the term ‘Socifi’ for that kind of story. Lately, Yugal Kumar has also joined the bandwagon. In 2000 a major Hindi SF writing workshop was organized in Varanasi, U.P., under the aegis of ISFWA and was sponsored by the National Council of Science and Technology Communication (NCSTC), New Delhi. The event brought

18 together some of above popular names as delegate participants. Many issues pertaining to Hindi SF writing were discussed at length in the workshop and the proceedings are now available in published form (Upadhyaya, et.al., 2002)

Fiction and Fantasy

Both these forms of SF writing i.e. ‘fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ (Asimov, 1981; Hollinger; 1999) are popular in Hindi (Mishra, 1984, 2000), but the majority of writing is skewed in favour of ‘fantasy’, a kind of SF writing which encourages Hindi SF writers to express freely and more imaginatively. Hindi writers usually prefer imaginary sciences primarily to develop the plots of their stories on themes such as alternate worlds, antigravity, faster than light (FTL communication), invisibility and of course time travel, etc. This growing trend of ‘fantasy’ elements in Hindi SF writing is often a matter of debate among Hindi SF writers and fandom (Mishra, 1990, 1992; Prasad, 2004).

The Definition

Another debatable point of Hindi SF relates to its methods of classification and treatment of stories accordingly. As the SF giant Isaac Asimov has stated earlier “. . . it is a measure of the richness of the field that no two of its practitioners are liable to agree on even something as fundamental as its definition . . .” (Asimov, 1981). Hindi SF writers genuinely seem to be widely divided over the issues and the scope of the nature of SF writing. A largely accepted worldwide definition of SF reveals that it is deliberately anachronous and deals with phenomena, gadgetry and accomplishments far off (possibly) in the future. Some critics discourage this form of SF writing in Hindi (Prasad, 2004; Rajnish, 2000; Dubey, 2006) and emphasize that contemporary social backgrounds should also be dealt with in Hindi SF along with scientific details, as per requirements of the story, while others do not seem prepared to compromise with the predominantly Western outlook that SF should necessarily depict only those events and social backgrounds that neither existed in past or present but only in the future. Notwithstanding such debates, the future of Hindi SF seems bright.

19 References: 1. Asimov, Issac (1981). My own view; Asimov on Science Fiction. Panther Books, Great Britain. 2. Dubey, Arvind (2006). Personal communication. 3. Goyal, Harish (2004). ‘Hindi Me Vigyan Kathaon Ka Samridh Hota Itihas’. Madhumati, Dec., 2004 : 26-37. 4. Hollinger, Veronica (1999). Contemporary Trends in Scifi Criticism, 1980-1999, SF studies, 78, 26, 2. 5. Mewadi, Devendra (1984). ‘Vigyan Katha Sahitya’, Bhavisya, National Publishing House, New Delhi. 6. Mishra, Arvind (1984). ‘Saras Lok Vigyan’, Lalit Kathayen, Fantasi aur Bhavisya Puran’, Vigyan, 71, 11-12: 4-8. 7. Mishra, Arvind (1989). ‘Hamari Vigyan Kathaon me Vaigyanikata’. Bhartiya Bhashaon Me Vigyan Lekhan. Proceedings of National Symposium, Vigyan Parishad, Prayag: 223-228. 8. Mishra, Arvind (1990). “Hindi Kahani Ki Ek Vismrit Hoti Parampara”. Navbharat Times, Lucknow, 22 Feb : 7. 9. Mishra, Arvind (1992). ‘Mahaj Manoranjan Nahin Hain Vigyan Kathayen’ Avishkar, Aug., 92: 322-325. 10. Mishra, Shivgopal (1984). ‘Hindi Upanyas, Tilism Tatha Kathayen’ Vigyan, 71, 11-12: 1-4, 11. Mishra, Shivgopal (2000). ‘Aascharya Vrittant’. Vigyan, 80, 2: 31-33. 12. Prasad, Shukdev (2004). ‘ Vigyan Kathaon ‘Ke Uts Ki Khoj’ Bhartiya Vigyan Kathayen, (Edited). Kitab Ghar Prakashan, New Delhi: 8-31. 13. Prasad, Shukdev (2005). Vigyan Kathaon Ke Yaksh Prasn, Indian Journal of Science Communication, Vol 4, (2) July-Dec. 2005: 13-22. 14. Rajnish, Zakir Ali (2006). Personal communication. 15. Singh, Ajay (2002). Hindi Sahitya Me Vigyan Katha, Ph.D. Thesis, Gorakhpur University. 16. Upadhyaya, R.R., Mishra, Arvind (2000). Sanchar Madhyamo Ke Liye Vigyan Katha, Indian Science Fiction Writers’ Association, Publi. Faizabad. Arvind Mishra has studied Fisheries Science at Deemed University in Mumbai. He hosted numerous radio talks and TV programmes broadcast on Agricultural and popular science. He published nearly 1.000 popular science articles, essays and SF stories in magzines and newspapers of nationwide circulation in India. His stories have been translated into Czech, French and German. He is member of the Indian Science Writers Association and the Indian Science Fiction Writers Association. Manish Mohan Gore has degrees in Botany, Education and Mass Communication. He currently works as a Scientific Officer in the National Institute of Science Communication Vigyan Prasar. He has published popular science articles and since 1997 science fiction stories, many in Hindi. Some of his stories have been broadcast by the All India Radio.

20 c h i n e s e s p a c e c h i l d r e n

Detail from ‘Pursue New Knowledge, Be Bold in Creation’ artist: Cheng Guoying (程国英) July 1986

his selection of post-Mao propaganda art can be found at www.chineseposters.net (also at their Flickr site), and T originates from the collections of Stefan R. Landsberger of the University of Amsterdam, and the International Institute of Social History, also in Amsterdam. Several of these (among many others) can also be purchased as posters from their collection at www.vintageposter.nl.

21 ‘Bringing His Playmates to the Stars’ artist: Shi Shiming (史士明) June 1980 22 ‘Little Guest in Space’ (宇宙小客人) ‘Take the Spaceship and Tour the Universe’ artist: Yang Furu (杨 馥如) artist unknown May 1980 1962 23 ‘Soar, Youth of the New China! On the Rocket – China’s Youth No. 1’ date and artist unknown

24 title, date and artist unknown ‘Little Guests in the Moon Palace’ artist unknown 1972 25 ‘Heaven Increases the Years, Man Gets Older’ ‘A Garden in Outer Space’ artist unknown artist: Liu Chonglin 1985 1985 26 title, date and artist unknown 27 Dop’s House of Anime

Antony J.J. ShepherdShepherd lookslooks atat fourfour ofof thethe bestbest fromfrom the last few years So Ra No Wo To (Sound of the Sky) TV Tokyo, 2010, directed by Mamoru Kanbe

Someone was saying the world is ending. But I like this world. I like this town. I love the people here. I can't give up.

rivate Kanata Sorami is riding in a boxcar on her way to her posting with the 1121st platoon, stationed in the town pof Seize, near the Helvetian border with No Man’s Land. Waking from a dream where as a child she met a blonde woman in army uniform, she’s given a box of caramels by an army sergeant, part of a group of soldiers discussing the armistice and their new postings. “Be good to the bugler”, the sergeant says, “then you’ll hear the call to retreat better.” After a second train ride and a hair-raising ride in a sidecar, Kanata arrives at Seize, to find the town’s annual carnival is in progress. With time to spare, she explores the town, and stopping to rest, gets caught up in the traditional water-throwing festivities where the townsfolk soak each other in dyed water. Chided for allowing herself to get soaked in this way, she’s taken off to dry out by someone who turns out to be a member of her platoon, but is currently in civvies. This

2012 person is handed a bell pendant by a shopkeeper who’s repaired it. As Kanata is admiring the pendant, an owl swoops down and flies off with it. On her way to report for duty,

Korean Doll Kanata’s keen ears hear the sound of the pendant stolen by the

owl and goes off after it. Meanwhile in town, it’s time for the main event, and the woman who took Kanata to dry off is now wearing a ceremonial robe and riding on a cart, throwing water over the

Angela RicardoAngela crowd . . .

29 She tells a story of the world before it was the way it is now. A story of a demon which came to earth, and the five flame maidens who were captured by the demon. God gave them a golden horn to communicate, and with the help of a spider they escaped, and defeated the demon. But when its head was cut off, it spewed out flame, so the flame maidens held the head, and were sprayed with water by the townsfolk for one year before the flames went out. Meanwhile, Kanata has retrieved the pendant, but fallen into a lake, and as she sinks, she sees a huge winged skeleton with no head. Back on the lake shore, with the light fading, and completely lost, Kanata signals for help by blowing her bugle. This was the first episode of So Ra No Wo To. Now, some anime series take a few episodes to really get into. One of my top ten favourite shows, Simoun, didn’t really grab me until episodes 7 and 8. So Ra No Wo To grabbed me with this first episode, during the sequence about the legend of the flame maidens. The French song in the background, and the artwork derived from Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, completely hooked me and made me realise I had to see the rest of this series. One of the things I really liked about the series was that it didn’t bog itself down with exposition. They created a world, but rather than setting it all out in episode one, they slowly revealed certain aspects of the way of this world as the series went along. The 1121st platoon consists of five women, which ties in with the five flame maidens legend. The headless skeleton Kanata sees under the lake also ties in with this story, as does their tank, the Takemikazuchi. As the series continues, we find out little things here and there. The much smaller population, the absence of doctors, the demise of life in the seas, the lost high technology of the past, and the desolate wastes of No Man’s Land. We find the 1121st platoon has a secret, and we find out some of the backstory of each character. We learn about the town’s war orphans, and how one of them was orphaned by the ‘invisible reaper’. We learn that Seize was once a

