0. Editor’s Note

First Light Of A Crooked Sun — August Linn

Machine Learning — Tan Jing Min

Grape, Backwards — ash chua

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group — Ng Yi-Sheng

Searching for One’s Roots 2.0 — Shawn Seah

Island — Stephany Zoo

Falling into a black hole — Ann Grá

Monsoon Season — Zavier Seow

The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent, Part 2
— Vivekanandan Sharan

When They Burned the Butterfly: An Interview with Wen-yi — Megan Chee

Strange New Worlds — Brandon David Servos

And They All Lived: Remembering the Happy Smiley Writers Group

Ng Yi-Sheng

Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and activist with a keen interest in Southeast Asian history and myth. He has been published in Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons—check out his Pushcart-nominated essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto” and his BSFA-longlisted “A Not-So-Swiftly Tilting Planet”— and is author of the speculative fiction collection Lion City (winner of the Singapore Literature Prize). Additionally, he served as editor of A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. His website is ngyisheng.com, and he tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.

In December 2008, a collective of Singaporean SFF writers was founded. They called themselves the Happy Smiley Writers Group, and their motto—“We want some happy endings, darn it!”—was their cry of resistance against the culture of bleak, pessimistic storytelling they saw around them.

Members gathered regularly to write and discuss their work, usually at the Geek Terminal café at Raffles Place, favoured for its free wi-fi and accessible power points (on the floor, so they didn’t have to search for wall-facing tables to charge their laptops), or at the nearby Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

As a group, they published two anthologies—Happiness at the End of the World (2009) and The Steampowered Globe (2012)as well as a collaboratively written novel, Bubble G.U.M. (2010), all under the AS¡FF (Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy) imprint. For a few years, they were the most public faces of Singaporean speculative fiction, rallying writers and readers together at book launches and festivals.

Today, however, they’re barely remembered. It’s easy to blame this on Singapore’s culture of amnesia and lack of respect for genre fiction, but it doesn’t explain why their accomplishments are even more forgotten than older sci-fi works like Han May’s novel Star Sapphire (1985).

The problem, perhaps, is that they flourished in a time of transition. They were born too late to be regarded as pioneers of the genre, yet too early to ride the emergent wave of mainstream Singaporean SFF. Still, it’s this very obscurity that makes them a truly intriguing subject for retrospective research. Who were the Happy Smiley Writers Group? What did they do? And to what extent is our current SFF scene their legacy?

Collective Joy: Origins (2008)

Let’s start with the “who” question. Happy Smiley, as they sometimes called themselves, had a roster of just six members.

There was Rosemary Lim, who, at the time of the group’s formation, served as a professional editor. Also Maisarah Binte Abu Samah, a school tech support officer and blogger. Joelyn Yep and Viki Chua, both students. Lina Salleh, a scientist. And finally, Yuen Xiang Hao, a physics teacher and the only man in the otherwise all-female circle.

I’ve managed to speak to three of these members. Sarah Coldheart (formerly Maisarah) and Joelyn Yep (occasionally published as Joelyn Alexandra) met me for coffee at the National Gallery’s Rempapa café, while Yuen Xiang Hao chatted with me on Zoom.

Rosemary Lim declined an interview due to health reasons. This is a shame, since she was—according to Yuen—the de facto leader of the group. Born in Northern Ireland in 1960 (“Lim” is her married name), she was the eldest of the six, all otherwise young Gen X-ers and Millennials. She also happened to be the only author among them with a book to her name: The Seed from the Tree (1999), recipient of a Merit Award at the Singapore Literature Prize 1998, beating iconic works like Daren Shiau’s Heartland and Alfian Sa’at’s Corridor.

What brought everyone together was National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, a global movement where authors challenged each other to complete a 50,000-word novel within the month of November. Though it began as an informal project in San Francisco in 1999, it soon found a presence in Singapore, with a dedicated forum on the official NaNoWriMo website where locals shared their accomplishments and struggles. By 2005, Lim was involved, even editing an anthology of works by that year’s Singaporean writers: So You Think You Can Write a Novel (2007).

