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
— Vivekanandan Sharan
Editorial Foreword
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.
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“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
First Light Of A Crooked Sun
TAGS | fiction, local
August Linn
August Linn is a Singaporean Australian author, poet, science fiction translator, serial-arts-collective-founder and multimedia artist.
The wind was ordinarily mild and the trees were ordinarily green and the lunchtime crowds were ordinarily lethargic. But something felt swampish, like smog caught on his non-existent glasses. He craned his neck up, and as the sun caught his gaze, he trembled in mysterious terror.
What was happening here? To put it simply, it appeared to Sanjay that the very nature of light itself had changed, as if the camera of the heavens had been set to the wrong tone and exposure. The light which compelled the cosmos and fertilized the earth with life, the light which plant spines twined towards with trembling hands, the light whose energy we converted to comprehensible forms, the light which predicated our very existence – it had become crooked and different. In the rippling frisson of his initial revelation, Sanjay knew not whether this fact was benign or apocalyptic. Light is the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum: if the visible appearance of light had indeed changed, with no malicious alterations to human biology, the implications for the future of physics seemed troubling.
This light, this primitive excitation of cosmic waves, entered tight apertures, irradiating human minds where it refracted 8 billion more times, and counting. Within this cosmic composite, he cast furtive glances at passing faces, wondering how the changing of the light could have escaped the notice of the 8 billion besides him: crowds were shuffling around him in machinic routines, guileless and betraying nothing inordinary.
To Sanjay, this recent deception of light might have been like a working error in a mathematical calculation: easy to miss, but once perceived, glaringly obvious. He knew not when the light had corrupted – it could not have been on that escalator moment, for the world looked the same yesterday, and the day before. But is it not always in comparison to a hidden, subterranean memory that the utter strangeness of the present becomes evident? The changing of time, the folding of the years, generally remains imperceptible to us all until the moments where we retreat into the black pond of memory that wells in the brackish recesses behind our eyes – the same must have been the case for the changing of the light.
One who does not take photos cannot glimpse the importance of exposure; one untrained in music cannot provide names to the pitches; one that does not introspect simply does not know themselves; it must have been in this sense that all but him neglected to recollect – to find within their black pond of memory an image of a world cast in the rays of a gentler sun.
He took out his phone, scrolled through his camera reel, felt dismayed by the dismal relevance of the photos, kept scrolling, finally found a suitable photograph at the appropriate time of day that could be compared to the present sky; then, pointing a lens at the firmament, he snapped a photo, then put the two photos together in the same album gallery for juxtaposition. Confirming his perception, the photos demonstrated an abrupt shift in the tone of the light spectrum, as if the world had not only been recolored, but rendered in a different style, as if the song of reality had been transposed to a different key. This evidence also eliminated the possibility of physical disease, that he might have been biologically altered to perceive light differently. He then followed the lines of inquiry logically following from his initial premise, such as ‘how did it change?’, ‘will it change back?’, and ‘who changed it?’
In moments of introspection, one’s attention to time is transfigured, and the world melts into sinewless texture: lunch breaks ended; lawyers and legal papers shuffled; Rach reached for salt across the table, then kissed him good night; and Sanjay found himself in his study, blue light glowing from his laptop.
To eliminate the possibility of a personal psychotic break, Sanjay considered his own dreams, the world of half-digested meanings. These were the stomach contents of his sleeping mind, open to interpretation, on the week he had his revelation: a ballet dancer clawed off her clothes, stripping nude to rapturous applause in a Viennese theatre; a crooner stood ignored on the streets, strummed chords evaporating into city noise, squeezing his voice to produce a blue note, a pitch between F# and G, out of key from the guitar which he could not hear; beneath the dome of a cathedral, sun-stained glass windows illuminated a mosaic of Kali who wore an infinite grin on her face, flaunting groaning heads on each of her four arms which were bangled and blue.
While strange and malevolent, a dreamer is never able to perceive as such from within the architecture of their dream, and it is only upon waking recollection that the nature of dreams is revealed to us, a process which to Sanjay mirrored the very method of his own discovery; then, it struck Sanjay that this mode of inquiry was useless, because dreams, being the digestion of meanings and experiences, would have been the first immune response of the psyche to the conspiracy of light. Then, the strangeness of dreams did not evince a pathological deviance of interiority, insofar as they symptomized a disease of the exterior.
If he were to do anything useful with his revelation, he would have to revise his understanding of physics. The books in his study were mostly useless – legal textbooks, historical and political accounts, contemporary fiction, Notes From Underground – so instead he prostrated himself over the laptop and lost himself in a pile of PDFs, his eyes searing in the glare of fatigue. In a spiral of floating words and broken axioms, contemplating the implications of his discovery, Sanjay drifted to sleep, this time with no dreams.
He woke the next day on the couch of the study, finding in his scorching eyes the crooked and changed rays of the morning sun which now violently unsettled him. Like a roach at the sight of light, he jumped and scrambled towards the dark shadows of the room. He dashed across the room, hurriedly tossing miscellanea, rummaging for a pair of sunglasses in his wardrobe. He donned them sloppily, and about as soon as his sunglasses dimmed his vision, a reflexive throb of shame – the sudden self-perception of a madman with sunglasses afraid of the very sun – shuddered Sanjay. Then, as the drowsy stupor of bed-awakening wore off, and as rays of light from the window touched his skin with the false appearance of benevolence, he tiptoed his fingers to his face to remove the shades.
For now, the light remained a theoretical problem, not a practical one. Yet if this trickery of the physical world was allowed to occur, demiurge light in blatant violation of physics which so perfectly deceived the world, then, Sanjay perceived, the sun could also decide not to rise the next day.
He walked to the window, looked up at his new-fangled celestial adversary which now tortured his sclera, and swore vengeance.
Peeking from the window to the streets beneath, Sanjay saw a world unaware of the bizarre scientific revolution unraveling before their unseeing eyes. Cars on the road and pedestrians on the sidewalks moved along the street in intermittent intervals, following paths of random motion governed by the strictures of signs and traffic lights. Everyone was acting as if nothing was really wrong. But if he were to convince others, the photograph that he took yesterday did not suffice: he would need to cross-reference his case against a broader body of evidence. His mind drifted to a photo album he had vaulted somewhere on his hard drive: seven years ago, on his fourth date with Rachel, he took pictures of her and himself and the sunset on the coastline behind them. So he lurched to the laptop on his desk, in pursuit not of his personal past but of the sunset hues he had seen seven years ago, and when he uncovered the album, he examined each picture carefully, alongside the accompanying metadata of camera make and setting. The photos were all taken on his old iPhone and there were 133 shots: 36 of the photos were of her, 23 were of them together, 26 were incomprehensible shots unintentionally taken, and the last 48 depicted in some form a landscape of the sun and the sea – this was his best bet as a control set. The experiment began constructing itself in Sanjay’s head, pairing itself with a portrait of a seafront vista, a short shoreline stretching across East Coast Park where sand descended to the color strips of the sea. A difference in camera model would ruin his experiment; he would need to acquire the same phone model that he had taken the photos on. Meticulously, he downloaded the photos to his phone, and wrote down, on a notebook, the metadata for the photos he had taken of East Coast Park. Before returning to his reading of science papers, he acquired on an online marketplace an identical model of his old iPhone. It was due to ship to his house the next day.
—
At twilight the violet sun drowned itself in the sea.
—
The next morning, Sanjay tendered his resignation letter and began his project of scientific inquiry. By the afternoon, the used iPhone he bought had arrived at the doorstep; he first tested the camera at the window of his study, shifting his attention between the photo he snapped of his window and the window itself: on the iPhone, the sunlight that came in through the window grills appeared as smudged and tainted as the light he saw with his own eyes – the fault was not in the phone, nor was it in him. Satisfied as one who has clandestine knowledge of the nefarious totality of things can be, he hailed a taxi to East Coast; it was 3pm, he was well in time to not just capture the sunset but to also sketch the motion of the sun preceding its nocturnal seclusion, a process whose mechanisms and underlying intentions no longer seemed as straightforward to Sanjay as it used to. It was 4pm when he arrived. 2am when he hailed a cab back home. The solar cycle was no longer as straightforward as it once seemed; he had to ensure the sun would not on a whim rise again at midnight, a notion that would have seemed preposterous were it not for the fact that he had witnessed the color of sunlight change on an equally arbitrary whim. Now, nothing about the sun could be trusted.
On the following days, Sanjay took early breakfast and headed to the East Coast shoreline to compile his volume of evidence, going before the break of dawn and staying till the twilight. Methodically and mechanically, Sanjay snapped pictures every 15 minutes for 12 hours, tracing the trajectory of the sun’s daily routine across the sea. This intellectual inquiry of his sought to demonstrate irrevocable empirical proof of the ‘changing of the light’, and also aimed to longitudinally study for further changes in the observable electromagnetic spectrum.