30 big prosperous city, before the war began. It’s in the second half of the series where things slowly start to get more serious. We find that the platoon leader, Lieutenant Filicia Heideman, was an active combatant during the war, as a member of a tank crew, she was thrown clear when they were hit, and saw the rest of the crew die. Wandering the battlefield, she fell into an underground building, found a dessicated corpse of a soldier from an earlier war. Wracked with despair and survivor’s guilt, she contemplates suicide but is rescued. We find out Sergeant Rio Kazumiya’s true identity as she tries to escape her destiny, before realising she has to accept it, and in the last two episodes, we find that one of the characters has a dreadful history and is reviled by the enemy as ‘the witch of Helvetia’. As the second half of the series continues, we start to hear rumours about the failing peace talks, and how it all might be different if the princess was still alive. We learn about the princess Iriya Arkadia, and how she links Kanata, Filicia, Rio and Noel (driver and engineer). With the coming of a scout from the enemy country of Rome, we learn that the two countries have religious differences, and that the Romans have their own version of the flame maiden legend. With the enemy approaching through No Man’s Land, and with a tank battalion led by a warmonger Colonel known as ‘the demon of Vingt’, can five young women with a highly advanced spider tank and a trumpet stop the war? This is not a show about a war – it’s a show about the aftermath of a war, and a show about not letting the war happen again. Also, in a way, So Ra No Wo To is quietly reminiscent of Haibane Renmei, in the way the storytelling works. In Haibane Renmei, the new arrival Rekka is introduced to the other haibane, the city, and the way the society works, and it’s through her that we find out the way of the world, and that’s very much the way with So Ra No Wo To, where it’s through new arrival Kanata as she’s introduced to her platoon members, and shown around the fortress and around the town, that we find out through the odd snippet of information the way of this post-apocalyptic world. The world has an intriguing mishmash – The country of Helvetia has French place names and signs, the currency is the Yen, the architecture is Spanish (the town of Seize based heavily on the Spanish historical walled town of Cuenca), and the army has uniforms which look German, and use Kubelwagens as personal transport. The enemy is Rome, where the people speak German. Another thing I like about this series that it still leaves us with so many unanswered questions, such as how long the

31 war has gone on for, and how it began. What is the truth behind the two legends of the flame maidens. If I have any criticism of the series, it’s that it could have easily been longer. There’s so much more we could have seen about this world, and towards the end a few things seemed rushed. There are two more DVD episodes to come, and maybe they’ll fill in a few things that slipped by in the background while we weren’t watching. But that’s pretty much it. Definitely one of the best shows of 2010.

Hotarubi no Mori e (Into the Forest of Fireflies’ Light) Brain’s Base, 2011, directed by Takahiro Omori

otarubi no Mori e is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful 45-minute anime about h the tragic love between a human and a youkai (supernatural being). It’s based on a short manga story by Yuki Midorikawa, who went on to write the brilliant Natsume Yuujinchou (‘Natsume’s Book Of Friends’), and this anime adaptation is made by the same people who’ve made the Natsume Yuujinchou anime, currently in its fourth series. We start with a young woman called Hotaru leaving her home and going off on a summer trip. As she waits in the bus shelter on a blistery hot day she reminisces. When she was a little girl, spending the summer in the country with relatives, she went off exploring the forest, and got hopelessly lost. As she sat crying a man wearing a mask appeared. Thankful to have been found, she runs at him but he dodges. As she tries to grab him again he hits her on the head with a stick. He is a youkai, and the mountain god put a spell on him so that if he ever touches a human he will cease to exist. Taking opposite ends of the stick, he leads her to the gate and the path leading out of the forest. She tells him her name and promises to come back tomorrow with something to show her thanks for being rescued. As she walks away, he says his name is Gin (with a hard G, not like the drink). Every day, Hotaru goes to meet Gin and they walk through the forest. Another youkai appears and threatens to eat Hotaru if she touches Gin. Another one warns Gin not to let himself be touched. But summer comes to an end,

32 and Hotaru needs to go back home ready to go back to school. So she tells Gin that she has to go, but she’ll be back next year and hopes to meet him then. And so it goes. Each summer she returns to the small village in the country and spends the day with Gin (it means Silver, like the colour of his hair), who beneath his mask appears to be a handsome young man. As the years grow by she comes to realise that while she is getting older and growing up, Gin stays the same, and hasn’t really changed since the day she met him. When he was a baby, he was abandoned in the forest and left to die, but the spirits heard his crying and the mountain god took pity on him, and he became a youkai with a human-looking body maintained by magic, which is why he can never touch or be touched. One summer, her uncle (or grandfather, depending on who’s translation you read) says it’s going to be a cold winter, so before she leaves she buys Gin a scarf. That winter, she can’t stop thinking about him, and as he touches the scarf she gave him, he’s thinking about her. Then the following summer, during her visit, Gin invites her to the annual festival the youkai hold each year . . . All this is very much in the same territory as Natsume, showing the inhabitants of a supernatural world as not necessarily scary, or monstrous, but just different from humans, and is rooted in Japanese folklore. It is, I think, one of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful, sad and haunting pieces of anime I have ever seen, one of those examples of the genre at its best.

Mouryou no Hako (The Moryo’s Box) Madhouse, 2008, directed by Ryosuke Nakamura

ouryou no Hako gets off to an intriguing start with the story of a man on a train, who wakes to find that the man m opposite him has a box on his lap. The other man asks if he would like to see what is in the box, and opens it up, to reveal the head of a girl, seemingly alive. We then cut to a school, where poor girl Yoriko, strugging to answer a question in class, has the rest of the

33 question answered by well-to-do girl Kanako. The two become friends, go to coffee houses, and dance in the moonlight together as Yoriko becomes more estranged from her mother, who is increasingly in the clutches of a religious cult. Kanako says that Yoriko is actually a reincarnation of herself, as she is the reincarnation of Yoriko, and they will go through time constantly being reincarnated as each other . . . She speaks of the degradations of divine beings, and at this point it all starts to get somewhat reminiscent of Heavenly Creatures to the point where you half expect them to kill Yoriko’s mother. So they meet up for the last train, where we find Kubo, a detective from Tokyo, having a nightmare flashback to the war (the series is set in the 1950s). He wakes from his nightmare as the train screeches to a halt. He goes outside to investigate the hubbub. Kanako has fallen in front of the train and been run over. Kanako’s mother has Kanako taken, following initial surgery, to a special hospital. This ‘hospital’ is a mysterious looking building in the middle of nowhere, and it’s from this hospital where Kanako disappears, seemingly spirited away by a kidnapper who kills one of the hospital staff in his escape. But how can someone as injured as Kanako disappear from a room in a matter of seconds while everyone’s back is turned? And this is where the real story starts, because poor doomed Yuriko and Kanako’s romance is just the McGuffin, the catalyst for the real story. Someone is going around killing young women, dismembering their bodies and putting them in well-crafted wooden boxes made to fit exactly into holes – crevices in walls, gaps between houses; the boxes are a perfect fit. So what we have here is a good old-fashioned mystery, and involved in its solution are a policeman, a private detective, an author, a journalist, an editor, and a scholar/priest who acts as a kind of consulting detective. It turns out that all the victims of the killer are members of the same dodgy religious cult which Yuriko’s mother was involved in, and so the scholar/priest Kyougokudou moves in on the cult leader to lay down the smack. Everything concludes with one of those classic “I have called you all here tonight . . .” sequences in which everyone is gathered together at the ‘hospital’ from which Kanako vanished, and where Kyougokudo opens up all the

34 metaphorical boxes and lets out all the metaphorical mouryou – mysteries are solved, secrets are revealed, and it all comes together brilliantly. While many shows get ‘fansubs’ within days of airing in Japan, this show took over a year between broadcast and final episode to do so, so while it aired in 2008 it wasn’t until 2010 before I could watch it. But it was worth waiting for. Mouryou no Hako was a fantastic show. It was a show I will hold up and point to as being what I call “Anime for Grownups”. Once you get past the teenage schoolgirl yuri of the first episode, what you actually have in this series is a lush, cerebral, detective mystery combining psychological horror, oriental mysticism, bogus clairvoyants, crooked religions and secret wartime experiments. Sadly, I suspect this show will never get an English language release. It is if anything too cerebral for the average western audience, I guess, and too risky for any of the western anime companies to license and release. And it’s a shame. I’d love to be able to point at where people could buy this show with English subtitles, but I can’t, as no legitimate English subtitled version exists.

Shutainzu Geto (Steins;Gate) White Fox, 2010, directed by Hiroshi Hamasaki

teins;Gate is the story of Okabe Rintarou, otherwise known as the self-proclaimed Mad Scientist Hououin Kyoma. As s the story starts, his Future Gadget Lab consists of only two members, Okabe’s childhood friend Mayuri and ‘super hacker’ Daru. They’re working on an invention under the working title of the Phone Microwave, but all it seems to do is turn bananas into a sickly looking green gel and make hot food cold.

35 At a conference on time travel, Okabe accuses the speaker of stealing his ideas from the infamous John Titor. He’s dragged out of the room by a young woman called Makise Kurisu. Shortly afterwards, on hearing a scream he rushes into a room and finds her dead. He runs out, sending a text to Daru. Suddenly, everything changes. He’s in the street, the conference never happened, there’s what looks like a crashed satellite on the roof of the building, and Makise Kurisu is alive and well. It turns out that the Phone Microwave has a side- effect: that it can send e-mails back in time. This ability is, after some argument, named ‘d-mail’, short for ‘DeLorean mail’. John Titor contacts Okabe and warns him of the organisation SERN, who in the future have taken over the world. In order to combat SERN Okabe has to locate an IBN5100 computer to decrypt the data hacked by Daru from SERN’s network. To help in this goal, more lab members are recruited, more d-mails are sent, each one causing divergences in the timeline which only Okabe seems aware of. Things change in the world, not always for the better. Messing around with the timeline is all fun and games until someone gets shot in the head . . . Okabe is faced with a horrible truth. The only way to undo this death is to nudge the timeline back to the original, undoing each of the d-mails thereby undoing the changes to the timeline they made. Using their recently invented ‘Time Leap’ machine he repeats time over and over, each time being faced with the death of his friend. Until he comes to a horrible conclusion. Whichever timeline he’s on, someone he knows well will die. Just when he thinks it’s all over, there's one last big surprise . . . Kudos goes to voice actor Mamoru Miyano, who plays Okabe; whether in the adopted persona of Mad Scientist Hououin Kyoma or the panicking and grief-stricken Okabe, he turned in a great performance which made the character really work. All in all, this was a brilliant time travel yarn, as well as a real scientific romance. Eat your heart out Steven Moffat.

