Singapore-Themed Speculative Fiction

Despite seeing Jason Erik Lundberg's musings and presence around, I've never read his writing. When J mentioned his books, I picked up his short story collection titled 'Most Excellent and Lamentable' (2019). Apparently some of the 14 short stories are selected from his earlier works, and only one is new, 'Slowly Slowly Slowly'. But I've never read any, so they're all new to me.

The collection of Singapore-themed speculative fiction begins with 'The Stargirl and the Potter'. It’s a romance, community, do-good, and a bit sci-fi. And the couple eventually disappears into the stars, leaving behind two statues of them in “remarkable likeness” and hundreds of clockwork mechanical spiders that crawled over them, standing in the town square for 137 years before dissipating. I was a bit bored. At the end of the tale, the author’s endnote made me realize that this story is a nod to Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Potter’ (~1955) and Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ (1955). 

I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry at the rewritten after-story of Chinese literary classic ‘Madam White Snake’ in the second story titled ‘Always A Risk’. Green Snake became Blue, Lady Blue. Scholar Xu Xian, in this incarnation over centuries, became Julian Xue Zhe of Tumasik Town. I can't even... I didn’t even bother about the reference to Jack Kerouac’s ‘City’ in the story’s use of Julian’s destination of cityCityCITY. He never got there anyway. I was completely bemused. Another love story. Ugh. Depnding on how you view it, this is like, fan fiction, and it pan out depending on who you ship. This was only the second story in the collecion. The rest of the book was going to be such a ride.

Fa Hai, Julian and Blue, in that order, stepped out of Leifeng Pagoda’s only gate, and approached the Fleetline Coupe. The light breeze whispered across clothes and skin, the salt smell of the ocean waves drifted throught the air, and from far away a gull or a tern squawked hoarsely. Julian had just given himself a life sentence, a thought that frightened him to his very marrow, despite his show of bravado. Would he be driven mad? Was the option of madness but proximity to his greatest love better or worse than sanity but restlessly searching lifetime after lifetime for that one person who could make him feel complete? 

Even the eponymous title story is a romance. Zzzzz. Thank goodness not every story is a romance. Of course love centers all stories, but different kinds of love. A son's love for his father stricken with dementia, another son's love-hate relationship with his father who's a time-traveler, of suicidal young men and random ocelots and wombats, etc. Then there was a man who turned into a 'rat' because after he was cured of asthma in Bali by a cave witch, he went home to Seattle and forgot offer incense to the Balinese gods. Only, he's a 'civet cat' because the title is 'Kopi Luwak'. I love it!

"Ah, Mr Troy," Sudra said, looking inside, a face you could trust completely. "I am very sorry had to come to this, yeah? But no worry, we take care of you, keep you safe. Make sure you enough water and food. All the coffee berries you can eat."

My favorite in this collection is 'Slowly Slowly Slowly'. It left me in stitches, and the language used is hilarious. Old people who are ill with degenerative diseases are turned into animals and housed in a special facility in order to prolong their lives. Family members visit as often as they wish. The sentient animals retain their minds, speech and cognitive abilities. Their lifespan is extended by almost a decade, after which nothing else could be done when their physical bodies deteriorate, and they're gently put to a permanent sleep, and their ashes subsequently returned to the families. However, there's speculation that this isn't done. We meet Leia, and her mother Gloria, who has been a three-toed sloth for two years, and new acquaintance Ivy, whose father Francis is a Galapagos tortoise.

"You didn't know about that little secret, did you?" Ivy took a deep breath. "After the ten years of the S.L.O.W. Treatment is up, they don't gently put your parent to sleep and give you the ashes afterward. They turn them over to the ultra-rich patron who donated a fortune for the opportunity to cook and eat them, the most exotic kind of meal." 

"Bullshit. I don't believe you." 

"It's true. How do you think the gahmen can afford to keep the program going? The rest of the world is not investing in Singapore like it used to. Money has to come from somewhere." 

"How do you know this?" 

"The same way I was able to break in to the preserve to and bust our parents out: I had help. But the less you know about that, the better."