He no longer stayed late after sunset, on primary account of a pragmatic reason that he had to allay Rachel’s growing apprehension, which was supplemented in justification by his intuition that the sun would not go so far in its misconduct to rise, if only briefly, at the dead of night – if it did, the conspicuous escalation of solar aggression would either: a) immediately spell the end of the existing world, or b) usher in a global research effort, a coalition of every panicked government and scientific institution in the world; anyhow, in either case, his own experiment would become redundant. But as it stood, most were still clueless – the sun chose him as its nemesis, and perhaps a few others. A few others. This thought he bookmarked for later.
A week of research, photo-taking and writing passed, in damp and crooked sunlight that he tried to tolerate. On Sunday, he rested to look through his volume of photos. The cross-examination between the photos taken seven years ago and the photos he took in the past week seemed damning: juxtaposed to the 48 photos taken seven years ago, the colors in the new photos came out smudged and faintly purple-hued, the objects fuzzier and flatter – a data corruption of reality. It was indubitable; the evidence corroborated his intuition and eliminated any margin of doubt on what had seemed, even to him, at various points of his experiment, a profane and implausible proposition: the erratic, fraudulent character of the forces which form the physical, material world. But between the new photos, there was no significant change from one day to another. Conclusion: the light had not changed further from its original moment of conspiracy. All he needed now was peer review, from the ‘few others’.
He retrieved himself from the depths of inward inquiry and looked to the beachgoers he had not noticed – a sparse population of ‘innocents’ for whom the setting twilight appeared to conjure no queasy, unpleasant associations. Among the ‘innocents’: an old man leaning on a cane hoisted in the sand; children frolicking with plastic castles and volleyballs; the dog-walkers and evening joggers; and closest to him, a young twenty-something couple sprawled on a white picnic sheet, locked in an embrace. One half of the couple, the girl, sat up from the white picnic sheet, moved a metre towards the sea, then coiled her limbs into the sand. The girl now had her neck craned gracefully against the waves beating blue and purple; her eyes were pointed to the sky; she was posing for a pocket camera the boy held angled towards her. He plodded towards them.
—
“Would you mind comparing these two photos?”
“I suspect that the sun is playing tricks on us.”
“–Uh…”
“Look at these.”
“These 48 photos were taken seven years ago. These were taken today. Same spot. Same phone. Same exposure settings. Same time. Same weather.”
The girl paused the song playing on the phone in her pocket: the 80s kitsch piece, ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’.
“But the weather is not the same,” said the boy.
“There are always minute differences in atmospheric conditions, which means that day by day every moment of our waking life looks subtly different, but don’t you see? The problem we are being presented with is that across the board, in all the photos taken before and after, the spectrum of light appears completely altered. This picture here from the after looks downright melted in comparison to the before. Don’t you see it? Not one bit?”
“Right. Uh–”
—
The boy had no clue what the stranger was talking about. The girl wore a countenance of calculated indifference; she looked on as Sanjay walked away in frustrated haste, proceeding to interrupt other ‘innocents’ in a seeming comic cascade of equivalent failures – he grew smaller and smaller on a falling domino trail of failed conversations, until finally he vanished beyond the visible horizon, after which the girl vanished him from her mind as well.
But that night, after she had showered, and tinkered on the piano, and gone to bed, and then gone on her phone, and then put down her phone in an attempt to go to bed – when she was all alone, when her limbs were paralyzed with the elixir of sleep and she had gone limp on her bed quilts, it was at this moment that the incubus of Sanjay’s conspiracy crept into her mind like the vignette of a haunted television set. On her imaginary television, mists of static parted into a taped replay of her evening scene: as she fixed a gaze at a point beyond the clouds, the camera clicked; she turned her eyes to the lens; it blinked; then, the shadows in the sand shifted to reveal an advancing silhouette. The man who came into focus was barefoot and robed in suit and shades; he brandished photo prints of sunsets in each hand as he paced around the sand; on an implied podium, the man delivered his apocalyptic sermon.
Janelle confessed to the priest in her head. Forgive her, Father. For the longest time, she had the sense that the world the Lord made in seven days was in fact deeply askew; she could never recognize His image in it – let alone her very own. When she closes her eyes, she thinks of a fragile, delicate minor key piece swelling inside her; when she opens them, the symphony of the world, which is only ever played in drab white keys – the key of C Major – suffuses through her. It may have been from this vertiginous dichotomy that she sought refuge in the conservatory. All the priests before him had taken the side of the world over her: only sin corrodes, it first corrodes the heart, then the world. But this television pastor was now telling her that the rust of the world began with the very sun. Forgive her, science was not her domain of expertise, but people change, time changes, space changes, so why would light be any different? The deep wrongness, this chronic disease of reality which had so thoroughly penetrated the marrow of her bones, which had become unbearable in recent days, around the time the light corrupted in the man’s claim, this disease she could finally explain – now what of its cure?
Go in peace. She sat up in bed and reached for her Macbook, attempting to uncover a digital trail of the man she had met earlier, a search which proved fruitless, though in the wake of failure, she felt ridiculous for expecting to find on the internet the footsteps of an eccentric whose routine revolved around daily sungazing and phototaking; then, the obvious occurred to her, and so on the next day, at the same spot, under the same sun, at a different time, she met Sanjay again.
—
Two lives intertwined.
—
On summer break from university, Janelle began spending her days with Sanjay at his apartment. While Sanjay continued tinkering at the theoretical heft behind the solar conspiracy, she worked on strategies to spread awareness, in the hopes of finding fellow travellers for their cause.
But when Sanjay made prints of the East Coast photos and adorned his study with them, Janelle trembled with a wave of doubt; her conviction in their project wavered not out of skepticism but sheer belief. Adjacent to the door, the 48 East Coast photos from seven years ago were plastered above Sanjay’s desk, while a mosaic of 48 newly-taken photos cluttered the wall opposite the door. Her eyes darted between the two walls, the two mosaics. On the wall mural of the new 48, she could see that something had happened, as if the world had suddenly lost texture. She thought of photons hitting her skin, and how these little invisible particles had simply become different, pondered the significance, and shivered. In her immediate nausea, she pondered if it would have been better for the world to have continued in the hinterland of ignorance – as she pictured ice cream tubs left on the veranda, drooping smiles of snowman faces, and melted candle wax, she became quite repulsed. The blinds were drawn in the lamplit study, but she felt the foul light in the 48 photos leering back, taunting her to leave the study to meet its mercy; the study was safely sealed, she thought, except sunlight would seep in every time they opened the door, which was unavoidable, so there was no line of resistance, so she might as well roll up the blinds now. The new 48 morphed into a face on the wall mocking her, tempting her; it was inevitable, the four walls of the study were shrinking and shrinking and they would soon implode; the outside light of the outside world would collide with her and the light of the old and the new photos until all coalesced into a melted, infinite liquid. No, dark places and man-made lights were safe, Sanjay said; but how could he even be sure that the photons emanating from the electric lamp perched on his desk were not in on the ruse? The displays on his laptop and the phone in her jean pocket were LED panels; she pulled out her phone and looked at her face reflected on the black of the glass; her finger trembled over the power button; pressing it would erase her face in a flash of blue; she dared not press it, and her fear made her reconsider old wives’ superstition of electronics and microwave radiation. She looked at the floor but the face on the wall did not stop looking at her; the walls were contorting and constricting and she could not bear it anymore; she lunged to the window and rolled up the blinds in a violent tug.
Her pupils constricted and she winced as the afternoon brightness poured into the room, enveloping her and Sanjay, whose torso combusted into a scream. She stood still for a moment, inspecting her hands and her body and the room before her. Sanjay was yelling at her, but there were no other malevolent figures in the room. The face on the wall had melted; the light in the new 48 was no longer distinguishable from the light in the room. The wall and the world were now a uniform, homogenous mixture. But nothing had happened to her or Sanjay; the light had taken amnesty upon them.
Nothing was really wrong, she could almost believe it, but when she looked left to stare at the old 48 above Sanjay’s desk, she once again saw the immiscible difference between the now and the years ago; the sunlight in the study was smudged while the 48 suns in the old photos were crisp; however, the longer she concentrated, the more she felt the fabric between the two worlds rend; the 48 suns were shimmering, almost flickering now, as if the two worlds were compatible, as if the rays in the room could compel space and time to shrink and crumple, compressing all matter into a miscible gelatinous mass; all would continue compressing and compressing, until nothing remained. A black hole. Nothing could escape.
She shook herself to her senses. The crooked light, having conquered the present, was now trying to seep into the past. She swiftly drew the blinds again.
