Philippine Speculative Fiction

[note: apologies for not keeping the blog up to date. i have a few announcements lined up for when i have more time to post, please stay tuned.]

This personal post was inspired by a blog entry in Philippine Genre Stories titled Generational Reading Gap [blog] [multiply].

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I grew up in a library that my father built up from scratch. Most of my literary education came from this. But I’ll have to admit, I feel like growing up with this repertoire led me to become more isolated from the readers and writers I correspond with.I know very few readers from my generation (or older) who call themselves “sci fi fans,” and at the same time know who Cordwainer Smith even IS. They may have read a little Asimov, a little Clarke, a little Philip K. Dick - but for the most part they’ve read and liked more Carl Sagan, Greg Bear, David Brin, and people who got published WAY after the “golden age,” than I ever will.

I sometimes get vibes from younger readers that run along the lines of: “Well, you’re not a real sci fi fan if you haven’t read China Mieville/Iain Banks/Stanislaw Lem” and my knee-jerk defense is to go “Yeah? To me, you’re not a real sci fi fan unless you’ve read “Doc” Smith/Theodore Sturgeon/at least one Aldous Huxley title that is NOT Brave New World.”

No, I’m not automatically resentful… and I don’t blame people for this, of course. These are just some of the reasons why I don’t: Read more

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Gotten from Kenneth Yu, who got it from Azrael:

Tals Diaz, journalist and marketing manager of Fully Booked, explains the rationale for the awards: “Neil’s theme is Filipino unrealism. It has to have that unique sense of Filipino-ness about it. We do have a rich tradition of Filipino mythology and folklore that we hardly explore in our literature. If you look at our literature right now, a lot of it is very realistic. That’s what Neil Gaiman wanted us to veer away from with this contest.” Romulo adds, “Don’t say that he doesn’t like the stuff that he got from here—the realist novels that he read, he liked. He just wanted to explore if we had other things. As for fantasy, he thought we could go beyond juvenile literature and explore what he thinks is an integral part of our culture—science fiction, horror or speculative fiction. It really is how you weave the genre into Filipino heritage.”

Read the rest here.

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There’s been a fun discussion going on about Filipino-written sword and sorcery (S&S) stories. Linking to some of the relevant posts here:

Filipino Sword-And-Sorcery (at The Grin Without a Cat)
The Conan Question (at to the tale, and other such concerns)
Filipino Sword and Sorcery (at the PGS Multiply journal)
More on Filipino Sword and Sorcery (PGS Multiply)

Because of the dearth of S&S stories from Filipino writers, Banzai Cat is wondering if it would be good to open a group blog called Pinoy Pulp that would address this issue. Read his post about it here:

Conan vs Panday

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For someone who says she doesn’t like discussing fanfiction, I sure talk about it a lot XD;

I’ve always found the concept of prompts intriguing. In the fanfic world it’s a driving force, almost as powerful as peer pressure :P Someone comes up with a word or phrase, and it’s a challenge for the writer to include it in the fic to be written.

However, some prompts don’t work like this - you don’t need to include them in the pieces you write, they’re really just there to inspire. A prompt could be something as simple as “rain” or as complicated as “we can spin the sun around.” The resulting story could be anything from a 100-word “drabble” to a full-blown 27-part epic.

…I’ve found that I don’t really respond well to prompts. But I think it would be really interesting to try that with original fiction, especially if the person issuing the prompt is someone like FH “Ichi” Batacan, author of Smaller and Smaller Circles, who is by the way also the guest editor for the PGS Special Crime/Mystery/Suspense Issue, which merits its own blog post.

Ichi aims to inspire Pinoy writers to write more crime fiction. I wonder if, as with fanfics, we can have an online venue for the pieces we’ve finished? Alternatively, we could just keep our fiction to ourselves, and let it brew and keep refining it until it’s ready to be submitted to paying markets. You know - the traditional way :)

Ichi’s first prompt is a bit tough, I think - a recent major rogue trading scandal. But because it’s tough, it’s worth doing!

Another thing that prompted (lame pun intended) me to write this post is the existence of Talecraft, a proudly Philippine-made fantasy-based story creation game. I confess I haven’t looked into the game yet, but it seems to operate based on the prompts method as well. I’ll probably write more about it when I’ve checked out the game myself.

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First off: HAPPY 2008 EVERYONE! Here’s to another good year of fine Pinoy spec fic!

A while back, Kenneth Yu called our attention to an essay about magical realism. I must admit though that my attention was more caught by a comment on that post by Jego, who linked to another blog post by someone on the novel jury of the SFWA. The post is titled “A lament for science fiction,” and this passage stuck with me:

Science fiction has changed a lot, unfortunately, not for the better. It used to be adventure literature for young men, now it’s romance literature for middle-aged women. That’s why young men now play science fiction-based computer games instead of reading science fiction novels and so-called science fiction publishers churn out book after book about sexy vampires, seductive were-seals and strong independent forty-something single women looking for love in space.

