Category: “Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction”

Web 3.0 : The Future of Publishing and Content Creation

Victor Fernando R. OcampoLeave a comment

I firmly believe that the only way to grow Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction is to create a new center of literature in the region, away from the Anglo-US sphere of influence. Perhaps Web 3.0 can help build a decentralized infrastructure for regional writers and artists, while providing a means to fairly compensate them for their work.

Watch this space for future announcements!

This article first appeared on my channel on Medium last 17 April 2023.

The advent of Web 3.0 is a game-changer, much like the discovery of the internet in 1996. It offers exciting opportunities for writers, publishers, editors, and readers, not the least of which is the potential for developing new hybrid art and writing forms that bring a new mode of transmediality and intermediality. Unfortunately, making sense of how it will revolutionize the way we write, publish, and consume written content has been mostly buried in hype, disinformation, and hard-to-understand jargon.

Web 3.0: A Brief Introduction

Web 3.0 is the next iteration of the internet, characterized by decentralization, collaboration, and immutability of content. It is built on top of an electronic ledger called a “blockchain,” which enables a decentralized internet that is not controlled by big tech companies, but owned and governed by its users. It is essentially the democratization of the publishing industry.

Web 1.0 involved desktops connected to the internet. Web 2.0 was centred on mobile phones and apps, including social media apps that allowed us to leave comments on content. Web 3.0 takes it a step further by enabling writers to publish their work directly on the blockchain, where it is permanently stored and can be accessed by any reader with an internet connection and a mobile wallet.

Smart contracts ensure that authors earn crypto rewards for contributing to the network based on the quality of their content and the engagement it receives. Decentralized platforms like Steemit and Hive allow writers to publish their work without intermediaries such as publishers or literary agents. This will force traditional publishing models to evolve and present both opportunities and challenges for new revenue streams.

Collaborative Writing Platforms

Web 3.0 also enables the development of collaborative writing platforms that can allow multiple authors, editors, and even readers to contribute to a single work. For instance, Textile can be used as a decentralized platform that enables writers to collaborate on a single novel. Each writer’s contribution is recorded on the blockchain to ensure that all contributors receive proper attribution, and the final work is transparent and tamper-proof.

Blockchain and Writing

Blockchain technology enables a new breed of hybrid textual artworks that are limited only by the authors’ imagination. Kalen Iwamoto is a Japanese-Canadian conceptual crypto writer and artist who converts blockchain processes into rules for writing and inserts poetry in web3 spaces (e.g., her “Few Understand” series[1]). On the publishing side, blockchain technology can be used to authenticate original work, manage royalties, and prevent plagiarism. This technology also offers an unprecedented level of security and trust, ensuring that writers receive proper credit for their work and are paid fairly for their contributions.

NFTs and Literature

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become increasingly popular in the art world, but they also have potential use cases in writing and the publishing industry. NFTs can be used to monetize literature and create new revenue streams for writers. There are already various NFT marketplaces that already allow you to mint your own poem as an NFT[2]. An eBook can be minted as an NFT, providing digital proof of ownership (or at least access rights, depending on the jurisdiction) that cannot be erased or rescinded by an Apple or Amazon. However, it’s important to note that NFTs aren’t the art or content themselves, it’s more accurate to say they are simply the digital certificates of ownership.

A note on Sustainability

This has been an unfortunate misconception. Not only does a Web 3.0 approach mitigate carbon emissions, it also creates a whole new world of privacy and security by design that cuts down on the need for even more physical infrastructure to support the tens of billions of attachments sent around the world every day.

The Future of Writing and Publishing?

The impact of Web 3.0 on writing and publishing is potentially far-reaching. It is crucial for writers, publishers, and readers to understand and adapt to this change. Web 3.0 offers a new level of transparency, security, and trust, making it a powerful tool for writers, publishers, and readers. It is up to us to embrace it and make the most of it.

[1] https://kalen-iwamoto.com/portfolio/few-understand/

[2] https://postergrind.com/how-to-sell-a-poem-as-a-nft-easy-guide/

Very Late Post: Rachel’s Now Reading Review of TILAOS

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This review was actually posted 5 years ago. I had meant to RT it but for some reason, it got buried under all my other work. I am rectifying this grievous error now.

Thank you so much to Rachel’s Now Reading for your kind words. Please subscribe to her page to get book reviews on a wonderfully eclectic range of reading material.