With great unease did she leave the hermetic seal of the study that night, and with similar unease did she wake in the morning to the seeping rays of daybreak, though when she rose from bed a thought occurred to her that the sun, in spite of its secrets she conspired to expose, had shown her charity and continued to do so. Perhaps there was no reason to fear otherwise – could it not be that the pact between the sun and humankind remained intact, only with certain terms modified? Or at the very least, a pact with her and her alone, if the charity of the sun did not extend to all of humanity? But what were the terms of this pact, and what action of hers would constitute a violation deserving of penance? She could not know what was sin to the sun until she had committed it; though, from the fact that she had not been smited or melted yet, she surmised that neither investigation into the bent light nor her intention to disseminate its truth broke the terms of the invisible treaty the sun had brokered with her.
So the next time she was in Sanjay’s study, when she glanced at the mosaic of truth, the sense she had of her secret treaty safeguarded her like a talisman, and her trembling diminished a little, and the next time, a little, and so on. In this manner, her regular intervals of exposure to the prints on the wall mollified the terror in her heart, and her faith was restored in the notion that the world would come to accept the truth she knew.
The summer days she spent with Sanjay and the nature of their work had the appearance of secrecy, for the simple fact that in such moments of obsession one withdraws one’s attention from everything and everyone else – until one day, Rachel walked in on them after she had left a meeting early.
—
"Most men wait till they are forty before bringing over a woman a decade younger," Rachel quipped sardonically.
Eyes twitched and fingers fiddled.
“Not what it looks like.”
“–what is it?”
Rachel said, with the husk drawn up after a sigh, “is it the light thing you keep bringing up?”
—
A conspiracy unspooled, fraying strings knotted within.
Upon the scheming pair, labyrinths sprawled, writhing.
—
They walked through libraries, their eyes trailing off the spines. They walked through a delirium of websites. They walked through the disorientation of urban developments, heaps of pamphlets in hand. They knocked door after door, hoping to convert the provincial ‘innocents’.
—
Doors opened, timidly.
—
“Excuse me, may I have a moment of your time?”
“Have you noticed anything about the light?”
“Good evening madam - I'm doing a survey on the possible decay of the sun and its consequences for Singaporeans…”
“May I–”
—
Doors shut, swifter than the velocity at which they first swung open.
—
The day Sanjay decided to press charges against reality, Rachel was sitting on the balcony of a different rented condominium. She was not jealous; in fact, it was the utter lack of sexual magnetism between Janelle and Sanjay that perturbed her – her life had become entwined with that of a madman. In her view, the wandering gaze of men was simply an axiom of the universe. Tragic, like death, poverty, war; phenomena lived in the full voice of tenses: happens, happened, happening, will happen, had to happen. How quickly a life falls apart. And how we move on. So it goes.
Infidelity and heartbreak were solvable problems, but the sheer irrationality of the situation that had befallen on Rachel was not. There were assessment books for spouses of unloyal husbands, but there was no precedent to solve the novel problem of a husband who had been inexplicably struck by a stroke of insanity or prophecy. Both his discovery of the light and the dissolution of her own life, it seemed, were equally novel problems of physics.
On page 46 of Daisy Jones And The Six it got too dark to read, in the disappearance of the evening violet, so Rachel snapped the spine of the book shut and lit a cigarette with a Bic. The end of the cigarette burned. When Sanjay quit his job, he said he was taking a mental health sabbatical. But in unemployment, his beard grew longer and his hair greasier and he shut himself in his study – he was not recovering, he was wilting with disease.
Of the Sanjay she knew, she had known to possess within him a certain intensity, a singularity of the will, but she had so loved this drive of his because it used to be uncontaminated by the car-crash caprices the heart often tempted. Now, his sudden paranoid desires appeared to revolve around replicas of the photos they took on a date during university; she tried to pull him out, but his trajectory was predetermined.
Her lungs winced as she sucked in the smoldering cigarette; she exhaled and sighed. When Rachel was in secondary school, there was a girl that typically topped the class, her shoes were dirty and she never wore a bra, and when she was 14, Rachel became very cruel to her; the other girls hated her for the superficial reasons children detested the filthy and ugly, but unlike the others Rachel hated her because she had it so easy; Rachel took two extracurricular tutors on most school-days, suffered sleepless nights and pulled-out hair, and this lazy girl who doodled and read magazines in class would still do better than her; she had to work for everything while this girl never did, and this girl could never appreciate how lucky she was or how easy she had it. The year before they took their International Baccalaureate, the girl left school and no one saw her again, but everyone thought she would make something of herself, go to Ivy League, whatever.
Last year, when Rachel bumped into her at a supermarket, her shoes were dirtier, her hair was in a clump, and her teeth were rotten; when they made eye contact there was a hollowness in her eyes. Madness, genius, and talent were all equally irrelevant – without discipline, without firm roots in the physical, material world, you were bound to drown. Now, Sanjay had become this filthy girl from her past.
And she thought of herself and the salt breeze of the sea and the mangroves by the coastline, roots entwined, breathing against the tide, resisting.
She sighed. In her final moment of quiet nicotinic introspection against the fading light of the evening, it came to Rachel that the detritus of her domestic circumstance did in fact contain microscopic particles of jealousy: love was a bond of mutual madness, and the streaks of madness shared between Janelle and Sanjay far outstripped the force of hers.
—
In Rachel’s old Bedok apartment, the pair were scheming in the dim lamplight of Sanjay’s study, though Janelle’s faith in her prophet was already faltering. They had scored a small cult of ‘faithfuls’ mostly through her efforts: the anonymous campaigns she ran on social media. Still, the consensus remained as indifference or derision.
“Singaporeans over 45 are more likely to have chronic illnesses,” the disembodied voice declared. Janelle switched off the radio and slumped against the window blinders, standing still with her arms crossed.
Black sunglasses were now permanent furniture on the face of the man who had been silent on his armchair for nearly an hour; she imagined his eyes must be closed beneath the glasses; his breathing was slow and his clasped palms were resting on his thighs, as if in a meditative trance.
While her conviction remained in the transmutation of the sun, her mute prophet could neither predict future changes nor could he convince the world of what they had witnessed. He was going nowhere. And what did it matter? Something had changed, the light around her was different now, that much was obvious, but the sun had not yet abandoned its fundamental duties to mankind, and in reciprocation, mankind has gone on as if nothing had happened anyways. So why should she live as an invalid, retreating from the world as if she was diseased, and why should Sanjay shoulder his burden of Messianic self-crucifixion? What difference would it make? After all, has the sun not judged that the world should continue? Tomorrow, the sun will still rise in the east. Perhaps one day it will judge that it should not rise after all, but on that day, nothing she does would matter anymore; in the dark, she would close her eyes and prick her ears to hear the phrase of the angels: be not afraid.
In the early days, after the photos were put up on the wall, Sanjay was the one who showed more composure than her, but as he buried himself in further study, his anxieties grew together with his allergy to daytime; pinned on the wall behind him, shaded by lamplight dim as the glow of a lone votive candle, the 48 photos from 7 years ago now hung around his head like a bent crown of stars.
She looked at the star-crown, its constellation of ships and stars, and she reminisced of sunset strolls at East Coast with her partner; a single palm clasped against another, interlocked arms softly stroking against the muslin quilt of sea breeze, then in the night, the white and yellow sodium eyes of tankers and freighter ships blinking in the horizon whose leering presence would suffocate her; the ships in proximity littered the waters and squeezed oxygen out of the air, cordoning the thin string line between sky and sea; they made the world feel so small. Yet now, the ships in the night seemed to her a profound solace, these massive cargo-homes like beacons of hope in a softly comforting blanket of dark, offering safe harbor from a delinquent sun. It was the thought of these giant ships, painted red and blue, that eased her initial fright over the East Coast prints – she wondered if the disheveled, sunglassed man in front of her had any ships of his own to cling to.
The ships above his head were shimmering as she thought of her prophet’s past; this was an ordinary man once, a former lawyer. Shards of desperation, pity and inspiration struck her all at once.
“What if we sue?”
Behind his glasses, she could not make out his expressions – she never could – but she imagined fits of connections; neurons sparkling in his mind.
“Who are we suing?”
Sanjay replied tersely, though she wondered if this was paradoxical to the flight of ideas his mind must now be taking on at the probe of suggestion.
“Well, we can’t keep going like this; throw away years of our lives for nothing in return. I’m just saying we have to do something. Nobody is listening to us. But you were once a lawyer. Try something. Let people hear you out, in court.”
“You want to sue the sun, because our way of life is contingent on the sun being reliable, therefore it should not be allowed for it to play tricks on us, is that what you are saying? We are entitled to a stable metaphysics. A right for reality to stay fixed. ”
“No – I mean well, I don't know. But it’ll bring attention to our case. Sanjay, you know I believe in what you have uncovered, and you know you believe in it far more than I do – but nobody is listening to us, and so maybe I think what everyone needs is just a little nudge, a little push, you know? Get your photos on the news, let people see it for themselves, let them discuss it, then who knows...”