The six met face to face in November 2008, at the NaNoWriMo kickoff party, held at the now-defunct Earshot Café at the Arts House. Lim and Sarah served as Municipal Liaisons for NaNoWriMo’s Singapore chapter, organising weekly write-ins; Yep, Chua, Lina and Yuen were participants.

Next door, the other rooms of the Arts House were buzzing with the panels of the Singapore Writers Festival. Yep remembers feeling alienated by those events. “A lot of the stories being discussed and being told were very historically and culturally important, but also historically and culturally heavy,” she says. Sarah agrees: “It was an age of really serious writing. There was a lot of Catherine Lim.”

By comparison, NaNoWriMo was a haven for writers of genre fiction. Certainly, there were a few serious authors involved, including the celebrated playwright and novelist Ovidia Yu. However, Yuen recalls that the most vocal people online and in person tended to be writers of fanfiction, crime fiction and speculative fiction—folks like Yep, who declared, “I just wanted to write about kids going on adventures.”

Then the month ended. “After November, it was like, OK, now what?” says Yep. It was Lim, she remembers, who suggested founding a collective to extend their sense of community. This was hardly an original idea, Sarah notes: theirs was an era of collectives, such as the art collective Vertical Submarine, whose playful installations the group adored.

It was further agreed that their group should focus on speculative fiction and strive for happy endings. “The challenge to overcome the lack of attention paid to genre writing from Asia is one of the group’s main motivations,” they declared in a later writeup. “Another is the dearth of fun in writing that seems to exist within most writers’ communities. Misery literature has had its day.”

On 11th December, Sarah made a formal announcement of the group’s inception on her blog Seriously Sarah, inviting NaNoWriMo participants to gather at Geek Terminal, and declaring that they would be holding monthly meetings every Saturday at 2pm to critique and edit each other’s novels. She also supplied a link to their official website: the now-defunct <www.singapore-novelists.com>.

The Happy Smiley Writers Group was officially in business.

Violent Delights: Happiness at the End of the World (2009) and Bubble G.U.M. (2010)

One of Happy Smiley’s first projects, initiated in 2009, was the collaborative sci-fi novel Bubble G.U.M. This was the tale of a batch of young Singaporeans undergoing National Service in the year 2045, when rising sea levels had plunged most of the world underwater, and the nation had only survived by enclosing itself in an artificial bubble.

Sarah wrote the beginning of this tale, describing 18-year-old purple-haired Prix Chan riding the Three Mile Lift with her parents, out of the subterranean living spaces of Singapore, venturing beyond the bubble for Enlistment Day. The text was then passed from member to member, round-robin style, as the novel grew in length and complexity, until halfway through, when they realised that it made no sense, and started all over again along the lines of an actual plot.

“Everyone had their own genres,” Sarah remembers. “Lina wrote the romance parts. Mine were the ridiculous plots.” Chua supplied sections on Singlish, which is used for coded telecommunications; Yep takes credit for bits about the arts and espionage; while Yuen, the only member who’d actually done NS, tried to ensure that the portrayal of army life wasn’t too distant from the real-life experience.

“It worked for us because we were on a similar wavelength,” says Yep. Nevertheless, the process was a headache. “It’s extreme pantsing, and a lot of us are not pantsers,” she explains, referring to the writing approach of devising a plot with little or no planning, i.e. flying by the seat of one’s pants.

In the midst of this chaos, Lim issued a challenge to her fellow members of the group. In 1998, she had written a short story titled “Happiness at the End of the World”, about a woman reunited with her lost love in a wartorn, post-apocalyptic multi-ethnic slum. “Go read this story and write your own about someone, somewhere, finding happiness in a post-apocalypse Earth,” she said.