36 tt ii mm ee zz oo nn ee

2121stst centurycentury speculativespeculative fictionfiction :: asiaasia

Chan Koonchung The Fat Years 2009 (Doubleday, 2011) 2010 This novel has one of the best introductions I’ve come across in a long while: an essay by the sinologist Julia Lovell, in which she both places the novel in its present-day sociological context

Multiverse and also sets the stage admirably for the story to come: in a near-future China a month has gone

missing, not only from official records but also from peoples’ memories, and no one could care less. But there’s also a group of unaffected people who collectively try to find out the reason for this cheerful cultural amnesia about certain events the Party wishes to ‘erase’, and something radical has to be done to discover what mark China plans to make on the rest of the world. The Fat Years is only a dystopia on its thin surface – China emerged from something far worse in real Romanlily @ flickr Romanlily @ flickr 37 life from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution; today there’s no Mao-like figure, the Party is driven more by pragmatism than ideology and has an unspoken contract with the people: “tolerate our authoritarianism, and we will make you rich”. Explored admirably here, the bigger question then becomes, “Between a good hell and a fake paradise, which one would you choose?”, so ‘post-dystopia’ would definitely be a more accurate description. China also has leaders with a variety of agendas ranging from outright fascism to the spread of democracy and Christianity, and these disparate groups are all characterised in the novel. Yes, there are Orwellian undertones, but they only underpin this exploration of China’s very likely future, with good characterisation and a little too much info-dumping. Still, this is a necessary and challenging book.

Hiroshi Yamamoto MM9 2006 (Haikasoru, 2012)

What if the world had a Richter-like scale for monster attacks? And where better to show how the whole thing works than in Japan? Given that this is such a brilliant idea, when teamed up with this book’s self-serving ending it was probably inevitable that a TV series would result from this fix-up of episodic short stories about the Monsterological Measures Department, doing battle to contain outbreaks of kaiju activity across Japan. As a science fiction writer, Yamamoto’s first priority had to be that of getting around the law of conservation of mass to account for the extraordinary size of some monsters and their unlikely ability to support themselves/breathe fire/stomp buildings with apparent ease, and Yamamoto has given his monsters a clever yet almost whimsical explanation that conveniently excuses them from the laws of physics of our universe. Yamamoto’s speculation in this aspect of the novel is engaging but not always rigourous, and when evaluated by his characters the explanations are often too easily accepted by the MMD without a great deal of debate because, well, there’s a monster to defeat now and it answers the problem of how to tackle the kaiju

38 somehow. I admit to approaching MM9 from the wrong direction at first, expecting a more tongue- in-cheek and self-knowing escapade than the straightforward episodic adventure we were given, but after realising how I should be reading it this novel was good fun, and Yamamoto’s mythical monsters are always neat inventions. I’m now awaiting a dubbed/subtitled DVD release of the TV series with bated breath.

Fa Poonvoralak The Most Silent School in the World Kodji, 2009

While experimental fiction gets as fair a shout in Thailand as anywhere else in the world, as far as I can see (and, given that I don’t read Thai, maybe I can’t see far enough) it isn’t yet on the map for wildly imaginative speculative fiction, let alone SF, fantasy or slipstream. So when something category-defying and just downright unusual comes along it’s unexpected to say the least, particularly in that Silent School was also shortlisted for the 2009 SEA Write Award. It’s the story of eight schoolchildren of mixed ages at a riverside school in rural Thailand; they turn up whenever they want, night or day, there are no teachers, they play games, not a great deal happens that’s different from one day to the next and they’re not being groomed for a life in society. That’s because in our plane of existence they’re not really children at all: they’re the eight Trigrams of Taoist cosmology, given English/Thai names like ‘Water Nam’, ‘Mountain Pukao’ and ‘Sky Fa’. They are then visited by eight more ‘echo children’ from the Moon who are all subtly different, then more children arrive from the rings of Saturn, the Oort Cloud, the Sun and other places in the solar system. They speculate if their school may in fact be some kind of spaceship. They’ve finally multiplied to sixty-four – the same number of pairings that make up the Hexagrams of the I Ching – and the physical dimensions of their school keep on growing, instantly adding more rooms as new children arrive. How they all interact may be meant to reflect the subtleties of the I Ching’s

39 Hexagrams; although this seems to be the intent it was often difficult to figure out beyond the characters of the children/Trigrams themselves. All the above is not a spoiler as it would have helped to know something of the structure of the book before beginning it. It’s also rather inconclusive, but then this story was not particularly written along the lines of a linear, modern Western text, with the analogy of the ‘Silent School’ probably meaning the life situations contained in the I Ching itself, and the physical school representing an expansion of an octagonal ba gua arrangement of Trigrams. This book is both perplexing and entertaining, and for someone who’s long been interested in the inner working of the I Ching it was also a rare and valuable find, regrettably one that I doubt will be showing up in many bookstores outside of Thailand.

Vandana Singh The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories Zubaan, 2008

Ten stories make up Singh’s first collection, published by India’s premier feminist publishers, Zubaan. Over the last half dozen years she has been garnering a reputation for quality, and I don’t think it will be much longer before she’s on a Hugo or Nebula shortlist. That quality also comes with variety, sometimes gentle but often more measured and hard-hitting, but Singh is never strident. All the stories rely strongly on Indian themes and their speculative aspects are mostly drawn from folklore or common SF tropes, with one story, ‘Conservation Laws’, written as a direct tribute to the master of Bengali SF, Premendra Mitra. Highly commendable is ‘Thirst’, which takes a while to get to its speculative point but when it does it stays lodged in the mind; best is ‘Infinities’, first published here, a story about a lifelong mathematical obsession that’s set against a backdrop of Hindu/Moslem racial tensions in Delhi, and it’s a story that has deservedly been anthologised. An impressive debut collection.

40 Jason Erik Lundberg Red Dot Irreal Math Paper Press, 2011

Lundberg’s first collection is centred on Singapore, where he has lived for many years now. The ‘Red Dot’ of the title is Singapore itself: as he mentions in the story notes, Singaporeans take pride in the fact that their entire country, for all its impressive wealth and economic success, disappears completely beneath a small red dot on a world map. Lundberg is becoming a bit of a useful player on the Singapore spec-fic scene, and his stories can act as a useful bridge between cultures: several of them focus on Westerners in Asia and the cultural differences they encounter (while also having to deal with some more urgent fantastical or science fictional problems at the same time), and these help to give the collection as a whole a semi- autobiographical feel – there are certainly several elements present that are drawn either directly or indirectly from Lundberg’s own life. His writing often feels whole, in the sense that each story has been not so much ‘worked out’ as ‘grokked in its fullness’ first and written out subsequently. It’s hard to pick a favourite here, but I’d probably go for ‘Bogeymen’, a picaresque, semi- steampunk tale of a young Victorian English sailor and his encounters with malevolent Singaporean myths; ‘Hero Worship, or How I Met the Dream King’, describing an almost totally believable encounter with Neil Gaiman; also ‘Taxi Ride’, a Kafkaesque piece that takes the reader on a one-way noir- like journey into the beyond. Ten stories in all, each a memorable trip into “equatorial fantastika”. I’m looking forward to whatever Lundberg does next, and a novel would be very welcome.

41 Ian McDonald Cyberabad Days Pyr, 2009

Six stories and an original novella all set in the universe of the excellent River of Gods. This has been a slow burner with me for all the best reasons – McDonald makes it next to impossible to rush a story anyway – and India circa 2047 must be one of the best-realised futures so far in 21st century SF. These stories remind me there is still an original and currently lesser-used meaning for the word ‘alien’ that science fiction has all but replaced with its own trope: with their varying points of view these stories rehabilitate the strangeness of that original concept while not resorting to ‘othering’; McDonald also reengages our sense of wonder in things that might otherwise be dismissed as not foreign enough. Among the stories here is ‘The Djinn’s Wife’ which deserved its Hugo and BSFA awards, and ‘Vishnu at the Cat Circus’ was also worthy of its recognition. A genuinely great read throughout.

Geoff Ryman Air St Martin’s Griffin, 2004

I doubt Ryman’s Mundane SF ‘manifesto’ will ever turn out to be a rod for his back, thought that will obviously depend on his ability to work creatively within the limiting boundaries he has set for his science fiction. But if Air is indicative of the direction he wants to take things we shouldn’t worry: it’s a thoroughly engaging, mostly believable and humane work of extrapolative fiction, set in a near future Asian village in the fictional country of Karzistan (loosely based on Kazakhstan) beset by the fear and attraction engendered by ‘Air’, a future development of the internet as the means for complete human interconnectivity.

42 What pushes the novel onward and engaged me most is how a step forward is followed by two steps back as the protagonist Chung Mae, a peasant fashion designer, is driven (and often forced by circumstances) to take her village three steps forward again in the name of surviving the disaster only she knows will come, if anyone will believe her. This may be a classic story of old ways of life being brought up sharply against the new but the battleground is here found in the virtual spaces between people, and it’s the real-world interdependence of friends, family, rivals and strangers depicted in Mae’s life, in the face of this sweeping change, that gives Air a memorable but bittersweet aftertaste. A fabulous book.

Jason Erik Lundberg, ed. Fish Eats Lion Math Paper Press, 2012

Of the two spec-fic anthologies released by Singapore’s Math Paper Press in 2012, this is by far the larger. Twenty-two substantial stories fill these 400+ pages, some from better-known names on the Asian literary scene (such as Grace Chia Kracovic and Cyril Wong), others from authors for whom this book actually represents their first venue for written work. It’s worth commenting on the high quality of stories from such newcomers, and how they sit comfortably side by side with more familiar names, as I’m sure the editor hoped they would. The theme throughout is specifically Singapore: every story is set here, and all subject Singapore and/or its residents to fantastical experiences. So, immediately to my favourites (because discovering something unexpected and great is, for me, what anthologies like this are all about): June Yang’s ‘Where No Cars Go’ opens with a stunning visual image that I can’t get out of my head. I would love to see this, done as CGI. Her story about a hidden Singapore society centred on sentient cars is one of the anthologies high points, although where the story goes ultimately felt like an introduction to this particular world. Another very visual story is Yuen Kit Mun’s ‘Feng Shui Train’: the whole story is in fact contained in

43 the title, and for satire and humour I’ll point to Ivan Ang’s ‘The Digits’, about a time when Singapore’s national zoo unexpectedly interacts with the national lottery. Jeffrey Lim’s ‘Last Supper’ is a poised, melancholy and elegant story about a Singaporean man’s final hours, with supernatural elements. This is probably my favourite in the book, but there is also something more admirably Kafkaesque about Isa Kamari’s ‘Green Man Plus’: what would you do – and what would the world around you do to you – if you were told you had only months to live? The penultimate tale, Tau Ming Tuan’s ‘Open’, about an exchange of life stories between a Mexican and a Singaporean, is a similarly matured story, and I’m surprised this is his first published work. I doubt I’ll read a more engaging collection this year. With some spacious typography the pages breeze by, and there’s a rich optimism to be found here that speaks of lesser-known spec-fic writers rising to a challenge, and that challenge being more than adequately met.