“This is a book review of Victor Fernando R. Ocampo’s “The Infinite LIbrary and Other Stories”. It’s a book containing 17 speculative fiction short stories somewhat linked together to make a whole.

If you’re a sci-fi fan, this is definitely the book for you. The presence of queer elements helped as I always love an inclusive book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection and hope you will too!”

You watch her great review here.

Take note that the Youtube link to purchase a copy is outdated. You can get one (and other fine Gaudy Boy Books) at Singapore Unbound instead.

(Excerpt) Locating Fantasy in Filipino Literature

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Here’s another teaser from my chapter of Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction (Editors: Gabriela Lee and Anna Felicia Sanchez, UP Press pre-publication) which was entitled “The Roots of Speculative Fiction in the Philippines” (you can also read the chapter intro here). For this section, I tried to identify the earliest known Filipino works that could be reasonably argued as Fantasy or Proto-Fantasy, but excluding Folk Literature.

Hope you find this interesting:

One of the earliest novels that could be characterized as proto-fantasy fiction is Ramon L. Muzones’ Margosatubig: Maragtás ni Salagunting (“The Land of Margosatubig: The History of the Hero Salagunting”) written in Hiligaynon from 1946. This is the cover of the English translation by Ma. Cecilia Y. Locsin-Nava (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2012).

Navigating the genre of fantasy can sometimes be difficult and confusing as “fantasy” is not a single definite category but rather a cohesion of many diverse, often wildly different, sub-genres. Wikipedia defines “fantasy” as “a genre of speculative fiction set in a fictional universe, often inspired by real world myth and folklore[1]”.

Fantasy proper takes place in a world other than our own (second world fantasy), whereas the sub-genre of magical realism (also known as magical realism or marvelous realism) focuses entirely on an ordinary “real” world where everything is normal, “except for one or two elements that go beyond the realm of possibility as we know it[2]”. To date there are at least 58 named sub-genres of fantasy[3] including urban fantasy, Christian fantasy, dark fantasy, epic fantasy, mythic fantasy and vampire fantasy, just to name a few.

In the Philippines the roots of the fantasy genre begin in folklore – particularly in local tribal myths and legends, as well as in pre-Hispanic ethno-epics of which over 20 oral narratives have been recorded and translated (many more remain to be transcribed and/or translated – Palawan alone has sixty-three)[4]. It should be noted that while the natives of what would be eventually  named las Islas Filipinos had little by way of books in codex form, the inland tribes and early maritime polities in the archipelago possessed a remarkable level of literacy and a strong literary tradition[5].

Myths and legends still figure prominently in modern speculative fiction works, albeit in reimagined or subverted forms, such as the graphic novel The Mythology Class by Arnold Arre (Quezon City: Alamat Comics,1999).

Epics (in the Philippines we speak of ethno-epics[6]) are considered the most direct ancestor of the fantasy tale. These long stories essentially consist of an oral narration of the adventures and trials of a revered folk hero. Sadly, as important as they are to Filipino culture, they have been less of an influence on modern speculative fiction compared to indigenous myths and legends. One of the few to have any impact was Biag ni Lam-Ang which is pre-colonial in origin.

Biag ni Lam-Ang (“Life of Lam-Ang”), tells the story of his extraordinary birth, his various quests aided by magical animal companions, as well as his death and resurrection. It became the subject of a metrical romance in the early 20th century, as well as various comic book adaptations in the 1970s, a movie, an animated film and even a musical theatre production.  

Lam-Ang, from “Kagitingan at Pag-asa” by Crisanto Aquino in the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art: Philippine Literature, Volume 9 (Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1994)

Let’s Start with (Philippine) Metrical Romance

The most popular genre of fiction during the 18th and 19th centuries was the metrical romance or chivalric romance, a type of narrative poem which in Europe developed from traditional myths and fables and was typically centered on courtly love, knights, and chivalric deeds. This genre wholeheartedly embraced fantastical elements and was a forerunner of the modern fantasy genre.

In the Philippines, metrical romance in vernacular languages (particularly Tagalog) took on two forms: the awit (a poetic narrative verse set in dodecasyllabic quatrains) and the korido (a poetic verse narrative set in octosyllabic quatrains). Like the epics that preceded them, these tales of chivalry were made to be sung and chanted.