The resulting tales were published in 2009 as the first book in the AS¡FF imprint under Lim’s publishing company, Two Trees Pte Ltd. Happiness at the End of the World is credited to Happy Smiley and Friends, as it contains one story from each of the six members, plus contributions by Lim’s colleague Clarence Tan and NaNoWriMo regular Chen Ziyang. A year later, in 2010, Bubble G.U.M. appeared on shelves, the second in the AS¡FF series, continuing a theme of upbeat apocalypses. The publications were timely, Yep remembers, since everyone was buzzing about the Maya prophecy that the world would end in 2012.

Today, these books read as amateurish, but full of promise. Happiness contains several gems: Lim’s story stands out as the most textured and literary, but Yuen’s “Izanami” is also wonderfully lyrical with its vision of a reality-bending cosmic cataclysm, and Sarah’s “Dirty” is outrageously eccentric with its premise of a germaphobe saving her crush for killer robots, despite being utterly repulsed by the fact that he’s made up of organic matter.

Bubble G.U.M. is a trickier work. One can praise it as an early work of solarpunk, with its visions of sustainable urban farming (Singaporeans subsist on delights such as seaweed, mutant seabass and rabbit meat) and symbiosis (soldiers have a cooperative relationship with dolphins, even learning their language). Its worldbuilding goes deep—perhaps unsurprisingly, since six minds collaborated on its creation.

However, its level of maturity is wildly inconsistent. At first, characters are sexualised (recruits admire each other in the co-ed baths) but do not have sex. Troy, our token nerd, comes across as an annoying attempt at comic relief, spouting 20th century pop culture references that his compatriots can’t understand, and periodically yelling, “Bollicks!”, presumably because “bollocks” would be too obscene. Yet by the end of the story, characters are saying, “shit” and explicitly having sex.

It’s also surprising how flippantly the books treat the issue of cultural representation. Of the eight stories in Happiness, only one explicitly takes place in Singapore, Sarah’s “Dirty”, yet besides the mention of an address in Jurong, there’s little that makes this is an explicitly Asian story. While Bubble G.U.M. is replete with Singapore references—sambal, Singlish and the Raffles statue—almost all major characters (with the notable exception of the short, dark-skinned, nerdy Troy) are described as stunningly attractive Eurasians with improbably coloured eyes and hair. Except for a walk-on character named Khan, no-one has names of Malay or Indian provenance. It’s almost as if the novel was written for a racist Western readership who could only identify with characters of European descent—a theory that makes no sense, given the limited distribution of the work.

Members of Happy Smiley, however, are bemused by my attempts to read a deeper politics into Bubble G.U.M. “It was just a case of, let’s have fun with this, we don’t want to worry about whether it will win awards,” Yep tells me. In Sarah’s words: “This was an experiment in seeing what works.”

Changing Gears: The Steampowered Globe (2012)

In the 2000s, a new SFF genre was on the rise, popularised through franchises like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), Full Metal Alchemist (2001-10) and Girl Genius (2001-05).

This was steampunk. Happy Smiley leapt upon the trend, printing an advertisement for their forthcoming STEAMPUNK ANTHOLOGY 2011 in the back pages of Bubble G.U.M., paired with a Wikipedia definition of the term for the clueless. Like their previous collection, this would contain only stories with happy endings. Unlike its predecessor, however, it would be open to submissions from all writers resident in Singapore.

The resulting anthology was The Steampowered Globe (2012). Only Lim and Sarah are credited as editors, but other Happy Smiley members were involved in beta reading and publicity. It consists of seven stories, two by Yuen and Chua, but otherwise all by writers from outside the group, including a young Neon Yang (credited as JY Yang), with their first ever published SFF work, “Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia.” The official launch, coinciding with the NaNoWriMo TGIO (Thank Goodness It’s Over) party, was held on 31 December 2011 at the National Library’s Multipurpose Room, with steampunk fashion as the dress code.