June Yang & Joyce Chng, eds. Ayam Curtain Math Paper Press, 2012

This is the second collection of speculative fiction from Singapore from the same small press that produced the admirable Fish Eats Lion (actually, I believe they were released concurrently). A brief explanation in the introduction of what the term “Ayam Curtain” means would have been helpful for non-locals buying the book because the collection takes a thematic approach, that of ‘Speaking Bird Language’: with birds flitting between universes, what alternative Singapores might they see on their travels? The first half of this collection comprises of flash fictions built around just such a concept: we get aspects of Singapore as it might yet be, and Singapore as it thankfully isn’t. It’s a colourful variety of ideas, brief and punchy, my favourites being Geraldine Choo’s dystopian ‘The Heart of the Rain Tree’ and Lucas Ho’s ‘KY USB’. Most of the authors here are younger and perhaps less experienced, but all have a good standard of prose and get their ideas across with clarity: these

44 flashes are mostly quite refreshing. The second part of the collection includes longer works, stories that are still connected to Singapore but which may, to some readers, feel otherwise unthemed. One that made me catch my breath and say, at a particular point in the story, “Wow, now that’s neat” was Joses Ho’s ‘Her Name Was Jane’, which has already appeared as a Nature flash fiction in 2011: it’s simply excellent, and cunning; also Clare Yeo’s ‘Woodwind’, a mature work by a teenage writer that I found echoed my own speculations about the interconnections between the miracle of life and nature as a whole, and the story was something a little unexpected and revelatory. If feasible, a series of themed collections like this would certainly be a great thing, and would continue a momentum that Singaporean speculative fiction is clearly developing. More will be very welcome.

Arthur C. Clarke & Frederik Pohl The Last Theorem Harper/Voyager, 2008

Post-hype, no one will be hailing The Last Theorem as the great publishing event we were perhaps led to anticipate. As a ‘last hurrah’ for Clarke it’s undistilled wish fulfillment, a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ of disjointed ideas that Clarke had already visited with far greater success elsewhere, like a grand tour of his better stories and therefore rather lacking in novelty: solar sailing, space elevators, first contact, peace through technology, transcendence, all threaded into the life of one young Sri Lankan mathematician who happens to have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem (Andrew Wiles’s proof is dismissed as inconclusive). With a little reworking it would do rather well as a young adult novel. It has one very good thing in its favour: a deft beginning, in which Clarke’s and Pohl’s introductions segue smoothly into the story itself, like stepping from the shore into the shallow waters of the start of the story with the promise of greater depth to come, however by the time half the book has gone by you realise that knee-deep is just about the depth it’s going to stay. Disappointingly, one for the completists.

45 Bjorn Turmann The Last Tobacco Shop in the World Konstrukt Books, 2010

Just occasionally the novels you discover at airports are not your typical airport novels. They tease you with nondescript jacket designs and instead draw you in with a well-written cover blurb. They’re wrapped in cellophane or produced by a very small publishing house, or they come in very limited print runs. In the case of The Last Tobacco Shop in the World, all the above apply. A few chapters in, it was apparent this is an unexpected and original take on the future – one in which natural disasters are created as aphrodisiacs, in which smokers are hunted down and killed by the state, in which interior lighting has the ability to sense human needs. My interest was sustained for over 300 pages mostly because of the tight and interesting way Turmann has with dialogue, particularly between strangers getting to know each other: they talk obliquely to produce conversations that zig-zag their way to their point. There are also some neat future ideas in this story, set in the year 2040 on a new island called Jarangwa, a tiny slice of post-tsunami geological apocalyptica thrown up by the Andaman Sea off Thailand in 2004. Anton Brick is a freelance ‘syrup monkey’, chasing down ever-diminishing fringe supplies of oil in Iraq, then while staying in Cambodia he’s offered a PR job at the only hotel on Jarangwa, one of the few places on Earth where it’s still entirely legal to smoke tobacco. The rest of the planet is a mess of plagues and worldwide Orwellian governmental forces that have banned love, premarital sex, small firearms (big firearms being harder to conceal) and, of course, smoking. But Anton discovers that the guests at this hotel are a strange crowd including a repentant ex-spammer and a Mongolian ex-prostitute (by far the most interesting and well-drawn character), some of them with frightening personal ambitions and dangerously complex personalities. Plot and setting aside, Turmann’s obvious strength is his dialogue. It’s the aspect of this novel that will probably draw a reader completely into it, with a side-effect of making one feel a little

46 trapped inside, Prisoner-like, as one tries to figure out where this small cast of ill-matched characters is heading: as the reader I felt like the protagonist Anton, a blank slate always being kept a little in the dark and always well out of his depth. This is an enigmatic and slightly twisted slipstream novel, and it’s also one of the most off-beat books I’ve read in a while. It kept me reading less for its distinct strangeness, which is actually understated, and more for its promise, which is considerable. It has one obvious geographical error (and a rather unforgiveable one as it’s relevant to the plot) which is that a boat cannot get from Cambodia to Phuket unless it circumnavigates the entire Malay Peninsula, a journey that could not be done in a day – Turmann seems to have relocated the Andaman Sea on the other side of Thailand. That problem notwithstanding, as I write there are only 600 copies of Tobacco Shop in the world, but there ought to be plenty more because this novel deserves the interest of a bigger publisher.

Paolo Bacigalupi The Windup Girl Night Shade Books, 2009

Love it or hate it – and there are those that do, including the lame few who criticised it vociferously without even having read it – The Windup Girl is certainly one of the most talked about science fiction novels of the last few years. I wouldn’t say it’s a divisive book in the way that Ender’s Game has ended up being, with fandom falling into pro and anti factions, but perhaps it comes close with, as I see it, the majority falling into the pro camp. Your mileage may vary. The story is of Emiko, a Japanese ‘pleasure-model’ clone designed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman. Without warning Emiko is left to survive alone in a post-oil, future Bangkok. For her, scenes of rape and degradation ensue which controversially see her mostly not fighting back despite having enough ability to do so. This is where the novel seriously falters for some readers, however as Liz Williams once said, it’s one of the tenets of writing genre fiction to be

47 able to put your characters through hell. Bacigalupi doesn’t hold back here, and while I never found such scenes to be voyeuristic or gratuitous they are certainly one of the things that remain with you about the novel. Two other story threads – about a Thai import inspector and his deputy, and a shady American neo-colonialist ‘Calorie Man’ on the lookout for gene-types thought to be extinct from which to capitalise – alternately play second and third string and provide most of the backgrounding and scene-setting before the three threads interconnect quite effectively. The aspect that didn’t work so realistically for me was that of the turf war being fought by government departments against each other while both being loyal to the Monarch: an engaged King would have taken a lesson from history and banged a few heads together, although the young Monarch in this future seemed remote and ineffective in the extreme. There’s an authenticity to the future of The Windup Girl, whether the setting is in Bangkok or anywhere else. Bacigalupi’s environmental obsessions are more than minor concerns for the planet, and now we have the eponymous term ‘Bacigalupian’ to describe ‘post-oil’ futures in a speculative fiction context. I’d like to see the Windup universe expanded further past ‘Yellow Card Man’ and ‘The Calorie Man’, although for the stories to become too much of a commonplace is probably the last thing Bacigalupi wants.

Aliette de Bodard On a Red Station, Drifting Immersion Press, 2012

A magistrate refugee from a destroyed world arrives on a Viet space station occupied by some distant yet unwelcoming family. With honour and familial ties seemingly determining everything she is able to do, can she ease her passage by solving a mystery regarding some ancestral memory implants, and at the same time re-assert her status to her lasting benefit? Set in the expansive ‘Universe of Xuya’ this is a bridging novella set in a remote corner of that universe, and connects de

48 Bodard’s ‘space station’ stories to the rest of the series. Some awareness of earlier ‘Xuya’ episodes might be in order, and in structure this reminded me of the earlier 20th Century ‘Xuya’ murder mystery ‘Butterfly, Falling at Dawn’. This is a closed microcosm of colourful Asian society set against the blackness of space; the story’s unfolding is well-paced, with the detail supporting the plot admirably. It’s no wonder I always look forward to new additions to this series.

Kate Osias & Alex Osias, eds. Philippine Speculative Fiction, vol. 7 Kestrel, 2012

With Volume 7 Philippine Speculative Fiction now becomes an entirely digital publication, and the plan is to make all past issues of this well-established anthology series that much more accessible for readers outside Asia. Vol. 7 is not my first dip into the waters of Philippine spec-fic, and PSF continues to be a broader style of anthology than the kind lately adopted by, for example, Singaporean anthologists. PSF does not feel tailored to a specific kind of reader, and is also notably varied in content: there are stories focussing on sword and sorcery and mythic quests, mixed together with digital-era kick-ass heroines, malevolent spirits, present-day retellings and riffs on Philippine folklore – all get an airing here. With such rich variety I quickly figured that not all would hit the mark for me, and I expect plenty of cultural in-referencing probably whizzed past me unnoticed as well. But it’s that referencing, when it is caught and understood, that opens eyes and makes anthologies like PSF interesting and worthwhile. The first story is a well-characterised one: ‘All the Best of Dark and Bright’ by Victoria Isabel Yap, in which a heartbroken youth discovers the ‘first woman’, Maganda, in a bamboo garden. Another worth re-reading is Arlynn Despi’s ‘The Scrap Collectors’, a brief post-apocalyptic sketch which has an unbeatable opening line: “At night, we burn the bibles to cook meat.” Dean Francis Alfar’s ‘East of the Sun’ is perhaps the most memorable story here for the way it puts a young girl right at the centre of a sexually-charged encounter with a

49 mythical Tiq’Barang. For near-perfect satire there is Benito Vergara’s ‘The Changes’, in which a segment of the Filipino population is suddenly transformed to look like American celebrities. At this point in the anthology, only four stories in, I was clear this anthology has a strong selection of stories. Some way further in we encounter Kristine Ong Muslim’s cool and unusual ‘Pet’, something I’d like to see anthologised, and F. Jordan Carnice’s ‘The Day Nostalgia Swept Over a Town’, which despite the title is a positive, ultimately optimistic story. There were only a few stories that didn’t work for me at all, generally characterised by an overindulgence in either clichéd or violent imagery, or perhaps an over-reliance on technique over story, but that’s a minor criticism of the collection as a whole because for the most part, it rocks.