 Numerous works in Tagalog (around 200 titles were known to have been published[7]), Bicolano, Ilonggo, Kapampangan, Ilocano and the Pangasinan language were written during this period. Interestingly, while metrical romances are not speculative fiction per se, there has been no other time in Philippine history where fantasy-adjacent genre stories were the most accepted and feted literary works.  

[1] Wikipedia Foundation Inc., “Fantasy”,  Wikipedia Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy  (accessed 17 December 2020)

[2] Burlington County Library System, “Focus on Genres: Magical Realism”, Fantasy (accessed 17 December 2020)

[3] BestFantasyBooks.com, “Fantasy Sub-genres Guide”, 2015, http://bestfantasybooks.com/fantasy-genre.php#urban-fantasy  (accessed 17 December 2020)

[4] Eugenio, Damiana L., “Introduction: The Philippine Folk Epic”, Philippine Folk Literature: The Epics (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), p. xi

[5] Jesuit friar Pedro Chirino notes, ‘All islanders are much given to reading and writing, and there is hardly a man and much less a woman, who does not read and write in the letters used in the island of Manila They used to write on reeds and palm-leaves, using as pen an iron point’. However, writing was used mainly for the exchange of letters. Religion, government, and literature were founded on oral tradition. In Chirino, Pedro, Relacion de las Islas Filipinas (Rome: Esteban Paulino, 1604) as translated and reproduced in Blair, Emma Helen and Robertson, James Alexander, The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904), p. 169

[6] As opposed to national epics like Germany’s Niebelunginlied, ethno-epics are “histories” of ethnic groups or small maritime polities that consider themselves “nations”. As per David-Maramba, Asuncion, Early Philippine Literature: From Ancient Times to 1940, (Mandaluyong:  National Bookstore, 1971), p. 21. See also Godinez-Ortega, Christine, “The Literary Forms in Philippine Literature”, GOV PH, https://ncca.gov.ph/about-ncca-3/subcommissions/subcommission-on-the-arts-sca/literary-arts/the-literary-forms-in-philippine-literature/, (accessed 15 November 2020).

[7] Jurilla, Patricia May Bantug “Tagalog Bestsellers and the History of the Book in the Philippines”, doctoral thesis submitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 30 August 2006 p. 52

The Mythology Class by Arnold Arre. Originally published by the author in four issues in 1999, it was collected into a special edition by Anino Comics in September 2005 and Nautilus Comics in 2014.

Baby Steps with AI Art

Victor Fernando R. OcampoLeave a comment

A.I. generated art has been around for years. But tools released this year like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — have made it possible for visual-art challenged people like myself to create fairly complex, abstract or photorealistic works simply by typing a few words into a text box.

These are my first attempts to illustrate some of my stories using Midjourney AI. Not incredible but not to shabby either. I could actually use some of these as e-book covers.

However, I am still on the fence about the ethics of A.I.-generated art. Are they a real emergent art form or a high-tech form of plagiarism? WDYT?

“Blessed are the Hungry” – this one came out the best. Funny how the rendered image looks like my youngest daughter.

“I ducked out of sight as soon as I saw the wolf-like mecha, shrouding my lantern with my shirt. Frightful as they were, I was mesmerized by their strange beauty. In the half-light of the Holosonic, their liquid-armor bodies shimmered purple, vermillion and bronze. I imagined these to be the colors of a sun that I had never seen, the burial clothes of a mother-star that we had abandoned so long ago.”

“Infinite Degrees of Freedom” – the blurry shape in the background is Midjourney unable to render a mythical sigbin monster in a spaceship corridor. Why does the kid from my story look like a young Rodrigo Duterte?

“From out of nowhere, Deo smelled an immensely foul odor, a rotting stench filled with the smell of death. A shape coalesced from the blackness, swiftly moving, gibbering, and utterly horrible. A sigben, a vicious half-dog/half-lizard chimera from ancient Philippine Myth had come for him. The impossible monster blocked his path and let loose a frightening roar-bark loud as a thunder clap.”

“Mene, Thecel, Pares” – My account expired before I could redo this with a steampunk Berlin in the background. The protagonist, Joseph Mercado (a fictionalized Jose Rizal) looks a bit cross-eyed.

“Joseph wished he didn’t have to remove his mask. Everywhere he went, people stared at him. Without his mask’s protection, the city’s xenophobic populace would peer from windows or point as he walked past whispering “fremde, außerirdische, ausländer, Asiaten, Japaner, Chinesischer Mann, Korean Mann” –- anything but his own ethnicity.”