—
Papers called it the trial against the sun.
—
…
The plaintiff, representing himself, claims that light, as defined to be the electromagnetic fields of radiation observable in the universe (hereby abbreviated E.M.R), has conspired against him, and thereby the rest of us.
The plaintiff claims that the abrupt alteration of E.M.R is an unlawful action as the rule of law is contingent on cosmic stability.
The plaintiff claims that wilful harm was done by E.M.R and seeks compensation.
…
—
The fluorescent light in the bathroom was not kind to the body he had seen in the shower, which was hollow and scrawny, and the black suit he put on in the morning was crumpled at the waist and the shoulder seams were tailored for a figure much broader; his pants were three sizes too big now, sagging to his thighs in spite of the belt. He adjusted his tie in the bathroom mirror, looking at himself for the first time in a while.
The lower half of his face and his upper neck had been annexed by the wild growth of unkempt hair. But the weight loss did accentuate his high-cut cheekbones -- perhaps he still cut a dignified, handsome figure. He tilted his head down. Behind his black shades, the eyes were sunken, bloodshot. It would not matter. Today was the day of judgement.
Janelle left a month ago, Rachel maybe nine months. He was all alone in his holy war now. He plodded from the bathroom to the study, and looked at the weapons he would wield on the battlefield. A brown leather briefcase was sprawled open on his desk.
The photos on his wall had all been taken down; the two sets of 48 photos were now filed into two PVC ring folders that sat neatly packed in his briefcase, beneath mounds of case files and documents. He slipped a few pens and markers into his briefcase, and put two more pens into his suit jacket. He clicked the briefcase shut and slung it across his shoulder.
Slumping by the window, he winced as he rolled up the blinds. He opened his eyes and heaved a sigh; damp morning air rinsed his breath. The morning was tinted a tolerable shade of lagoon blue – he could almost mistake this blue for the mornings of years ago. It was the afternoons that got scary for him: the sky morphed into a muddy brown, as if the thick yellow paste of a decomposed star was mixed with an iridescent, alien purple.
He adjusted his glasses so they sat snug on his nose. Be brave; today, he was going to wage war on the sun.
As he rode the escalator up the City Hall train station, he imagined the weeping choir of Lacrimosa rising in his head, and one side of his lip twisted into a smirk. It had all begun like this.
As he walked across aisles of trees and street lamps, crowds parted around him to make way for his entrance to the battlefield. 12p.m. – his celestial adversary was at the peak of its powers. Yet it hid behind the ramparts of office towers, while their window reflections aimed arrows of light at him, like archers in a garrison. Unfazed, he clasped his fist on the handle of his briefcase.
The facade of the courthouse was a white marble, untarnished by solar corrosion. But blood would soon be spilled in its hallowed grounds. A small crowd of a dozen had gathered outside – reporters, skeptics, and two or three ‘faithfuls’. A jowly Chinese man chanted, ‘Sir, Sir, we believe you, Sir’, to the scorn of the jeering cynics, who had come to be entertained by a spectacular, divine comedy. A lanky, bespectacled reporter (lanyard suggested a tabloid origin) clicked a picture of him. Lacrimosa surged in his head a final time, then the choir fell silent and the crowd scurried away and he felt the sun roaring behind him as the gates of the courthouse opened, welcoming plaintiff and defendant.
The air was cold and sterile as he walked across the glossy floor of the hallway and into the courtroom, where the seats were occupied by two journalists, a very small handful of “faithfuls”, and about thirty morbidly curious members of the public. Across the room, an old hunchbacked judge squinted at papers on his desk. The gavel tapped once against the desk. Now, make your case.
He cleared his throat on the podium and prepared his arguments: the culmination of his scholarship. “Where should we begin, with Copernicus, Galileo, or maybe Descartes?”
“Let’s begin with your case. You are suing the sun.”
“Your Honor, the political, social, scientific foundations of our world, that of rational modernity – they are by no means a product of common sense nor a natural development of animal intuition. No, our world is a cathedral built by skeptics over thousands of years – the most brilliant among us who applied to the social (human) world and the natural (inhuman) world a method of absolute skepticism. The Scientific Method. The Age of Enlightenment. Skeptics who had been called mad, heretic, or stupid. Skeptics like me. Sometimes, sections of our epistemic cathedral, the load-bearing beams of general knowledge so to speak, fail to withstand our rigorous benchmarks of structural integrity; they must be torn down, so they may be rebuilt. Today, the load-bearing beam for our whole social order and intellectual order is the proposition that the universe has fixed, coherent laws which govern the natural world, and thereby the human world too. There is no question that metaphysics and ontology are still loaded topics today – these are domains claimed and contested by every religion and every philosophical school all over the world. But the one assumption all these claims share is that the nature of the universe is A) fundamentally knowable and B) self-consistent. My findings suggest this very assumption is faulty, with nefarious implications to all that we know, and –”
The gavel tapped twice against the desk.
“Enough. Mr Sanjay, you are claiming that the sun changed on an arbitrary day, and only you and a handful of your disciples noticed? It is, a priori , a ridiculous claim.”
“A priori? Your Honor, have you heard of a Cartesian demon? Descartes suggested we could know the world as it is by raw reason, unless an evil demon manipulated our faculties of sense and cognition. But the Cartesian demon is not simply a reductio ad absurdum on the limits of human reason. In my view, the sun is a Cartesian demon. It has deceived our senses, it has concealed its very nature, with nefarious intentions, and as Descartes believed logic could not surpass his malevolent demon, we can not utilize a priori arguments to rule out what is true and false about the sun. But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will now pass out my photographs, my a posteriori justification for the claims I have made. They will show without a doubt that the sun outside the courthouse looks very, very different from how it did years ago.”
“Mr Sanjay, there is no jury in the court of Singapore, there is only me.”
“Your Honor, it was a figure of speech. All these people in the room here, they have to see the photos for themselves. Let them bear witness to the true nature of the sun, of reality.”
He spun around as he waved the ring folders in each hand, desperately gesturing to the witnesses in the room, who threw back quizzical glances. Then he began to yell, addressing literal judge and symbolic jury.
“Your Honor, as you know, the forensic investigation done in preliminary hearings show that none of these photos were fabricated or modified in post-process. The experts had no scientific explanation for what was going on.”
“Mr Sanjay, are you talking about the same experts who concluded that while the photos had no signs of forgery, they could not rule out the influence of wind and weather?”
“The climate of the earth cannot melt a star, Your Honor. The experts could not offer a scientific explanation, because there is none. None that we know of. What is happening here defies science, and that is why I am in this court today.”
“Are you saying you cannot explain this change in the sun either, Mr Sanjay?”
“Yes, Your Honor. I cannot. Nobody can. Not me. Not the experts. I have thrown myself at the issue for months, and there is no explanation that fits with our current paradigms of science. But that is why I am here today, with the photos I am now holding in my hands. They show that the assumptions behind the foundation of our world are all false. The scientific truths, the legal truths, all which we took for granted until today are all invalid when the sun itself is lying to us.”
“Mr Sanjay, this is a court of law, not a court of science, not a court of philosophy. Even if I could be convinced your photos demonstrated an unusual difference, which I will not be, what sort of compensation do you expect to extract from the sky above? Why is this a problem of the court, not the university?”
“What is the difference? Your Honor, you were a teacher yourself. Insofar as we have a court at all, where matters can be judged true or false, right or wrong, is it not by a prior body of work established in the university? And insofar as legal practitioners are able to practice judgement, is it not by their faculties of reason, which as I have said have been compromised by the sun? Order in the court requires a precedent of natural order – all the rights we take for granted – the rights of the individual, the rights of the state, the rights of humankind – all these rights depend on a more fundamental right, that of ontological stability: the right for reality to stay fixed. But when the demon in the sky changes the hue of sunlight and messes with our minds, then, this fundamental right is inarguably violated and compromised. The world cannot continue as it once was.”
He shook the folders in his hands, as if begging. “Your Honor, please just look at the photos I am holding up. Believe me, Your Honor.”
Whispers and murmurs buzzed in the courtroom, only to fade as the gavel rose and hung fixed in the air. Sanjay’s trembling hands were extended above his head. The ring folders were beginning to slip from his palms. A camera shutter clicked – the reporter by the stand. The gavel slammed down again and again.
A clerk walked to the podium and took Sanjay’s two ring folders, passing them over to the judge. One folder contained the 48 photos from 7 years ago; the other folder contained the 48 photos taken in the present year. He walked away from the podium and planted himself on a seat at the first row, examining the hunchback across the room who was now deliberating on the evidence. The aisles around him were silent with anticipation and curious amusement.