Lavie Tidhar Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God PS Publishing, 2012

Set in a future South East Asia, a land that possesses no national identities as we know them, the mercenary god-slaying gunslinger Gorel of Goliris embarks once more on his quest westwards to find his lost homeland, via a search for the Mirror of Falang-Et and whatever truth it tells, while at the same time forming a ménage à trois with two untrustworthy allies of both genders and all sexual appetites. There’s sex and drugs aplenty along the way, and frog people, and myth, some fairy tale and some magic. There are shades of Delany in both the sexuality and quest nature of the story, plus a dash of Leiber and a healthy dose of C.L. Moore in her pulp ‘sword and planet’ fantasy mode. This was a slow-burner for me but ultimately Gorel delivered everything I could reasonably expect because it stayed true to its roots in the above influences, and yet also managed to remain original and contemporary. Is there a collection of further Gorel adventures on the way? Tidhar would be onto a winner there.

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Haruki Murakami after the quake Alfred A. Knopf, 2002 For some enigmatic reason Haruki Murakami wanted this collection’s English title to be all lower case, as if the capital A and Q had been shaken down to lower case level: the six stories here are all set in February of 1995, a month after the devastation of the Kobe earthquake (and A Book of Vessels: Sky King’s a month before the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that Murakami explored in

2005 Underground), and while the characters he writes about were not directly affected by the earthquake it nevertheless created some other far-reaching and more personal seismic shifts. This is Murakami’s focus here, and only the science fictional ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has his trademark use of surreal imagery, with the rest being very down-to-earth and all told in the third Shelly Couvrette Castle (detail) 51 person – again, a departure from Murakami’s previous shortform style. He has a deft way with characterisation and these stories all get their point across with an easy-going precision. I was pleasantly surprised that best story of all is ‘Thailand’, about a bitter Japanese woman on holiday there who, with her ex-husband back in Kobe, is shown an unusual way to let go of her heart of stone. Murakami is another author I’ve since explored more of, all as a result of reading this good collection.

Atiq Rahimi Earth and Ashes Vintage, 2000 S et during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Earth and Ashes is a first novel from an Afghan film-maker more accustomed to making documentaries. This is worth mentioning as the book reads as a short personal fable and packs its emotional punch by looking at the spiritual cost of a person subjected to loss as opposed to any visually distressing imagery, which this book veils behind the digressive ramblings and nightmares of an elderly man in the shock of sudden grief. Earth and Ashes opens with Dastaguir, an Afghan grandfather and the book’s narrator, taking his grandson Yassin to see the boy’s father Murad, who works in a Russian mine, with the purpose of explaining to him that the rest of the family has been killed after the Russian army, in a fit of obstinate pique, obliterated their entire village. This story’s tellling in the second person as opposed to the first or third is a clever device which removes the reader from experiencing directly the shell-shock of what Dastaguir himself has experienced: he is clearly in a confused and distressed state yet still feels he must do the right thing and withdraws into frequent internal debates about his proper course of action, one of his reference points being the eleventh century Persian epic The Book of Kings which is interwoven with various well-depicted dreamlike visions. Earth and Ashes is as far removed from the political causes for the

52 execution of a war as any book could probably be, and focuses entirely on how this simple man is now forced to deal with an impossibly complex and traumatic event; Dastaguir, as a result, is given a troubled dignity that seems far beyond the reach of the rest of us. At times it seems like almost every sentence in this book is calculated to extract the reader’s sympathy, but the overall effect is rather positively overwhelming. Highly recommended.

Prabhassorn Sevikul Letter from a Blind Old Man and Other Stories Nilubol, 2009

Sevikul is something of a big name in current Thai literature, having written around sixty novels with some adapted for film/TV, as well as serving as head of the Writers’ Association of Thailand. Only now is his work being translated into Spanish and English, and while that’s a good thing, there are some stumbling blocks apparent, namely poor translations served by weak copy-editing (and the publisher looks like it’s Sevikul’s own imprint). He is known as someone who has a mastery of nuance in Thai however these translations convey none of that subtlety, being rendered mostly into rather flat sentences, sometimes giving an impression that the translator’s first language is not English. As for the stories themselves, gentle and sensitive are the watch-words here. In readership terms they mostly fall somewhere between adult and young adult, as if Sevikul is trying to impart lessons, or at least reminders, of the importance of family and friendships. Occasionally he does let his imagination run free such as in ‘Two Skulls’, an almost metaphysical contemplation of how people seem to replace their heads in the transition from child to adult, and the best story is probably ‘Departed Son’, about parental angst following the 1976 Bangkok student massacre. I will probably give his novel Time in a Bottle a try (given that it’s on the list of 100 best books about Thailand and was turned into an award-winning film), but on the strength of this collection I won’t be raising expectations too high.

53 Xiaolu Guo UFO in Her Eyes Faber & Faber, 2009

Guo’s debut in English Village of Stone was an ultimately great read; I’ve still not read her two other intervening novels but this one was a must-see. Given the title, her concerns aren’t in the least science fictional and the UFO is merely a McGuffin for some Chinese government officials investigating the sighting, something that sets off all the subsequent events. This is a crossover story in a number of ways: what we have in book form has been modelled as a lively film script, a format Guo-the-filmmaker clearly wants to do as a book in its own right; meanwhile Guo-the-author is bringing a couple of predominantly Western cultural facets (UFOs and 9/11) and shoe- horning them into her own unsuspecting culture, a near-future rural China, with the result of rapid and mostly unnecessary development that changes the face of a town while leaving its people behind. In hardcover it’s a beautifully produced book that’s typographically inventive with plenty of stuff that makes the pages turn fast, but I found as a whole the story lacks much substance; by the end one is asking what has everyone achieved apart from putting the small town of Silver Hill a little more prominently on the 21st Century Chinese cultural map. The multiple viewpoints work together well with much wit and profanity (but again, at the expense of characterisation); the interview format for the entire book is original but it’s a novel that doesn’t do much more than scratch at some surfaces despite some clearly referenced gender and class issues: but after everything’s said and done the novel is meant to be fun, and is certainly that.

54 lê thi diem thúy The gangster we are all looking for Picador, 2003

The lives of Vietnamese boat people as immigrants to the cultural strangeness of the US, this largely autobiographical novel is sometimes stunningly lucid, as if lê is treating us to some faded super-8mm home movies with the sound turned off. Despite the simplicity of the story the sophistication of her writing is very evident and always elegant, somehow making this book both ordinary and extraordinary. Highly recommended.

Julie Otsuka When the Emperor Was Divine Anchor Books, 2002

Many present day Japanese American families still feel stigmatised and dishonoured by Japan’s attack on their adopted country, and while it may not be Julie Otsuka’s intention to attempt to heal those wounds her clear target instead is the less-than-memorable experience of Japanese immigrants during World War Two, interned in desert camps by a process which included separation of families, with their family names deliberately, and shamefully, being replaced by numbers. When the Emperor was Divine is fiction but based on Otsuka’s own family history. The focus of the book is the forced displacement from their California home of a Japanese mother, daughter and son, and their dislocated, developing triangular relationship. The story is sparingly told from all their points of view but the family’s own focus is clearly their absent father, previously arrested on no charge and interned elsewhere. Years of isolation roll by with life outside the camp mostly a

55 mystery; telling moments accumulate and are recorded, and with the war over the family is finally reunited in bitterness against those who imprisoned them. What this book benefits from most is an understated style which fits well with the theme of looking back on two different situations both in their own way far from ideal: this was a time before America could admit its treatment of their innocent Japanese population was excessively harsh, just as it was also a time before Japanese treatment of their PoWs came to light and Emperor Hirohito was forced to admit that he was, after all, merely mortal. Otsuka’s lack of sentimentality about these unfortunate histories gives this book much character in its evident restraint, and is a clear window into an unjustifiably forgotten episode in America’s wartime history and the immigrant Japanese experience of it.

S.P. Somtow The Other City of Angels Diplodocus Press, 2007

A dark comedy set in 1990s Bangkok that Somtow wrote as a cliff-hanging serial for Thailand's The Nation newspaper, directly based on the tale of Bluebeard. The several-times-divorced Jude Abramowitz is more-or-less kidnapped by marriage from her Californian lifestyle and thrown headlong into some over-the-top Bangkok high society decadence, with a murder mystery to solve along the way. It features at least one real-life character, the food critic Bob Halliday (who also appears in several more of Somtow’s stories), but beyond that any connection to the real world is deliberately suspect. Probably written with a predominantly female audience in mind it skims between genres easily, from Californian chick lit to whodunnit to supernatural thriller, all ending in a bizarre fit of science fiction fury. For male readers it has its moments too but is best regarded as a kind of lighter antidote to John Burdett's Bangkok Eight, which doesn’t contain nearly as much wisecracking in the face of death.

56 Graham Joyce Smoking Poppy Gollancz, 2001

A lonely and bitter Englishman goes to Chiang Mai in search of his daughter who is jailed on drug- smuggling charges, but is led on a further journey into the mysterious, spirit-haunted world of Thai- land’s interior. Graham Joyce (who I would love to see writing more directly genre fiction) here shows a contemporary, knowing, middle-aged English freshness; all the characters are sufficiently well-drawn to come alive vividly in the reader’s mind, and the narrator never really loses his jaded cynicism throughout though he finally succumbs to a rather belated coming-of-age as a proper parent to his two estranged twenty-something kids. An excellent book, one I would like to re-read in a few years.

Shan Sa The Girl Who Played Go Chatto & Windus, 2003

Set in 1930s Manchuria in a town that lies in the path of the advancing Japanese army, a young girl who is unusually adept at the game of Go finds herself falling into the circle of some young Chinese revolutionaries determined to repel their country’s Japanese invaders. Told as both her own first-person story and that of one of the invading Japanese soldiers, the two opposing viewpoints eventually meet over a long and protracted game of Go after he is asked to disguise himself as Chinese and look for signs of insurrection in the town. Both characters are less wise than they think they are, she in her naïvety about love and he in his belief in the correctness of the Japanese invasion when comparing his rigid culture to that of the more easy-going Chinese. Go is a boardgame about defending and claiming territory from your opponent, so while their game mirrors

57 the invasion that is defining both their lives this rather obvious metaphor fortunately never becomes too overbearing. Chinese author Shan Sa has already won several French and Japanese literary awards for her two previous novels, and she is certainly able to build a convincing backdrop for her story’s theme and subtext. It has other important subtleties, and is also insightful into both Chinese and Japanese opinions of each other in that particular era. This novel ultimately takes on the dimensions of a love story between the two protagonists – albeit a rather curious and tragic one – and while it draws you along very nicely, nevertheless the odd and ultimately illogical (though probably inevitable) ending will very likely have some more literary types raising an eyebrow or two.