Among the tales, my favourites include Annabeth Leow’s “Ascension”, which imagines British computer programmer Ada Lovelace helping Chinese Empress Cixi to concoct an elixir of immortality; Mint Kang’s “How the Morning Glory Grows”, which features a 19th century mecha-assisted Singaporean police force investigating a runaway growth of purple flowers; Ng Kum Hoon’s “Help! Same Angler Fish’s Been Gawking for Eight Minutes”, in which a hapless protagonist is trapped in a towkay’s underwater transport capsule; and Yang’s “Captain Bells”, in which lesbian agents in the employ of the Malayan Colonies hijack a zeppelin. (Upon writing this, I realise the transparency of my biases: I’ve named only stories with Asian settings, rather than the three in generic Western steampunk universes.)

The publication of The Steampowered Globe marked the apex of Happy Smiley’s cultural relevance. Sarah recalls the sense of surprise among contributors as they realised how many other Singaporean SFF writers existed; Yep says that this was the first book which a bookstore (the now-defunct BooksActually) approached them for stocks rather than the other way round.

The book’s official publication date of 2012 coincides with the launch of two landmark Singaporean anthologies that secured the place of speculative fiction in the literary scene: Ayam Curtain, edited by Joyce Chng and Neon Yang (credited as June Yang) and Fish Eats Lion, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg. There’s considerable overlap between the communities involved in these three projects: Yuen, Lina and Lundberg all had stories in Ayam Curtain; Chng and Yang had been regular attendees of Happy Smiley events; and I wrote one of my first SFF stories for The Steampowered Globe—“Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist”—only to have it rejected, then accepted into the pages of Fish Eats Lion. Without doubt, Singapore was now home to a SFF community, one that would only grow with time.

It’s also notable that Lim chose this year to begin distributing AS¡FF publications as e-books, granting international readers easy access to the stories. As a result, Jess Nevins published a glowing review of The Steampowered Globe on the SFF blog io9, celebrating the fact that “this is steampunk written by the descendants of colonized rather than the colonizers,” with “a consciousness of issues like colonialism and oppression which are too often lacking in Western steampunk.” Two stories—Leow’s “Ascension” and Yang’s “Captain Bells”—were subsequently reprinted in Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s international anthology Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution (2012), alongside works by famous names like Bruce Sterling and NK Jemisin.

Might we credit Happy Smiley for having kick-started Neon Yang’s global publishing career, paving the way for their place in the Hugo shortlists and Time’s “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time”? It’s a reasonable assumption, but it’s not endorsed by Yang. When asked if they feel indebted to the group, their response is: “I submitted a story to their anthology b/c it was a friend’s project and for fun… I consider my publishing career to have started after I attended Clarion West in 2013.” There is no mention of “Captain Bells” on their website, and a request I made six years ago to reprint the story was declined. It is, in their eyes, a “silly story”, deservedly forgotten.

Epilogue: Escape from Reality (2015) and after

Over the course of the early 2010s, the members of Happy Smiley worked together, communicating via email and MSN messenger, publicising their events on the new platforms of Facebook and Twitter. Eventually, however, they drifted apart. There was no drama behind the breakup; as Sarah says, “Everyone just got busy.”

There had, initially, been ambitious plans for more projects, including a sequel to Bubble G.U.M., a fantasy novel and a Singapore-based historical detective novel. These dreams were never fulfilled. However, Lim was able to push through one final project: a fantasy anthology, edited by Sarah and Yep—“Kind of, let’s do one more hurrah; let’s see what happens,” as Yep describes it. Both Singaporeans and Malaysians were eligible as contributors. Unexpectedly, happy endings were no longer a requirement.

Escape from Reality (2015) was the fourth and final publication under AS¡FF. Highlights include Chong Jay Vee’s “A Single Sword”, a playful satire of fantasy RPG tropes; Bernadette Chong’s “Aeroplanes”, with its romance between a fighter pilot princess and a magical healer; and TK Ellsworth’s “Guardians of the Zodiacs”, with its tale of war brewing between embodiments of Chinese and Western astrological signs. Strictly speaking, however, this is not a Happy Smiley book: the group’s name is mentioned nowhere in the pages, and of all six members, only Yep has a story featured.