Permit me to ask: where may i find this “romance literature for middle-aged women”? I probably won’t have enough time to borrow the representative titles from my favorite library here, but I’m curious.

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I’d like to plug this before Saturday rolls around: Read or Die, a non-profit organization that aims to promote literacy in the Philippines, now has a twice-a-week (every Saturday and Wednesday) column in the Manila Bulletin. Miss Tin Mandigma is currently maintaining it. The first writeup came out on December 22, and could be read here.

If you’re interested in helping raise literary awareness in the Philippines, I hope you’ll follow this column and keep an eye on RoD’s many projects.

Have just been a bit busy/scatterbrained, but should be writing an essay on efforts to promote literacy alongside Philippine speculative fiction sometime. Although perhaps, that’s self-explanatory right there?

PS: In case anyone tried to respond to a post on this blog within the last 24 hours, my apologies: I was trying out a plugin that was apparently not working. It took me a while to log back in and fix it. Comments should be working fine now.

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I was not able to attend the launch of Philippine Speculative Fiction vol. 3, but my mother and my cousin Marivic were kind enough to go in my place.

My mother reported that everyone had a great time. But there was something she didn’t tell me, and she blogged about it instead :P

[ Reflections of a Writer’s Mother ]

Comments are most welcome!

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Against All Odds

I take it as my chore to discourage as many ‘aspiring authors’ as I possibly can. Because you cannot discourage a real writer. I’ve said it a hundred times in print. Break a real writer’s hands, and s/he will tap out a story with feet or nose.

- Harlan Ellison, in the foreword to Dan Simmons’ Prayers to Broken Stones

Charles is right: we do have a rather odd friendship. We disagree on quite a few things, but we don’t normally end up hating each other because of them. As is the way with these things, though, it’s probably just a matter of time >P

I think Charles has blogged a few times about how he endorses a “proactive” mode of living. He’s also elaborated on his thoughts on being “proactive” in private correspondence. I regret I wasn’t able to provide a suitable reply, but I do respect what he has to say.

I believe that what Charles is against is whining, more than anything. However, I think “whining” and “introspection” are separated by very thin lines outside of fiction.

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I was looking forward to having more opportunities to write on this blog during my two-month vacation here in Wellington. Alas, I find myself having less control over my time than I’d hoped. Not having easy Internet access also leaves me out of the loop, so I’m afraid I’ll be late passing on the news about many different things.

Still, there are some remarkable advantages to not being “wired.” One of them is, I get more time to think. And right now I think one of the many, many things about my New Zealand visit that I’m grateful for is access to a public library. I’m there at least twice a week, and in-between raiding my uncle’s private stash, I forage in Upper Hutt and take home some titles that I’m sure I wouldn’t easily find in the places I frequent in the Philippines.

For me, the Upper Hutt Public Library is, quite simply, a little slice of heaven. It’s been a while since I was last able to visit a decent library - in fact, the last time was over four years ago, when I was doing research for a certain writing project, and I was able to enter the University of the Philippines’ Main Library again.

Every time I step through the doors of the Upper Hutt Library, though, I’m bombarded by conflicting emotions. One of them, I was surprised to find, was guilt. I keep thinking about certain people back home who would love the gorgeous selections - I have yet to email a certain friend about the extensive Dragonlance collection there, another friend about the newer Iain Banks titles, and someone else about the surprising number of Storm Constantine’s non-Wraeththu books. Hell, I even took pictures.

And I feel like I don’t deserve to be there. I no longer set aside a sizeable amount of my earnings to books, and while I do love to read I don’t dare call myself a bibliophile anymore. I know other people - aspiring writers like myself, only more passionate and more talented - who would kill for the chance to be in the presence of so much quality reading material.

Yet I’m the one who’s here.

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1. Mia and Charles both recently made posts related to writing science fiction:

• More Notes on Science and Writing - Mia shares what she sees are possible angles for good science fiction stories.

  An abridged version of this entry may be found at the Read or Die blog. Share your own ideas!

• Writing Science Fiction - Charles tells about how the heart of a science fiction story is not actually the science. I find this essay comforting, because while science fiction fascinates me the most, I don’t think I can write hard science to save my life :P Not right now, anyway!

2. via Kenneth: Vin Simbulan’s short story “Silverio And The Eidolon” has come out in the October 13, 2007 issue of the Philippines Free Press.

3. Read or Die tells about its upcoming events.

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