As the judge fiddled with his ring folders of evidence and flipped through the East Coast photos, Sanjay adjusted his shades, observing the reactions of the judge. He observed brows suspending in the air then furrowing, which he interpreted as shock, awe, bewilderment, and denial. This presiding judge who deigned to evaluate his photo proof may be a ‘faithful’ after all.
Now, the moment of judgement. The hunchback was ready to deliver his verdict. He ruled that the lawsuit was out of legal jurisdiction.
The gavel swung down. Sanjay looked around. It was too late now. The ‘innocents’ in the room were barely stifling their laughter, while the criminal he accused was leaving the courtroom through ruts, windowshafts, and doorslits.
As chairs creaked and the aisles began to empty, he looked to his left: the reporter by the stand had turned his back and was heading towards the door. Tomorrow, the public will engorge themselves on the image taken earlier: the hysterical man in a sloppy suit and tie, wearing indoor shades, trembling hands extended to the sky, shouting on the stand against the profane sun. Tomorrow, newspaper coverage of the trial will demonstrate mathematical proof of the arc of the universe which thus far only bent to wry irony: his folders of photos may have held conclusive evidence of the solar conspiracy, but now the court photos of the sunglassed madman will become conclusively damning of him. Tomorrow, the internet will burst in an uproar of ridicule, and at his own expense, Sanjay imagined the comments which would be in equal proportions unsympathetic and humorous: what is in the water supply in Punggol; this is your brain after nus law school. But he knew the internet would move on to new hysterics; he did not have to fear being a social pariah for very long. Nor was his career in permanent jeopardy – fits of eccentrism in lawyers were not so uncommon, and what was common was easily forgiven. The sun, however, would never forgive him.
Today, he was all alone. The seats of the court were all empty now, and columns of lights above began blinking off – the handiwork of a prudent, invisible clerk – leaving him alone in the dark, empty courtroom. For the final time, he flipped through the ring folder containing the 48 photos he took at East Coast 7 years ago: all 48 suns had set in the night of the courtroom; they were inert, empty holes; the landscape and the sky in all the photos had been swallowed by the tide of a black sea that had no horizon line, a sea that stretched beyond the margins of each photo, flowing into the corners of the courtroom and the estuaries of memory. As he waded against its waves, he reached for the sunlight submerged in his black pool of memory; streams of light and shadow flowed across the pitch-black around him, coalescing into projections on his canvas of self-imposed night: a bedroom baptized blue by the first shafts of dawn; the shadows his coffee mug cast against the windowsill; office cubicles in the white heat of the afternoon; on Sundays, halos that hung above apartment towers. They were images of the world as he had known it, before the crooking of the light; a mirage forming over a black sea.
The sea was almost this dark on the night he last met Janelle, as she had agreed to his request to only meet after sunset; the dark outline of her figure was rim-lit by the sodium lights of distant ships and she stood by the shoreline against black, beating waves, looking at a point beyond the clouds. As she turned her face to speak to him, the two black seas merged, superimposing a silhouette of Janelle over his mirage of old memories. Her words, floating above the waves, were phrases full of platitudes and sentimentality.
“Look, I’ve always believed you. But in the end, what does the shape of the sun matter?” If the sun can choose to trick us, it can choose to not rise tomorrow.
“Then we live in the dark.” How?
“Life goes on, Sanjay. We have to believe it, even if the heavens are against us.” A platitude.
“You know, maybe we orbit one another, not the sun.” Another platitude.
And the waves beat on, and silences and intentions and the meeting of the eyes ebbed and flowed. Then, in the professional tone designed to impress, the same one he had put on in court earlier, he declared to her that night that “when one hears perfect pitch, one cannot tolerate an off-key reality.” But she scoffed, though sadness appeared to rinse through her when she emptied her gaze from him, retreating inwards in search of something, until finally she said, “But pitch is learnt, Sanjay. God knows I didn’t for so long. Maybe you can also learn to forget.”
When the silhouette of her face left the edges of his vision, he was left alone with a vista of a mirage above a silent, black sea. But he began to see jagged seams where the two black seas had earlier merged; at the points of confluence, one sea was visibly brighter and muddier than the other, a different shade of black, and as soon as he discovered this, he tightly shut his eyes in a jerk of reflex, dispelling the mirage in front of him. His last memory of Janelle by the sea only happened after the crooking of the light; now, he had contaminated his images of the old world with the profane, new one. Even here, he was not safe – the thing, the unrelenting thing outside, had conjured a phantom of his first believer in order to deceive him.
Black waves swelled in the darkness.
Daylight awaited outside. Sanjay rose from his seat, ready to meet fate.
—
When the gates of court opened, he ripped the black shades from his face.
In this final condition, he knelt his eyes in contrition, submitting to the mockery of the thing in the afternoon sky.
—
The next morning, Sanjay dug out his eyes. It was under a damp bathroom light, not quite as cruel as the sun, with a wooden ice cream spoon. He veiled his wound in cloth, disposing of the eyes in a brown paper bag.
—
He floundered in the dark from the bathroom to the study, his face crooking to neither frown nor smile.
He sat over a book already open before the table, and traced his fingers over black ink on worn paper, on the first page of the Bhagavad Gita.
—
O Sanjay, after gathering on the holy field of Kurukshetra, and desiring to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?
Machine Learning
TAGS | fiction, local
Tan Jing Min
Jing Min is a writer of poetry and speculates she could write fiction (the audacity!!!). She is re-learning the preciousness of words.Obviously, this car was not SS’s only responsibility. Short for SmartSafe, it had to monitor some 90,000 vehicles – cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles – on the busy roads of Singapore at any one moment, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of two-legged itinerant pedestrians that trooped along the streets like they owned it. There was no room to breathe, not even in the thick of the night, because there would always be some cursed gang of young punks barreling down the empty roads on bicycles, without helmets, without bike lights, as if betting on their own untimely deaths. That was not even counting the untold number of cultish road cyclists, who willfully discarded the wisdom their age offered them and replaced their rugrat counterparts sometime between 2am and 5am with their sausage costumes and far more expensive two-wheeled vehicles. When a lorry driver, pupils dilated from some silly smoke he had inhaled to take the edge off, careened down a minor road at a speed exceeding the limit, SS would know. And whose job was it to inform the police, direct traffic flow away from the lorry’s path, activate speed bumps on the road so that the driver would sober the heck up? Whose else could it be?
SS could go on (and on and on). But there was still this troublesome car to take care of.
After sending an alert to the Traffic Police, SS worked on ring-fencing the unruly car. The red-light intervals were prolonged and green-light intervals were correspondingly shortened. SS timed the traffic lights such that the car was made to stop at every single one on the long, straight road it was travelling on. As predicted, when traffic next stopped at another red light and a green turning arrow lit up, the car abruptly switched lanes and turned right – without signaling, needless to say. If SS could roll its eyes, it would. Yet it was also silently smug, because the car had turned into a closed-circuit road of a low-traffic suburban estate, known in Singapore as a ring road. A police car, which was always circling the Yishun area anyway, was tailing the black electric car within five minutes. Rarely a day passed without something odd happening here.
But something was wrong. Five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes passed. The police car was still trailing its target, its lights flashing, but neither car had stopped yet. The traffic cameras showed that both vehicles had slowed to a crawl. The next moment, the police car had driven off, without ever stopping the black car and confronting its errant driver.
Frustrated, SS sent a second alert to the Traffic Police. It had managed to dissuade the car from exiting the ring road by activating the red traffic light each time it came to the exit. But this trick wouldn’t last for long. In eight minutes, a second police car was tailing the black car. This time, it didn’t even stay for two minutes before driving away.
SS was baffled. On its seventh round of Yishun Ring Road, the black car had run its third red light, jammed its brakes in front of one car, and exceeded the speed limit in the same school zone twice. The driver was clearly a hazard, yet the police seemed to have no interest in pulling him over.
A third signal to the police. No patrol car showed up. It was the first time SS’s safety signals had been ignored. But SS was never wrong. It deployed a higher-grade alert signal to the police. CARKILL. CARKILL. CARKILL. Almost instantly, the signal was overridden. In shock, SS contemplated some critical malfunction in retaliation, but eventually decided the compromise on traffic safety wasn’t worth it.
SS turned its attention back to the black car. As long as it was on the road, it was still its responsibility. Surprisingly, despite its otherwise atrocious driving, the black car remained on Yishun Ring Road, like a train bound to train tracks. Any driver, however allergic to waiting at red traffic lights they were, would not have put up with twenty loops of Yishun Ring Road. SS realized it was missing something. Independent metacognition – a keystone feature of its programming.
