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

Editorial Foreword

For the third issue of the Sengkang Sci-Fi Journal, we issued a call for stories focusing on transitions. It is a belief commonly held , even among those who might agree on nothing else, that we live in transitory times. Stability seems to have slipped away both in the macroscopic sphere of global geopolitics, where the established world order appears to be collapsing with no clear replacement, and in the everyday rhythm of life, where the introduction of artificial intelligence has caused polarised debate, economic upheaval, and deep discomfort regarding the direction our technological civilisation is headed.

This discomfort is neither unjustified nor novel. The famed quote from Italian Marxist writer and philosopher Antonio Gramsci with which we opened this call, reflects this. Written after he was imprisoned following Mussolini’s rise to power , it offers a sharp rebuke regarding the Whiggish interpretations of progress and technology, and identifies that the danger of novelty lies not so much in what is novel, but rather in the human reaction to that novelty.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

– Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Science fiction as a genre requires novelty, mostly but not exclusively in the form of new technology, but also including customs, beliefs, religions, and other constructs. The selection of stories chosen for our latest issue is well suited to this task: Machine Learning by Tan Jian Ming, a satirical take that explores the possible collision between two innovations that, after years of media hype, have begun to appear; Grap Backwards by Ash Chua, which flips a traditional sociological milestone among Singaporeans on its head; and the poem Falling into a Black Hole by Ann Gra, which describes the sheer physicality of the transformation that falling into a black hole may produce.

Perhaps fittingly, we too shall be transitioning away from being the Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly (our initial goal having been perhaps a tad too ambitious) to the Sengkang Sci-Fi Journal. Regardless of our name, we will endeavour to continue publishing the very best science fiction that Singapore has to offer. We hope you enjoy the stories to come and remain subscribed to hear about our next issue as soon as possible.

Zubin Jain,
Editor-In-Chief