In the years since, some members have had more prominent careers than others. Lim continued with her trajectory in history writing, following An Irish Tour of Singapore (2008) with Forgotten Names Recalled: Stories from the Singapore Cenotaph (2014) and Irish Graduates of Singapore (2022). Yep partnered with artist Elvin Ching to create the graphic novel Unstable Foundations (2018, credited as Joelyn Alexandra), and now works as an arts manager. Sarah contributed a story to the celebrated anthology Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (2021), produces videos and has found fame as Singapore’s first hijabi pro wrestler.

There are lessons, I believe, to be learned from Happy Smiley’s accomplishments. They were amateurs who were early adopters of new technological platforms and trends, such as NaNoWriMo, e-book publishing and steampunk. Without pandering to the literary establishment, they were able to cultivate a community of writers and readers that’s the direct predecessor of our own SFF scene.

As for why they’re not better remembered, I’ve already mentioned my theory regarding the early 2010s as a transitional era. But we’ve also got to consider the peculiar challenges facing a small writing collective: prone to dissolution, with individual writing styles and personalities subsumed under the branding of the group. If they’d had been led by a single figurehead—Rosemary Lim and Friends, for instance—I dare say they would have developed a more lasting following, though at the expense of egalitarian principles.

Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the Internet, Happiness at the End of the World, Bubble G.U.M. and The Steampowered Globe are still available as e-books on Amazon. As for Lim, Sarah, Yep, Chua, Lina and Yuen, all six remain friends, and as Sarah says, “Spoiler alert! We all are still writing in our own genres.”

Like her compatriots, she looks back fondly on the days when they were leading lights of the local speculative scene, heading its growth and development. Yet she has no regrets about paths not taken.

“We learned we want to have fun with whatever we do,” she tells me. “The Happy Smiley Group is about how to have fun and not to be too serious in Singapore.”

¹ Sarah and Yep disagree, claiming that membership was so egalitarian that there was no leader to speak of.
² The Seed from the Tree is a short story collection primarily composed of literary fiction, portraying encounters between people of different cultures. Nevertheless, some tales are clearly influenced by genre fiction, e.g. the crime thriller "ABC—Wu, Liu, Qi" and the ghostly yarn “The Clock Ticks”.
3 From 1992 to 1998, the Singapore Literature Prize awarded three tiers of prizes: Winner, Merit and Commendation. In 1998, no Winner was named. Daren Shiau’s Heartland and Alfian Sa’at’s Corridor received only Commendation prizes, but have since gone through multiple reprints, and are today regarded as classics of Singaporean fiction.
4 Ovidia Yu is currently primarily known as an author of crime novels such as Aunty Lee’s Delights (2013) and The Frangipani Tree Mystery (2017). At that time, this aspect of her writing career had not yet fully developed.

5 Happy Smiley. “Who Is Happy Smiley?” Bubble G.U.M. AS¡FF, 2010, p. 302.

6 Rosemary Lim. “A Note from Rosemary.” Happiness at the End of the World, by Happy Smiley and Friends. AS¡FF, 2009, p.133

7 Regarding names, Yep clarifies that, “for Bubble G.U.M., the character naming was derived from Internet naming conventions, as people who frequented forums in the early 2000s.” It should be noted, however, that multiple characters have Chinese surnames, including the protagonist Prix Chan.

8 Jess Nevins. “A Steampunk Anthology from Singapore — With No Misery Allowed.” 27 February 2012. https://gizmodo.com/5888772/a-steampunk-anthology-from-singapore--with-no-misery-allowed

9 “Short Fiction.” It’s Neon Yang. https://neonyang.com/shorts. I sought to reprint “Captain Bells” in EXHALE: An Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices (2021). Yang contributed a different story, “Red Is the Colour of Mother Dirt.”

10 Happy Smiley. “Who Is Happy Smiley?”