“Carry That Weight” – This is supposed to be the older brother, Berto. The two blobs in the background are supposed to be megamouth sharks. Also, the boy’s hair shouldn’t look like that underwater. Must be industrial-strength aquanet.

“The smaller boy watched as his brother fished out a pair of smart goggles from his shorts pocket and clipped his phone to his wristband. Berto’s body was dark and tightly muscled. He seemed naked save for the skintight nanotech body suit that kept his body warm and protected it from the sun’s radiation.“

Get Luckier: The Reading

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Reading-Dialogue across the Sea between Get Luckier Sg/Phil writers

This Poetry Festival Singapore will take place from July 29 to August 10 this year in various locations across the island. Please join us this 30 July for a special event “Reading-Dialogue across the Sea” between Get Luckier Sg/Phil authors, with Singapore-based writers Paul Jerusalem, Migs Bravo-Dutt, Victor Ocampo, Reah Maac, Cathy Candano and Filipino poets Wilson Lee Flores, Wendell Capili, Jo Em Antonio, Cristina Montes, Mariela Lansang with spoken word poet LKN as host (and Cathy Candano as technology expert). The recording will be done from 8pm onwards. Stay tuned for the announcement of the online broadcast.

Get Luckier – An Anthology of Philippine and Singapore Writings II (Editors Migs Bravo Dutt, Claire Betita de Guzman, Aaron Lee Soon Yong and Eric Tinsay Valles) is the sequel to the much-loved original Get Lucky from six years ago. It features writing that illustrate how technology, the pandemic and other current events have impacted the fellowship between Singaporeans and Filipinos.

Fish Eats Lion Redux TOC Announced

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The landmark anthology Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction collected the best original speculative fiction written in Singapore in or around 2012. It was the first local anthology that treated the literature of the fantastic as bona fide literary work, instead of simply just genre. Edited by Jason Erik Lundberg, this book included stories by Ng Yi-Sheng, Neon Yang, Daryl Yam and Shelly Bryant, who would all become leading lights in the APAC Spec Fic sphere, as well as works by mainstream fictionists who were not generally known for fantastical writing such as Grace Chia, Dave Chua, Noelle de Jesus, Isa Kamari, and Cyril Wong.

It’s been ten years since the original FEL and Jason has commissioned a follow-up anthology. I am very happy to be part of both books but it’s also a bit of a shock to realize that I’ve been getting published for so long. In my mind I am still a new writer struggling to get stories written and published (when I am not doing my day-job or house work, that is).

Congratulations to our evergreen editor Jason Erik Lundberg and to everyone on the new antho’s TOC. I can’t wait to read these new stories!

  • Stay in the Sun | Meihan Boey
  • L’Appel Du Vide | Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
  • Tiger Girls | Felicia Low-Jimenez
  • Insert Credit to Continue | Stuart Danker
  • Longkang at the End of the World | Kimberly Lium
  • Down Into the Waters | Wayne Rée
  • Road Trip | Izzy Liyana Harris
  • Blood Double | Sithuraj Ponraj
  • Blue | Cyril Wong
  • Wife, Skin, Keeper, Slick | Wen-yi Lee
  • 315 | Daryl Qilin Yam
  • Asha Hanar’s Dowry | Nuraliah Norasid
  • Multiversal Adapter | Suffian Hakim
  • The Dog Frontier | Inez Tan
  • Sejarah | Ng Yi-Sheng

More info here.

11 Must-Read Filipino Sci-Fi Books (Bookriot)

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Thank you to Arvyn Cerézo over at Bookriot for including The Infinite Library and Other Stories (Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2017 ; New York: Boy, 2021) in his list of 11 MUST-READ FILIPINO SCI-FI BOOKS.

“Moreover, some stories explore the world between literary and genre fiction. It’s the best of both worlds, and it’s a noteworthy addition to a meager selection of Filipino sci-fi books.“

I also have a short story, “Infinite Degrees of Freedom” in the first book he discussed, Science Fiction: Filipino Fiction For Young Adults (Quezon City: UP Press, 2016). This work was also translated into Chinese and appeared in Science Fiction World‘s March 2017 issue. The story concerns the rocky relationship between a distant father and his emotionally needy son, programmable matter, guns that fire bolts of electricity, chicharon and a mythical sigben monster loose inside a rickety old spaceship.

I firmly believe in the transformative power of Science Fiction in nation building. As historian Yuvel Noah Harari said: “Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre… It shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.”