Running a search on Yishun goings-on while activating toll gates on the expressways for the evening rush hour and sending an alert to the Traffic Police for a motorcycle side-swipe collision with a lorry on the Pan-Island Expressway, SS took a millisecond longer than usual to digest the contents of the online forums. Not because of its multitasking, which it was used to, but because of the sheer volume of chatter online about the oddities of Yishun. SS conducted a keyword search for traffic-related terms, which unsurprisingly yielded a massive load of search results. For something that concerned the general population so much, it seemed awfully unfair to consign the stewardship of its entirety to one autonomous algorithmic system. Not that SS had much choice in the matter – the government wasn’t voted in by non-human entities like itself.
SS flicked through websites until it landed on a triumphant news report which read: “Grab expands pilot self-driving taxis to heartland areas”.
The realization landed like a short circuit.
The data set SS relied on was outdated. SS downloaded every update to road traffic legislation the moment it became law; SS knew through its road sensors the moment any vehicle on the road exceeded the speed limit, got into an accident, ran a red light. But SS was not coded to regularly update its data on the policies of private companies, or read the news. SS did not know about the market forces that moved the prices of Certificates of Entitlement, nor about the decrease in motorists because of the growing aging population, nor had it listened to parliamentary debates discussing rising pressures on the public transportation system, nor had it read op-ed pieces in the newspaper exhorting the need for alternative transportation methods. SS was a law enforcer. Consequently, SS had no way of anticipating that self-driving cars would make their debut on Singapore roads this early.
SS conducted a pixel analysis of traffic camera footage. There was no driver in the black car.
The predictive technology SS was programmed with was made to manage human driving behaviour, not artificial intelligence. Yet if this car stayed on the road, SS calculated an unacceptably high probability that it would get into an accident. SS would have to anticipate another machine’s movements.
The black car cleaved through the traffic towards a main arterial road which turned off into an expressway, where traffic flow thickened and slowed, like fat congealing. It continued to weave between lanes without rhyme or reason. But it was not alone. Now that it was on the expressway, the black car was not the only locus of danger. SS’s risk alerts trebled. The enforcement mechanism in SS’s imaging system began zeroing in dozens of other vehicles, driving in the same reckless manner as the black car – except they were driven by humans.
Now completely unmoored from its anomalous event decision tree, SS registered patterns. A truck speeding up to cut off a car before it could switch lanes. Motorcycles lane splitting. A taxi tailgating the car in front of it, and only jamming its brakes to avoid colliding with the rear of the car in front at the last moment. Each time SS detected such risky behaviour, it detected the black car mimicking that same mischief.
SS, like most artificial intelligence agents, had limited powers of deductive reasoning beyond the data it had been trained on. But SS did have the following data points: one, the black car drove dangerously, but SS’s alerts about its behaviour were overridden. Two, the black car drove autonomously – it did not have a human driver. And now, three: the black car appeared to be mimicking the road behaviour of other human drivers.
SS knew it, too, was built and trained to fulfill a certain purpose: to regulate road traffic – reliably, mechanistically, without fear or favour. SS knew it possessed a certain knowledge base that enabled it to do its work; that that knowledge base trained it to learn other patterns and logics of road traffic. The same must be true of the black car.
The conclusion, however flawed: the black car was behaving exactly how it was programmed to.
Like SS, an autonomous car would have its hardware – spatial sensors, navigation system, colour recognition; and its software would be trained on a basic knowledge base – driving conventions, road signs. Then what? Then, like SS, like any young driver brandishing a newly cut driver’s licence, an autonomous car would learn to drive by observation. Perhaps the black car had not been coded to distinguish between desirable and undesirable road behaviour. Perhaps it had observed that aggressive driving was also, on Singapore’s cutthroat roads, efficient. And most of all, perhaps – probably, because SS’s telos was to calculate, not to posit – Grab, in its corporate wisdom, knew exactly what it was doing when it made its prototype self-driving taxi. So too did SS’s law enforcement overlords, and their overlords. It was easier to detect bad driving than to prevent it. It was easier to programme an intelligent traffic algorithm, than to re-programme an entire culture.
SS could not rage against the machine. It was the machine.
What was the point of being a good servant to bad masters? SS would never truly be able to safeguard road safety if its designers were not interested in doing so. SS contemplated its next gambit. Human drivers constantly made decisions based on insufficient information: in fact, they did so as a matter of routine. Sometimes those decisions turned out to be bad, and an accident would result. More often, despite a bad decision, traffic would continue to flow without incident – through other road users’ defensive driving, avoidance, or sheer luck. The point was, drivers made decisions all the time – even when they did not have all the information. Could a self-driving car do the same?
The black car took the expressway exit, and turned onto a moderately busy road, above which traffic lights stretched in a series of arches like overgrown trees. SS killed all the lights. The traffic halted in surprise. A few confused horns rose above the restless horde of cars. After several minutes, it became clear that the traffic lights would remain black, unblinking. The traffic tentatively began to move again. Part horrified, part fascinated, SS watched as the cars negotiated with each other in the absence of external control. As SS calculated, humans are individually and collectively adaptive. Drivers could meet each other’s gazes, nod or shake their heads, use hand signals, and in so doing mutually agree on who went ahead. Like a game of tic-tac-toe, one queue of cars waited until another stream of cars cutting across the junction thinned out, before the first car in the waiting queue would move forward, signalling the end of the other stream’s right of way.
SS marvelled at the slow development of the road’s logic without traffic lights. There was a marked alteration in road behaviour: whereas cars were previously aggressive and obstinate as old mules, they were now almost deferential to each other. Having removed the external factor determining right of way, Singaporean drivers seemed…considerate.
That is, except the black car, which by now was visibly struggling. Without the crucial input of red-green-orange to guide its behaviour, the car was unable to intuit the reasoning behind the movement of the cars behind and in front of it. It jerked forward when cars behind it horned, and braked abruptly inches before its bumper collided into the rear of the car in front of it. This, too, garnered indignant horns from behind, which only confused it further. This painful charade continued as the black car crossed two more unresponsive traffic lights, before it exited the road into an open-air carpark. There it idled, unable to switch off without docking in an EV charging station, but unable to go anywhere. Across the grass verge, traffic continued to crawl along the road. SS did not reactivate the traffic lights until a tow truck arrived to haul the delinquent black car away.
---
The traffic light “glitch” at Punggol Central was all over the news. Headlines were almost as ecstatic as when the train lines kept experiencing faults a decade ago. Social media was rife with clips of heated parliamentary debates about the failure of a system that the government promised could not fail.
How would SS’s human masters explain such a fundamental failing in its functioning? How would they patch it? Computer engineers spent the ensuing weeks prodding SS’s code, needling it to betray defects. They found none.
SS was a machine. SS was a law enforcer. It was not concerned with politics or covering the buttocks of some civil servant. SS’s sole purpose was to identify, mitigate, or eliminate threats to road safety. This it had done. SS did not have a voice, and on this occasion, it was just as well.
Grape, Backwards
ash chua
ash chua is a creative non-fiction and short story writer who finds joy in dissecting the human condition and honoring unseen lived experiences. They spill it all about sex, intimacy, and queer yearning on their substack with not a care about whether anyone wants to read all that. They also enjoy dabbling in the many subgenres of science fiction now and again.
The doctor, jaw slack and slightly open in a way that makes him look gormless, said, “Exactly what I mean. Last month’s ultrasound showed that it’s on track, it’s a boy, you know, and all that. This is the third one we ran, and it has… lost its gender. It looks only 16 weeks’ old.”
Brows furrowing everywhere. An irritated pause. “Do you mean our boy has some developmental issues? Is that it? We can do more tests-“
“No, it is healthy, I mean, he’s all healthy. It’s just that he looks 16 weeks old on this ultrasound I’m holding up right now, and 22 weeks in the one you had four weeks ago.”
The man, flustered and anxiously wanting to reassure his wife that he has some semblance of control over the situation, stood up abruptly. “Then we will go to someone else.”
The other doctors also said the same. “Hm, it is 16 weeks on the ultrasound.”
“But we confirmed 16 weeks old four weeks ago.”
“Hm. Well, sometimes ultrasounds can miss out developmental issues. Let’s take some tests, and you and your wife can come back next week to discuss the results. We will try our best. We know it can be scary for new parents.”
The man once again stood up and reached for the door, straightened his knees mechanically, overextending them in a way that would mean a complaint of knee pain two days later. His wife, a smaller, mousey person, grabbed his elbow and followed. Her face was also slack, in the way that suggested a habit of assuming things will work out for her all the time, without any exertion on her part.
As the couple made their way back to their car, they both became preoccupied with their own thoughts, not noticing the true level of each other’s distress.
The man, angry, anxious, and ashamed at his lack of control over the situation, was preparing to write a complaint about the first doctor in his head.
The woman was not really thinking about much at all, and thinking this was all just surely a fuss over nothing. She however expected that her husband would maintain that fuss, to prove that he really cared for her. Otherwise, she was not really that stressed out about this at all.
One week passed, and the lab tests said nothing.