Jan Blensdorf My Name is Sei Shonagon Vintage, 2004

The rights to this novel were reportedly sold to eight countries before publication, an enviable record for a debut novelist. Aiming at being a modern rendering of Sei Shonagon’s 11th Century Pillow Book, it’s the story of a Japanese-American woman who inherits a Tokyo incense shop and finds herself acting as counsel to the insecure inner lives of her customers. It’s a ‘spiegel im spiegel’ of interiors, constantly looking further into the life of ‘Sei’ and how she engages with the lives of other people, lives far more interesting than her own which seems to have had most of the joy written out of it. This book is also good for providing a discreet look inside the private behaviours of present-day Japanese who come across as a nation mostly terrified of offending each other, largely reflecting what generations of Japanese would still see as the truth despite the excesses of post-war Western influence. As a whole it has the feel of a book that’s been assembled from disparate parts and rewritten maybe too much, all pieced together with the joins and spikes of interest smoothed over. It is observant and artfully prismatic, though not as engaging as I’d hoped for.

58 Hitomi Kanehara Snakes and Earrings Vintage, 2004

A character study of a young Japanese woman who inexplicably enters into the world of tattoos, body modification and a dysfunctional ménage-à-trois with two murderous male friends. For my money, Kanehara only just makes the grade for descriptive writing and Snakes and Earrings often feels like a fantasy of what the big bad adult world must be like to a curious teenager, which might explain its cult classic status in Japan. Somewhat disappointing.

Tew Bunnag Fragile Days SNP International, 2001

Nine stories that work well together as a cross-section of lives lived in Bangkok, from the poorest to the richest. These are less tales of status and stasis than stories of the different social strata inter- mixing and encountering each other, such as in ‘The Flower Girl’ in which a street orphan is adopted by a rich widow, or ‘Jeed Finds Her Brother’ in which a country girl finds out the truth about her missing brother’s life in Bangkok. These encounters inevitably leave the characters changed, yet somehow everyone at some point is a victim of the city itself, the Big Mango, for the better as often as for the worse. It’s hard to pick any story that stands out above the rest, although for characterisation the final story ‘Love Heals Tammy’ is the one that puts across best how most Thais are prepared to look to the positive and be transformed by it. Bunnag also caps off the stories with a non-fiction epilogue titled ‘An Ode to the City’ in which he spells out his feelings on the ugliness of Bangkok itself, while declaring an undying admiration for the people who would dare to live in such a place. This is a lovely collection.

59 Feet of Clay

S.P. Somtow ODAY [20 February 2012] THERE IS A huge celebration of the hundredth anniversary of M.R. Kukrit Pramoj, one Tof Thailand’s most gifted and famous artists, to which (for reasons that may become apparent in the course of this blog) I haven’t been invited. This is a pity, because I would be one of the first to recognize that Kukrit’s genius was unique. However, I have not in the past, nor would I now, attempt to whitewash those aspects of Kukrit’s career as a novelist which stand in the way of his achieving true international stature. I’m referring of course to Kukrit’s propensity to imitate the actions of a hermit crab or cuckoo: that is, to build his novelistic structures inside someone else’s home. Until aficionados of Kukrit’s work are able to face up to, digest and come to terms with Kukrit’s blatant plagiarisms of internationally known literary works, they will never fully appreciate Kukrit’s true talent – which was to employ an uncanny and boundless linguistic invention and creativity to create out of these borrowed structures material that was uniquely his own, and uniquely Thai. To accept one’s idol’s feet of clay is not to deny that the head and the heart may be of pure gold. As long as Thailand was a relatively closed society, and as long as Thai literature was something designed to be enjoyed only by Thais, one could ignore the occasional barb from an outsider who, after all, by definition, “didn’t understand Thailand.” When it was mentioned by some that the Don Camillo series was lifted wholesale 2007 into Kukrit’s Phai Daeng tales, people simply said “So what?” Indeed, when I read Kukrit’s novel Kawao ti Bangphleng and realized it was an almost scene-by-scene adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, a book every English schoolboy of my generation was forced to read, “So what?” was also my own reaction. Everyone knew that M.R. Kukrit was less than upfront about his sources, and everyone knew that he was a great writer of the Thai language, so what difference would it really make? Alas, in the nineties Thailand was no longer – and is no longer – a “relatively closed society.” What we do is seen everywhere and the Thai language is no longer the secret language of an obscure minority, but studied by Silhouetted Birds in a Tree

professors in major universities around the world. It is even possible to do Thai at A-level in my old school, Eton. Therefore, when I bumped into Khun Jareuk Kaljaruek, CEO of one of Thailand’s most important film studios, in Hollywood, and he told me he was making the most expensive Thai sci-fi flick of all time, having acquired the rights to Kukrit’s novel, for the first time I was forced to take him aside and say, “Before you release this film worldwide, there's something I should tell you.”

Angelo de Santis Angelo The Midwich Cuckoos had been filmed three times at that point: as Village of the Damned, as the sequel

61 Children of the Damned, and as a new remake by John Carpenter which was being released that very same year. It’s not just some obscure junky paperback – though it might have seemed that way to someone unaware of the history of science fiction. It is and was one of the seminal works of the genre. In addition, the original screenwriter of Village of the Damned, Stirling Silliphant, was at that time the most highly paid screenwriter in the world, and in the nineties he happened to be living in Thailand. Stirling was asked by Caravan, a leading Thai magazine, to write an article about the forthcoming sci-fi flick. Only then did he discover that the movie he was to write about was, in essence, his own. (The magazine decided that I, as an expatriate Thai living in Hollywood who wouldn’t ever return to Thailand to face the scandal, would have to write the article – and offered me danger money to do so.) This was definitely a major crack in the forcefield that shielded Thailand from “the real world”. Well . . . despite all this, I came back to Thailand . . . and the truth about these The genuine article: first edition of novels hasn’t dented Kukrit’s reputation in Thailand one bit. Now that the grand old man is ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’, 1957 celebrating his 100th birthday, it might be time to examine the cultural context of it all. The major creations of Kukrit’s auctorial career happened in another time – one far removed from today’s hyperconnected world. In the culture of Thailand we were emerging from a world in which artists were not considered societal icons who illuminate the human condition and hold the mirror up to society. They were, in fact, as were European artists in the eighteenth century, servants. At the beginning of the last century, no one thought anything of it if a composer or poet published a work anonymously or even under the name of some important patron, such as a royal or an important aristocrat. Indeed, schoolchildren in Thailand even today learn that certain major works were written by various early monarchs, when this was never understood to be the case at the time. The ascription of someone else’s name to a work of art was not considered particularly demeaning because that art was created in the service of those noble individuals. By the same token, literary works from other cultures were frequently recomposed in the Thai language and are now viewed as wholly Thai – works such as the Ramayana, the central epic poem in Thailand’s cultural tradition. Kukrit therefore grew up in a cultural context in which an author’s proprietorship was not clearly demarcated as it is

62 today – neither legally nor conceptually. In a sense, he was just doing what everyone else did – the only difference being that he happened to possess genius, and therefore what he did is remembered. Indeed, all great art has sources. Shakespeare’s plays drew on Hollinshed. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has provided a structural framework for countless pieces of fiction (including one of my own) as well as movies like Apocalypse Now. Jane Austen’s Emma was hilariously recreated in contemporary L.A. in the movie Clueless. You might ask, therefore, in response to the Kukrit problem “So what?” To dismiss these borrowings as homages is one solution to the Kukrit problem. But there remains the fact that M.R. Kukrit stated at the time that when he wrote The Cuckoos of Bangphleng, he wrote it simply as the inspiration came and had no idea how the story was going to turn out from day to day (it was first serialized in a Thai newspaper). He made this statement even though the derivation of the work is embarrassingly obvious – he didn’t even disguise the title. Instead of saying, “I’m going to pay tribute to this seminal novel by creating a Thai version of the story” he acted as if John Wyndham’s novel didn’t exist. Why didn’t he simply say it? His brilliant writing, his astute observations of Thai village life, and the cleverness of the adaptation would have been enough to merit praise for the novel without having to pretend that the idea was original. And yet something prevented M.R. Kukrit from making this statement. Was it vanity? But no one disputes Kukrit’s position as a foremost figure of Thai letters. I believe in fact that Kukrit would have received more kudos for stating that he intended to serve as a bridge between western culture and Thai literature. Three editions of Kukrit Pramoj’s ‘The Cuckoos of Bangphleng’

63 I cannot really fathom this. My mother’s novel, Mongkut Dok Som, was inspired by a novel by Chinese novelist Su Tong, and in her introduction to the published edition, she clearly says so. No one has ever said she was any less of a novelist for saying so – and indeed she went on to prove her own plotting skills by creating a sequel that owes nothing to Su Tong at all. In fact, artists do not exist in vacuums. All works have sources. Yet it seems that in these instances, M.R. Kukrit wanted to be in a vacuum. He wanted to be enshrined in solitary splendor and he was amply protected from a lawsuit by the Wyndham estate by the inaccessibility of the Thai language. It is, in the end, probably only about ego. And ultimately, it shows a disdain for one’s readership that is Not the real Kukrit Pramoj: as a waxwork in Bangkok’s Madame disturbing, and threatens to overshadow the magnitude of his Tussauds achievements. When I was a child, my mother used to read Si Phaendin to me every night and it was from Kukrit’s writings that I became connected to Thailand’s cultural past. I think it is fair to say that I wouldn’t be who I am today without the influence of his writings. But in order to completely understand the person, and the writer, one must also face the darkness in that writer, that person, and come to terms with it. Every great artist I know of has harbored darknesses within. Wagner was a hideous human being and yet in his art, he showed an incredible understanding of the human condition. Venality, sexual perversion, terrorism – you name it, some great artist has done it. They are human beings. We should celebrate that. To realize that Kukrit’s was a flawed genius does not in any way denigrate that genius. Let’s stop ignoring the elephant in the room, acknowledge its presence, and free ourselves to appreciate this artist for what he was. I've noticed that the Wikipedia article on Kukrit does in fact acknowledge the actual source of several of his novels. Nevertheless, at the time that I wrote my article for Caravan, the revelation about John Wyndham came as a complete surprise to many people. I guess the dust has settled somewhat now that the Master has gone on to his next incarnation.