But we must be conscientious with what we choose to write. The stories we dream up could very well be the bedrock upon which the next generation of Filipinos will build the future.

You can find the Bookriot article here.

(Excerpt) The Roots of Speculative Fiction in the Philippines

Victor Fernando R. Ocampo1 Comment

As promised, here’s a teaser from my chapter of Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction  (Editors: Gabriela Lee and Anna Felicia Sanchez, UP Press pre-publication) – This is the first-ever collection of non-fiction essays and think pieces about about Philippine Speculative Fiction, written by many authors, academics and critics who are active in the field. My research on “The Roots of Speculative Fiction in the Philippines” grew from my 2014 attempt at documenting the early days of local Science Fiction (check out my original post here). For this chapter, I tried to identify the earliest known Filipino works that could be reasonably argued as Fantasy, Horror, and of course, Science Fiction.

Here’s the introduction:

Stories of the fantastic have existed in the Philippine Islands for as long as there have been people to tell them. From the earliest folk tales born in the depths of pre-Hispanic history, to the forms of literature that were introduced and evolved during the colonial period, to the rise of modernism and post-colonial writing that arrived after the birth of the republic, “speculative” fiction that explores the human condition through the unreal or the otherworldly continues to thrive and to grow because it speaks to something deep within readers that cannot be addressed by realism.

Cover of Doktor Kuba by Fausto J. Galauran M.D. Manila: Limbagan Nina Ilagan at Sañga, 1933

Contemporary “Filipino speculative fiction” as a category and domain of cultural activity can be said to have properly begun only in 2005, with the arrival of its first deliberate and sustained platform – the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology series (edited by Dean Francis and Nikki Alfar). But what about texts that were not explicitly labeled “speculative fiction” by their authors, or were published prior to the first Philippine Speculative Fiction (PSF)? Let’s take a look at how deep the roots of the literature of the fantastic have dug into our history. How far back they go may surprise you.

I. Defining Speculative Fiction in the Philippine Context

“Every enthusiasm aspires to respectability,” Science Fiction Grandmaster Isaac Asimov once said about his chosen field of writing, “and one way of getting it, is to demonstrate that it is old, even ancient.[1]”

He goes on to say that by broadening Science Fiction’s definition to encompass “the branch of literature that deals with the imaginative and the unfamiliar”, it could be induced that Science Fiction is as old as literature itself.  

Although Asimov walks this back to a more narrow definition later, his initial, expansive definition of science fiction to include everything non-realist and fantastical is, in fact, one of the accepted historically located meanings for the term “speculative fiction”[2]. In this context, speculative fiction is defined as a supercategory of literature that includes fantasy, horror and science fiction, as well as their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured/subverted folktales, and all their related sub-genres. It encompasses, what fictionist and editor Dean Francis Alfar noted as “at its core, the literature of the fantastic[3]”. 

Marek Oziewicz, the Marguerite Henry Professor of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Minnesota, said that a story falls under the realm of speculative fiction if it has “speculative fiction sensibilities” i.e. it contains speculative elements that are based on conjecture and do not exist in the real world. These non-realist stories can also be filed under one of the genres covered by the speculative fiction umbrella.

Excluded from our definition of speculative fiction are ethno-epics, tribal myths and legends, as well as traditional fairy and wonder tales which fall under the category of folktales. These are anonymously authored literary artifacts, passed primarily through oral narratives. Also excluded are children’s stories and juvenilia, which is a branch of literature on its own.

Philippine speculative fiction is simply the spectrum of all genre work in fantasy, horror and science fiction (as well as their sub-genres) united by a Philippine identity and a coherent Filipino aesthetic.

Prior to the arrival of the first volume of Philippine Speculative Fiction in 2005, the term “Philippine speculative fiction” didn’t exist. Realism was (and remains) the most popular literary mode. Any work that existed outside this scope was marginalized[4]. As both PSF founding editors, the Alfars, lamented in the introduction to the first volume of PSF:

“If you look for speculative fiction in the Philippines, you will be dismayed. Science Fiction and the literature of the fantastic are in very small numbers and are still looked down upon as inferior…”.

Yet despite this realist bias, there are many pre-PSF works of Filipino literature that demonstrate speculative sensibilities that can readily be classified under speculative fiction’s umbrella genres of fantasy, horror and science fiction.  