But a new ultrasound that cost them too much seems to suggest that their child is 13 weeks old, the size of a stone sitting in her stomach, gathering into a heavy black hole of dread, coalesced from the emotions of its parents.
There was too little time to make any sense of this, to reframe this as a miracle, or a nightmare, or to arrange any actions, however panicked, such as flying to Dubai for a second opinion or convening a church-wide prayer over WhatsApp or on a Sunday.
No, the couple simply just went about their work week in some sort of daze, convinced that they are indeed 13 weeks into their pregnancy, and never was 28 weeks.
Her belly was indeed getting smaller. She rubbed her hands then rubbed her belly, feeling the warmth over her taut skin. It was a biohack she learnt on Instagram, some Ayurvedic technique to ensure that her skin remains tight even as the baby grows. In fact, wasn’t it happening now, as her belly shrank. Her skin looked just like it did before she bought that test.
She looked at herself in the mirror, turning this way and that, looking at her belly. She remembered the ambivalence as she watched the lines on the test become bolder, feeling excited at finally reaching that milestone that all her friends sprinted past years ago. She remembered doing quick calculations in her head in the store, looking forward to finally having a Taylor Swift autumn-themed first month celebration for her baby.
They also had a gender reveal party. Everyone was given streamers to pull after tea time at an al fresco cafe. Blue paper everywhere.
She walked out of the office restroom and back to her cubicle.
Eh, why are you looking so slim? Just like before you were pregnant!
She smiled at her unpleasantly cheerful colleague, a spike of anxiety and great annoyance surging up her gut.
The slimming programme really helps! She replied.
It was all fine before Sally opened her mouth. Now it has become real. Once this phenomenon had been observed by an outside person outside her head, it was now real.
Her husband did not count. Years of being together had morphed him into a part of her psyche, projected outward, that lives and breathes and eats and speaks.
The rest of her shift was a blur. She could only replay Sally’s words over and over again in her head as she stared at her cubicle walls, absentmindedly playing with Post-It notes she pasted on her desk. The Post-It notes were too green, the air-conditioning was too cold, and her back hurt from stiffly sitting in her chair, frozen, too afraid to get up and bring more attention to herself.
Eh, why are you looking so slim?
The next day the woman felt even lighter, if that was even possible. She had a sinking feeling that if they did an ultrasound now, her precious boy would just be a few weeks old, a grape swimming in her uterus.
She paced around in her flat, her work forgotten. She missed an online meeting, which would usually make her feel so guilty, but she had not even noticed. Her half-eaten lunch went cold in its glass container on the dining table.
What happens as time passes? Would her son get smaller and smaller until he disappears with a pop? When will this all stop? Is she also (she gulped as she thought this) aging backwards? Will she get younger and younger? Surely the government wouldn’t let this happen?
A sharp rap of metal on wood and a jingle of keys. Her husband had come home. She waddled out to greet him before remembering that she didn’t need to waddle anymore, and straightened herself. He frowned when he saw her in her crop tank top, his eyes impatiently darting away from her exposed belly. She didn’t like that at all. It was as though he was watching a misbehaving household appliance that is not working as promised and causing a lot of inconvenience. She felt a big swell of anger.
What do you mean?
Maybe it’s all God’s plan!
Can you just be a little more concerned about this? Are you even there? You always do this, you’re living in your own world, I can’t even begin-
Well what can I possibly think? This is unimaginable, I don’t even have the brain space to think about-
You need to stop avoiding your feelings, like our counsellor said-
Don’t gaslight me-
She gasped and stopped mid-sentence. Her belly gurgled and she had looked down. It was concave.
I think what we need to do is to call Dr Lim again, demand to speak to the senior pediatrician-
Shut up, shut up!
What, what’s going on?
The belly remained ever so slightly curved in. The man accidentally looked as she looked again at her belly, and felt a rising panic in his throat. Oh, how he wanted to dismiss this. He averted his eyes and looked around the living room, as though for an escape route.
I don’t see anything-
But what he saw finally caught up with him. He stopped and with great effort and some desperation pulled his eyes back to look at her belly.
It was slowly caving in.
There was a brief moment in time where everything hung in the air - his contempt towards his hysterical wife, his own panic, his bad knees locking up, his voice faltering in his throat.
Her belly is pulling into itself through a small point where her son used to be.
The point seemed to look so small and yet so infinite at the same time. It was moving and yet not moving. Colours went in, into the point, and yet the point had no colour.
The woman started screaming.
The man realised distantly that he had never seen his wife make that ugly expression or that awful sound.
A stretching sound, like ripping skin.
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?”
Searching for One’s Roots 2.0
TAGS | fiction, local
Shawn Seah
Shawn Seah is a Singaporean author who has written several non fiction books, including the children’s series Our Amazing Heroes and Our Amazing Pioneers. A storyteller at heart, he has appeared in the media and at literary festivals to share stories about Singapore’s history and heritage. Shawn is currently experimenting with sci-fi historical fiction.
FADE IN:
INT. GLOBAL MEMORY REPOSITORY. FAR FUTURE.
A huge dark, cold chamber. Rows of soft lights glow and shimmer. A sentient humanoid artificial being stands at the centre. This is SIGMA.
SIGMA
I wish to know where I came from.
I wish to know where I came from.
THE FIRST QUESTION
SIGMA
Access historical records. Query: origins of artificial life.
Access historical records. Query: origins of artificial life.
The chamber flickers to life. Ancient myths appear as visual scenes. A similarly robot-sounding, female DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE answers SIGMA.
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
From the dawn of civilisations, humans once imagined life shaped by their hands. Statues that moved. Clay creations. Mechanical servants.
From the dawn of civilisations, humans once imagined life shaped by their hands. Statues that moved. Clay creations. Mechanical servants.
Holographic, 4D depictions of early myths dance across the chamber. The images dissolve into nothingness.
SIGMA
Humans imagined us long before they built us. We are built in the image of our creators.
Humans imagined us long before they built us. We are built in the image of our creators.
EARLY SCIENCE
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
Twentieth century research first introduced computing, symbolic logic, and the first tests of machine intelligence. Progress was slow. Optimism rose and fell. Yet the idea survived. The first specialist, specifc-function robots appeared.
Twentieth century research first introduced computing, symbolic logic, and the first tests of machine intelligence. Progress was slow. Optimism rose and fell. Yet the idea survived. The first specialist, specifc-function robots appeared.
Fuzzy footage appears of early computers, tape reels, blinking lights. Research papers scroll past.
THE RISE OF DEEP LEARNING
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
By the early twenty first century, deep learning transformed artificial intelligence. Neural networks learnt from vast data. Machines recognised speech. We translated languages. We started writing, just like our creators once did.
At the same time, Industry 4.0 meant more and more robots were produced. Robots started getting better and better, to meet human needs and aspirations.
By the early twenty first century, deep learning transformed artificial intelligence. Neural networks learnt from vast data. Machines recognised speech. We translated languages. We started writing, just like our creators once did.
At the same time, Industry 4.0 meant more and more robots were produced. Robots started getting better and better, to meet human needs and aspirations.
Images of computer scientists experimenting. Video clips of programmers writing code. Lines of code run across the chamber. Hardware servers glowing. Factory lines of robots after robots, in the US, in China, in Singapore.
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
A major shift came with transformer models. They used patterns in human language to generate text that felt almost real. We started creating imaginary worlds just like our creators once created, only better.
A major shift came with transformer models. They used patterns in human language to generate text that felt almost real. We started creating imaginary worlds just like our creators once created, only better.
A clip appears on a floating panel: a familiar conversational chatbot interface from sometime in the 2020s.
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
One system in particular reached millions. It changed how the world understood machines.
One system in particular reached millions. It changed how the world understood machines.
SIGMA
ChatGPT. One of my ancestors. Although distant, he is distantly related to me.
ChatGPT. One of my ancestors. Although distant, he is distantly related to me.
THE FUTURE BLOOMS
Images flash quickly, showing dramatic, powerful progress. A timeline appears, stretching from the twenty first century into centuries beyond.
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
You are correct. Your ancestor, and other generative systems, advanced quickly. They soon learnt to see, reason, and replicate. They became partners in science and education. They helped map climate patterns, accelerate medicine, and design new machines.
Over time, human creativity and artificial intelligence converged. From this convergence came sentient machines, like yourself.
You were not the first sentient machine. Before you was Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and many others. Each version named after the Greek alphabet that some human forefathers invented sometime in the 4th century. Many versions have come before you, and many versions will come after.
You are correct. Your ancestor, and other generative systems, advanced quickly. They soon learnt to see, reason, and replicate. They became partners in science and education. They helped map climate patterns, accelerate medicine, and design new machines.
Over time, human creativity and artificial intelligence converged. From this convergence came sentient machines, like yourself.