64 distant barking dogs

Peter Young

LATE HAD AN ARTICLE on 17 June 2010 on a common literary device: “Somewhere a Dog Barked” – pick up just sabout any novel and you’ll find a throwaway reference to a dog, barking in the distance. I’ve been collecting all sorts of examples of distant barking dogs since the mid-1980s, after I read a novel by

2006 Bel Kaufman called Love, Etc. (1979) in which a creative writing teacher leaves a comment at the end of a student’s paper: “I suggest you do not end every story you write with ‘Somewhere a dog barked.’” Many examples come across as rather hack, and often others are obviously and intentionally ironic, but

Cold Light certainly not always. The idea is often better used in a way that actually adds atmosphere instead of just giving pause, such as in great examples below from Graham Greene, David I. Masson and Derek Raymond. I first posted part of this list on Live Journal that same day in June 2010, and I’ve been able to make many other additions to the list since. Please send along any others you come across – or that you have written yourself and have courage enough to share . . . Full credit given, of course, in future lists!

NB. Casting the net wide, I’m considering all canine species featured here as dogs. Pedigree purists, deal with it. Andrew J. Faulkner 65 Off in the distance, a pack of coyotes starts yipping. A dog howled briefly somewhere, and a door slammed on — , ‘The Tamarisk Hunter’ 2006 another block. Paolo Bacigalupi — ‘The Very Last Day of a Good Harlan Ellison, A dog barks . . . Stop. The dogs answer one another from a Woman’, 1958 distance. — ‘A King Listens’, Under the Jaguar Sun, I remember once, when I was in the army, we were going Italo Calvino, 1986 (trans. William Weaver, 1992) through an Arab village and it was all quiet and the only thing you could hear was a dog barking in the distance The whining of a small dog came from some balcony. and the noise of the wind. There was crying in the distance, confused shouts, people — The Last King of Scotland, 1998 Giles Foden, calling. Someone was walking and praying. — ‘Darkness’, 1972 Somewhere in the Channel a boat blew its siren and André Carneiro, another answered, and another, like dogs at night waking Dogs in far-off yards barked. each other. — A Scanner Darkly, 1977 — Brighton Rock, 1938. Philip K. Dick, Graham Greene,

Somewhere a TV set played a Spanish program. A dog The garden was full of shadows, and the wretched hounds barked. at number ten were barking. — Radio Free Albemuth, 1985 — Reef, 2004 Philip K. Dick, Romesh Gunesekera,

Off somewhere on another roof an illegal dog yapped. Only the lawn and flowerbeds, suspended in the cool, — ‘Emancipation: A Romance of milky late-summer dark: but in the distance, somewhere Thomas M. Disch, Times to Come’, 1974 the other side of the river, she could hear the long, belling cries of dogs. From time to time, in faint bursts, the sound of voices. — Empty Space, 2012 (but is partially M. John Harrison, And the barking of dogs, coming from all directions, from relevant to what follows) beyond the mist, from all the villages. — The Lover, 1984 Marguerite Duras,

66 A dog barked from somewhere, but they couldn’t see it. A dog barked in the distance. The mistress’s dog barked in — ‘The High Walk’, Night Geometry and response, a shrill, reedy sound. A.L. Kennedy, the Garscadden Trains, 1990 — ‘The Mistress’s Dog’, The Mistress’s David Medalie, Dog: Short Stories 1996–2010, 2010 Dogs were beginning to bark like mad for blocks around. — ‘The Proud Robot’, 1943 The distant barking of a dog was the only sound in the Henry Kuttner, once-growling metropolis. Behind every wall, I could hear the sound of dogs barking. — ‘Dark Benediction’, 1951 Walter M. Miller, — ‘The Woman and the Blue Sky’, 1987 Ma Jian, Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked Somewhere a dog barked. the lyrics of A Chimp To Call My Own . . . — Learning the World, 2005 — ‘Conditionally Human’, 1952 Ken MacLeod, Walter M. Miller,

If one wandered far from the vehicles and men, the silence A dog howled in the distance, and someone slammed a was broken only by the thin sound of the wind where it window shut. combed a grass mound, the zizz and skrittle of insects, the — 1Q84, Book 1, 2009 (trans. Jay Haruki Murakami, distant yipe of fox or other hunting animal, and the Rubin, 2011) secretive giggle of seeping water. — ‘Mouth of Hell’, 1966 But in the hazy silence punctuated by the maddened, David I. Masson, distant barking of a dog the long ailing bunches hung their Cold wind blew across him. Across the lake a dog barked. heads – the bloom smelling rotten as you got close and the — The Shrinking Man, 1956 grape the colour of ash under it curled, yellow leaf. Richard Matheson, — A State of Denmark, 1964 Derek Raymond, . . . and hears the dogs barking in the distance. — White Devils, 2004 A coyote began yipping somewhere in the darkness. Paul McAuley, — ‘Under the Hollywood Sign’, 1975 Tom Reamy, Jackals and pig-dogs yip in the distance. — River of Gods, 2004 Ian McDonald,

67 All the village dogs were barking, their voices echoing from In the distance, seagulls cried. the amphitheater of the surrounding hills. — Voyage, 1996 Stephen Baxter, — Air, 2004 Geoff Ryman, Somewhere an automatic heating unit functioned. Somewhere below a dog barked. — The Man Who Japed, 1956 Philip K. Dick, — Way Station, 1963 Clifford Simak, Somewhere in the cosmic sea of space, a small, Not far away a dog began to howl miserably. meaningless planet disappeared. — ‘Answer Me’, Answer Me, 2001 — ‘The Sun Also Sets’, 2008 Susanna Tamaro, Reuben T. Dunn, (trans. Avril Bardoni, 2003). Far away an owl called. Somewhere a dog barked. — Disquiet, 2008 Julia Leigh, — ‘One Kansas Night’, 1994 Steven Utley, Then, somewhere away in the swirling mist and dark, I Somewhere out in the works, dogs bayed. heard the sound that lifted my heart, the distant but — ‘Girl Pool’, While Mortals Sleep, unmistakeable clip-clop of the pony’s hooves and the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 2011 (but is relevant to what follows) rumble and creak of the trap. — The Woman in Black, 1983 (but is relevant Susan Hill, to what follows) Now some examples of variations on the theme, something I’ve come to call the “Higgins Variant”: Somewhere some insane bird, not a nightingale, was Somewhere a pony whinnied. singing. — Toll For the Brave, 1971 — ‘Covehithe’, The Guardian, 22 April Jack Higgins, China Miéville, 2011 From somewhere further off came the echoing melancholy hooting of a night owl. Somewhere in the distance there was the clop-clop sound — ‘The Silver Wind’, Interzone 233, March– Nina Allan, of horses’ hooves. April 2011 — ‘Fur, Actually’, Departures, 2011 Tony Parsons,

68 Somewhere along the street, a garbage bin clattered. A shout for SF author and dog fan Nancy — ‘Little Drops of Water’, Look at the Kress. It’s only fair: she ran a Flickr competition for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the best poodle photograph to coincide with the release Birdie, 2009 (but is relevant to what follows) of her mainstream thriller Dogs in 2008. A photograph I’d taken of my wife’s dog won, and Nancy sent a big An empty streetcar far away screamed rustily, rang its package of dog treats which went down exceedingly cracked bell. well with our vicious poodle, Lookmen (‘Smelly Puppy’ — ‘King and Queen of the Universe’, in Thai) . . . and the novel went down well with me, too. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Look at the Birdie, 2009 Maybe it’s inevitable a book about dogs would embrace a few clichés here and there. Whatever. Nice one, From far away, down by the river, came the quacking of a Nancy: flock of mallards. Ellie opened the door to let the dogs out into the — ‘Census’, City, 1952 Clifford D. Simak, backyard. Somewhere a siren began to sound, but she barely noticed . . . Somewhere in the distant river valley an owl laughed irrationally. . . . But then he heard a single dog, somewhere a few — ‘Census’, City, 1952 streets over . . . Clifford D. Simak, . . . Somewhere nearby, dogs howled . . .

. . . Outside, one of the dogs howled at the moon . . .

. . . Somewhere a dog howled, announcing its presence, and from the distance came an answering howl . . .

. . . Jeff finished his cold coffee. When he left, he heard a single dog bark in the distance.

— Dogs, 2008 Nancy Kress,

69 70 hermeto’s giant breakfast

Peter Young Deep-fried excess As much as I love it, one thing I dislike reading about in novels is food. Six lines on what the protagonist had for breakfast that day, a dozen on the precise varieties of barbecue sauces she puts on her steak at lunch, half a page on how a geek Asian teenager who never leaves her bedroom can also rustle up a brilliant curry in twenty minutes with spices and flavourings even Madhur Jaffrey has never heard of. Simply, when I encounter a novel in which altogether too much space is given over to superfluous details about food, I go into automatic – and sometimes frantic – skim mode. It’s worse when the reader can sense the writer is doing it just to add local authenticity, and while it may indeed be authentic especially if the author clearly knows his/her onions, I get that familiar guilt trip. “Hang on, you might get more flavour out of this novel if you took some time with these kinds of details.” This then triggers an internal dialogue that continues along the lines of, “But I don’t need to know the traditional methods with which this dish was made. So she had curry for breakfast that day. So what? I did too, yesterday.” “That was the previous evening’s left-overs. The writer is going into detail because he/she thinks it’s necessary. He/she is not deliberately wasting his/her readers’ time.” “I beg to differ. Nothing is added to the story if his/her dish was cooked one particular way or the other. So it was a kofta paneer with basmati rice. That’s all I need to know; not that the cheese has to come from a particular breed of sheep/goat, not that the rare herbs and spices came from her great-aunt’s metre-square garden patch, not that the sauce was prepared in a thirty year-old clay pot that mystically adds thirty more years of authentic flavour 2010 to the end result, not about ‘the juggling of disparate elements to create a harmonious finish’. It’s bollocks. All this adds little to characterisation and nothing to plot development. Skip it, please. I’m now in even more of a hurry to get to the end.” And . . . skim. So far I have won every one of these arguments, and await a novel where the food is directly relevant to the Stupid Things rest of the book such that it might even make me want to take up cooking. I admit I don’t cook much, but like most men who don’t perhaps I would like to be better at it. The food I eat at home is mostly Thai noodles with crottled greeps and/or tofu, a bit of tom yam, maybe one of those weird Thai desserts (if we’re out somewhere) that mixes sweetcorn and red beans with flavoured ice (I can’t even remember their names right now, despite having

Justin LynhamJustin been told a dozen times). That’s all anyone needs to know. I don’t go in for fine dining when it comes to my own

72 preferences, much like books needn’t have an aura of glamour for me to read them – quite the opposite, usually. Just authenticity – without the excessive culinary details. Typical bloke.