[1] Asimov, Isaac, The Birth of Science In Fiction (New York: Knightsbridge, 1981), p 9

[2] Oziewicz, Marek, “Speculative Fiction”,  Literature, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 29 March 2017

[3] Alfar, Dean Francis, “Introduction”,  Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 2 (Pasig: Kestrel, 2006), p IX

[4] Alfar, Dean Francis, “An  Introduction”, Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 (Pasig: Kestrel, 2005), p vii

Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction (Editors: Gabriela Lee and Anna Felicia Sanchez, UP Press pre-publication – likely the end of 2022 or early 2023).

BTW, I’ve decided not to post my unedited original text for the Science Fiction section due to — reasons. Instead I will (eventually) post the intros to Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction sub-sections, as well as the chapter intro you see here.

Late Post: Necessary Fiction reviews “The Infinite Library”

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“Ocampo’s collection is simultaneously a meaningful addition to the genre of speculative fiction and a powerful manifesto laying out the possibilities of Southeast Asian literature.“

Thank you to Elise J. Choi, a copy editor based in Portland, Oregon who “reads science fiction, fantasy, and translated literature to her cat” for writing a great review of my collection, The Infinite Library and Other Stories (1st edition Math Paper Press, 2017; 2nd edition 2020; 3rd edition Gaudy Boy, 2021).

You can read the review at Necessary Fiction here.

“This is a reader’s book through and through, and the final story, a two-page ode to reading, confirms it. “To See Infinity in the Pages of a Book” provides a lovely cap for a work that has reveled in impossible libraries. Sometime in the future, a crack in spacetime reveals an astronaut literally “falling into a good book”:

Inside the singularity, the impossible astronaut is not dead, they are reading. Before they get to that last book they will ever read in their life, there is yet another book that needs to be read. Between that penultimate book and the one they hold in their hand, there is yet another book and another demanding attention. In fact, between the astronaut and Death, there is an endless series of books with no beginning and no end.

The scene is a literary imagining of a mathematical limit, in which a line stretches infinitely toward a value but never quite arrives. Usually it is the writer who achieves a kind of immortality. But Ocampo shifts that power by bestowing it upon his readers. The story closes with the optimistic declaration that “those who fall endlessly into books never die. They are forever reading.” – Elise J. Choi

Read “The Easiest Way to Solve a Problem” for free on Get Luckier

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In 2018 I wrote a near-future science fiction story called “As If We Could Dream Forever” which appeared in Vol. 17 issue of the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore. The work was set in a city where people surrendered their conscious selves to a corporation’s Artificial Intelligence during working hours. In exchange they got a high salary and the AI developed them into the best possible workers they could be. I had meant it to be a cautionary tale, to inspire horror, but I was the one horrified when I found out that most of my readers actually wanted to live that kind of regimented, automated life.

“The Easiest Way to Solve a Problem” is another short story set in the same near-future version of Singapore. It appears in the e-anthology Get Luckier (Singapore: Squircle Line Press, 2022), edited by Migs Bravo Dutt, Claire Betita de Guzman, Aaron Lee Soon Yong, and Eric Tinsay Valles. This anthology was made possible with support from the Singapore National Arts Council, Philippine National Bank and LBC Express.

Mrs. Mercy Maalala, 33 years old, trained nano-engineer, and a proud Batangueño from Lian, Batangas, begins her employment at Singapore by almost drowning in a vat of microscopic machines. The living computers link her to the Automatic City’s Artificial Intelligence grid which she has agreed to surrender her conscious mind and body for 9 hours every day, five days a week. A strict Non-Disclosure Agreement keeps her from remembering what she did, save for a superficial security log provided to her at the end of every day.

As an expatriate Filipino working in the technology space, I wanted to explore how much imminent future technologies could affect the lives of ordinary Filipinos. Moreover, I wanted to share the experience of Pinoy professionals working overseas, including our dreams, hopes and fears that sometimes don’t quite fit with either the normal OFW or the usual immigrant experience.

Why should Filipinos (or anyone for that matter) read and write Science Fiction? With the publication of Fausto J. Galauran’s Doktor Kuba in 1933, the Philippines actually has the oldest written Science Fiction tradition in Southeast Asia. Despite an early start, the country has had comparatively few serious Science Fiction works in any medium. This is problematic as nothing shapes the vision for a country’s future like Science Fiction does. As historian Yuval Noah Harari has said: “Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre. “It shapes the understanding of the public on things which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.”

Read it for free here or scan the QR code below.