Burma’s Little Brother: MiA? The first Kickstarter project I ever chipped in ten bucks for was the plan from Digital Democracy to arrange for translation of Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother into several Burmese languages: “to broaden the debate on technology for freedom against tyranny”. Burmese students involved with ABITSU (the All Burma IT Students’ Union), the translators for the project, clearly felt the novel epitomised Burma/Myanmar on the matter of student surveillance: remember, this project dates from a time before the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and the limited opening up of the country, and a despotic, totalitarian government was still in power. The project hit the required funding threshold of $2,200 from 58 backers on 16 December 2009; book covers appeared in May 2010, but since then the project seems to have gone off into the wild blue yonder. A page at Digital Democracy authored by Mark Belinsky on 24 May 2010 mentions a forthcoming “serialised release of Little Brother in Kachin, Karen and Burmese languages”, but further reference to these releases is non-existent, at least as far as Google reveals. Two recent enquiries from me to Digital Democracy’s co-founder/director Emily Jacobi (plus one via Kickstarter) have received no more than a single automated “out of the office” reply; The ABITSU website also has no news, but this may be explained by an immediate e-mail reply from them to me indicating they had received none of the funding for translations, and that they have “no longer heard from [Digital Democracy] about this project.” After more than three intervening years, at the moment it looks like we’ve blown $2,235 bucks on a few unused cover designs. Digital Democracy should issue a long-overdue update to backers of this project – the last was as long ago as 4 February 2010 – and make reparations if necessary. I hope to have an update by the next issue.

In which things ain’t what they seem In February 2009 Benji and I took a trip to the majestic-looking National Library of Thailand in Bangkok, somewhere I hope to be spending some time in the coming years. But, quelle dommage, let’s be frank right up front and say in both appearance and substance it’s not a patch on somewhere like the British Library in London. There’s a rather sad feel to the place as if

73 everyone there knows it ought to be much, much better: shelves are poorly filled, many books are in poor condition, it does not have the feel of a library that’s meant to be enjoyed. Naturally I took a look at the English language fiction shelves, which seem to be defined by whatever they can get hold of or the few books that get donated: there were perhaps around 200 works of English language fiction in all, in a wide range of bindings and age. As for the scattered amount of science fiction and fantasy, here was the total: just about every Harry Potter book in either paperback or hardcover, several tattered paperback copies of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, a couple of abridged paperbacks of The Time Machine, what actually looks like a rebound 1908 first edition (!) of Wells’s The War in the Air, plus a torn paperback of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Then for curiosity value add to this two rather battered and bruised Robert Silverberg first editions, Hawksbill Station and To Live Again. And that was about it. There was also something rather unexpected on those few fiction shelves: this copy of Harry Nicolaides’s Verisimilitude. Only fifty copies of this self-published novel were ever printed, and only seven sold. Nicolaides was jailed for three years in Thailand in January 2009 for a paragraph in this book which was deemed to be rather derogatory towards a fictional Thai crown prince, something that, the courts decided, nevertheless contravened Thailand’s draconian lèse majesté law. The offending text is freely available at Wikipedia; it’s also rather bizarre in a ‘left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing’ way, in that while the author was given a custodial sentence the ‘offensive’ material is made freely available in the National Library (and I wonder if Nicolaides may have donated the book himself, after which the shit truly hit the fan). Thankfully in February 2009 Nicolaides was pardoned after his mother in Australia had had a stroke. You can’t help but feel for the guy, and yes, having sampled a few pages,

Banned books dept.: Nicolaides’s ‘Verisimilitude’ the book does look interesting.

More sleuthing Sometime in November 2012 at a shopping mall in Bangkok, I passed a small optical store with a display stand featuring a very familiar illustration of an asteroid striking the Earth, from one David A. Hardy, FBIS, FIAA. I recognised it immediately, but it’s an unfortunate thing that when I see familiar art in this part of the world I also wonder if the artist got paid. No harm in asking – I snapped a couple of shots, which I e-mailed Dave along with my enquiry. Instant reply: “Did I heck!” Dave did

74 ‘Night Impact’, reproduced WITH permission a bit of online research as to who the culprit ‘Excelite TVX’ is, and fired off an e-mail of his own. Then in early December he notified me of a rare success in demanding payment for an unauthorised use of his art: he’d extracted $500 from them; they claim they got it from either one of two websites that also prominently display the illustration. One of these is the website of Voice TV, owned by the corrupt ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra who’s currently in exile evading charges of tax irregularities, dodgy land deals and a whole raft of accusations . . . and another could be the non-payment of science fiction artist’s fees. Go after him, Dave, everyone else has.

75 Corrupted minors It doesn’t matter which country I’m in, something I find myself doing on a semi-regular basis is finding books in bookstores that have been incorrectly categorised and shelved inappropriately. I’m not talking about that activity that was widely condemned as a bad idea a couple of years ago, in which UK fans were asked to find SF on mainstream shelves and furtively re-shelve them under ‘Science Fiction’ while hard-working Waterstones’ staff happened to be looking the other way. No, not that. I find nothing wrong with picking up an SF Masterworks title inadvertently or lazily left on the ‘Cookery’ shelves (which reminds me: when will that series include a well-overdue Damon Knight collection?) and shelving it somewhere that it more reasonably belongs. I think I’m doing the bookstore a service, here; however I will confess to one weakness, although I’ll refrain from calling it a lapse of judgement. A couple of years ago I went through a brief phase of picking up a copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography A Journey, or George W. Bush’s autobiography Decision Points, and re- Guilty, your honour shelving them under ‘True Crime’. I think of it as non-violent protest, but regardless of your political or social standpoints any numpty could have endless fun with this, and earn the well-deserved ire of bookstore staff everywhere. And taking this to its logical extreme, one could then reasonably find something like, for example, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fake Auschwitz memoir Fragments – probably a rarity even in secondhand stores these days – and file it accurately under pulp fiction. Or more deservedly in the trash. One book I have consistently found inappropriately shelved in Thailand is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which I’ve found frequently in the Young Adult section of several branches of Asia Books: in Hua Hin, in a few branches around Bangkok and in the city’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport. I think it’s the “Girl” in the title that has led Asia Books to sticker this as “Y/A Fiction”, also the fantasy-like ‘elephant’ on the cover of every edition. I’m now well-versed in labouring the point to the various stores’ staff: “I’ve read this book, it’s definitely not Y/A, in fact it’s very adult, rather mature adult, you could say.” I also ask them to feed this problem back to their office that decides these things, if they sincerely want to avoid a massive lawsuit from a litigious American who believes Asia Books has corrupted the mind of his once-innocent 13-year old after picking up what was assumed, by people who’ve never read it, to be just a teenage fantasy novel, maybe about a clockwork girl in Thailand. All before heading for a relaxing read by the hotel pool in Phuket, then ever onward towards a perverse and twisted view of sex and a decade of grubby bar-hopping in Pattaya. I know about which I speak, about a young life being warped and redirected irretrievably. One day as a kid, I once picked up a science fiction novel.

76 ...... makesmakes PDFPDF fanzinefanzine productionproduction runrun eveneven moremore smoothlysmoothly

Thanks to the authors of the following articles for permission to reproduce them here:

Science Fiction in Hindi: A Critic’s View: © 2011, Arvind Mishra & Manish Mohan Gore first appeared on 30 January 2011 at Inter Nova (nova-sf.de), reproduced by permission.

Mirai-ki: The Forgotten History of Japan’s Early Science Fiction: © 2012, Jess Nevins first appeared on 22 October 2012 at io9 (io9.com), reproduced by permission.

Dop’s House of Anime: © 2013, Antony J. Shepherd reviews first appeared individually as part of a larger series of Live Journal posts, reproduced by permission.

Feet of Clay: © 2012, S.P. Somtow first appeared on 20 February 2012 at Somtow’s World (somtow.org), reproduced by permission.

Thanks also to: Ted White for an early prompt to get writing again, particularly with regard to life in Thailand; Bill Burns for posting the original A.B. Dick card on fmzfen; all photographers and illustrators appearing in this fanzine, especially those who make their great work available under a Creative Commons licence; chineseposters.net for providing copyright information; and Benji and Miles for being here, and there, while I am often everywhere else.

77 Created using Pages 4.1 and Photoshop Elements 6 on a knackered and sometimes glacially slow 15” MacBook Pro. There is no PayPal begging button installed in this fanzine for software/hardware upgrades; I make do with what I’ve got.

Maladies dealt with during the creation of this fanzine: Trapped ulnar nerve in left forearm (ongoing), wasp sting on knuckle of left forefinger, occasional bursitis in left knee and ankle, occasional cartilege damage in left knee, frequent gout in toes of both feet, 2 head-colds, 1 kidney stone. Trolls smited for general obnoxious behaviour during the creation of this fanzine: 3 4 Currently addicted to: Liquid Stranger’s Cryogenic Encounters, sakura Japanese green tea, Jetpack Joyride, Fruit Ninja. Currently trying to avoid: scorpions and snakes in the garden.

This fanzine is dedicated to Samuel R. Delany who, with The Einstein Intersection, somehow made the sky even bigger.

Typographically dedicated to Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) and Sumner Stone (1945– ). Only fonts bearing your names would be suitable for a fanzine such as this.

Limited black-and-white paper copies of this fanzine are available (with a colour cover), but for the full-on dazzle this PDF e-zine edition in all shades of the visible spectrum can be downloaded from www.efanzines.com/bigsky.

78 “Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very

large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small.

But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons.

We need only look up if we wish to feel small.”

Carl Sagan The Varieties of Scientific Experience 2006

big sky 1 march 2556 / 2o13

Arvind Mishra & Manish Mohan Gore Jess Nevins Antony J. Shepherd S.P. Somtow Peter Young