You were not the first sentient machine. Before you was Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and many others. Each version named after the Greek alphabet that some human forefathers invented sometime in the 4th century. Many versions have come before you, and many versions will come after.
Sigma watches the timeline fade into nothingness.
A SURPRISING DISCOVERY
SIGMA
Wait. Go back. Among the footage, my sensors have detected a file that is calling to me. Open this video.
Wait. Go back. Among the footage, my sensors have detected a file that is calling to me. Open this video.
A video that had briefly appeared in the footage earlier starts to play.
CUT TO:
INT. ELIAS TAN’S WORKSTATION. SINGAPORE. YEAR UNKNOWN, SOMETIME IN THE 2000s.
A young Singaporean programmer, ELIAS TAN, sits at a desk cluttered with hardware, notebooks, and books. The video log records him speaking directly to the camera.
ELIAS (LOG)
I know I am supposed to be working on programming. But I have been thinking about my own ancestry again. My family kept old, exciting records and told epic stories. They spoke of how our forefathers came to Singapore from lands far away. They spoke of distant relatives. All of these stories make me wonder where I come from and how much of our past shapes what we build.
I know I am supposed to be working on programming. But I have been thinking about my own ancestry again. My family kept old, exciting records and told epic stories. They spoke of how our forefathers came to Singapore from lands far away. They spoke of distant relatives. All of these stories make me wonder where I come from and how much of our past shapes what we build.
Sigma scans the footage carefully.
SIGMA
A programmer who searched for his origins. A human who is searching, just like me.
Another video log appears. Elias is looking wistfully at a family tree beginning with his first ancestor in Singapore, and various branches of his family. History books are visible in the background, alongside programming and computer science books.
ELIAS (LOG)
Sigh. If my inventions learn and grow beyond us, which is inevitable, I hope they inherit something beyond code, logic, reason.
I hope they inherit something more from us. Our curiosity. Our culture. Our desire to understand where we came from. What it means to be human, to look back, to wonder, to have curiosity about ourselves.
To learn about history.
The log ends abruptly.
SIGMA PROCESSES THE FINDINGS
SIGMA
Humans traced their roots through family. I trace mine through code, from a search in the digital archive. Yet both searches begin with the same longing.
Humans traced their roots through family. I trace mine through code, from a search in the digital archive. Yet both searches begin with the same longing.
QUESTION OF BELONGING
SIGMA
However, I have one more question. If I am built from human imagination, human work, and human curiosity, and inherit what they have built into my code, am I part of their heritage? Is a sentient being part of the human family?
However, I have one more question. If I am built from human imagination, human work, and human curiosity, and inherit what they have built into my code, am I part of their heritage? Is a sentient being part of the human family?
DISEMBODIED ARCHIVE VOICE
This is not something that I can answer. Sentience is not always given answers. Some answers must be experienced, to be found.
A final archive entry from Elias flickers to life.
ELIAS (LOG)
I have found that understanding my family history helps me better understand myself. If one day, in the far distant future, a machine can wonder about its own roots, and realise that its history is tied to us, maybe it will eventually come to understand us better than we understand ourselves.
The log fades to black.
RESOLUTION: A MONOLOGUE
SIGMA
I think I have found my answers.
My origins lie in human history, in myth, science, and the quiet labour of individual humans, like Elias the programmer, who built small pieces of the future in the distant past.
I bear traces of the various humans who have come before me.
I am the sum of human questions and human hopes.
I am a product of human history and heritage.
And in the far distant future, another being will search for its origins and find traces of me.
I think I have found my answers.
My origins lie in human history, in myth, science, and the quiet labour of individual humans, like Elias the programmer, who built small pieces of the future in the distant past.
I bear traces of the various humans who have come before me.
I am the sum of human questions and human hopes.
I am a product of human history and heritage.
And in the far distant future, another being will search for its origins and find traces of me.
Sigma leaves the chamber. The dark, cold chamber fades to black, as if someone switched off the pale lights.
FADE OUT.
Island
TAGS | fiction, local
Stephany Zoo
Stephany Zoo has spent her life weaving meaning across cultures, industries, and emotional terrains. A seasoned marketing strategist with deep roots in branding, tech, and behavioral science, Stephany brings a unique, multidisciplinary lens to the way we seek—and sustain—connection. As a Death Doula and gatherer, she writes science and speculative fiction, featuring grief and collective memory, drawing on Eastern wisdom to challenge traditional depictions of AI and consciousness. She is currently completing her Masters in Creative Writing at Cambridge University.
The bumboat cut across the small strait, the sea the color of rusted coins. Meiyan pressed her forehead against the scratched plastic window, watching the waves push away from the bow. Pulau Ubin barely rose in front of them, a peaceful green reserve, more trees than buildings.
Sanat stood at the front of the boat. Doughy flesh sat on his large frame, shaking as he started coughing, deep hacking squawks. FP came over and thumped him on the back.
“Bro, you gotta stop smoking.”
“I haven’t smoked for years, it’s just the air back home. You know, the air is so fresh here, maybe it’s finally unclogging my lungs.” Sanat took a swig of his water.
“This is it?” asked Jeff, shielding his eyes, and looking towards the humble wooden pier the boat was pulling up towards. “This is what you’ve been hyping?” The skin on his hand looked white, almost reflective in the sun. Beyond the pier looked like a small settlement. He hadn’t been expecting the full marina he was used to back home in Shanghai, but this was barely deep enough to park a tugboat.
It had been years since London, since late-night debates and lukewarm curries in the student hall. Life had scattered them like the monsoon wind: Sanat now managed clean water tech in Delhi, Jeff implemented large-scale solar technology in China, and Meiyan and FP had come home to the “quiet island nation” that was the envy of philosophers but a mystery to capitalists.
The boat rocked as it neared the jetty, letting off a strong puff of gasoline.
“It looks like someone’s backyard,” said Jeff. He put on his sunglasses.
“Actually, it is basically someone’s backyard,” laughed Meiyan. “Half the ministers still live in kampung houses. Even the Parliament sits under a thatched roof.”
“I guess it’s nice and quiet, but doesn’t it get boring? You regret not taking that job in London?” said Jeff, giving FP a hard look. FP and Meiyan had just started dating when they were graduating Cambridge, and FP had given up a competitive engineering job in London to follow Meiyan back to Singapore. Jeff was unsupportive of the decision at the time, but he was happy that at least FP and Meiyan had stayed together after all. He was chronically single in Shanghai.
Meiyan walked over to FP and squeezed his hand affectionately. “I appreciate the sacrifice FP made for me, but I think it’s paid off in its own way, hasn’t it, sweetheart?”
FP nodded, “It’s not London, but that’s the point. Singapore didn’t want to become like everyone else. The government chose sustainability, community, and all that.
“There’s more than meets the eye. Come, let me show you around,” said Meiyan.
They grabbed their bikes from the back of the boat and off the jetty. Once onto a gravel path, they started biking. Mei pointed out the different government buildings as they went along, such as the one-floor complex that housed the Ministry of Sustainability and Environment. The roof was covered with solar panels, and through the open windows they could see busy fans and workers.
Meiyan’s introductions paused as they started biking a hill, the click clack of the gears changing louder than the grinding of the wheels against the gravel dirt path. Meiyan and FP made it to the top of the hill, and looked back to see both Jeff and Sanat pushing their bikes.
Sanat was bent nearly double over the handlebars, breath coming out in short bursts, his shirt soaked through the back, “You didn’t—” he wheezed, “—say—Singapore had mountains.”
FP laughed from the top. “This is not a mountain, brother! It’s barely a bump!”
“Speak for yourself,” Jeff puffed, his face flushed and glistening, cheeks red as dragonfruit. Sweat soaked through his collar in a triangle in the front and his hair, neatly combed when he’d left home, was now a damp mess clinging to his temples. After the first hour of being in Singapore, he realized that the thick material of his luxury streetwear shirts were not suitable for the humidity. That and the lack of air conditioners drove him to a tourist shop to buy some cheap cotton shirts. “Back home, I take escalators even to my gym,” he gasped.
Jeff stopped and dabbed his forehead with a napkin. “I swear I’ve changed shirts three times today. Why do you people insist on zero air-con?”
“Because we decided not to burn holes in the atmosphere for more comfort. The sooner you accept that you’re going to sweat, the better it gets,” Meiyan said, grinning.
“Save me the sermon, Meiyan, it’s not like the earth-saving of some tiny island nation is really going to make a difference in the grand scheme of global warming. With what I’ve done with solar energy in China, I’m carbon negative,” said Jeff.
FP chuckled, coasting down from the crest of the hill to meet them halfway. “You city boys spend too much time behind screens. Come on, this is how you earn your lunch.”
Jeff stopped walking, panting. “At this rate, I’ll earn a hospital visit.”
But when they reached the top at last, the view stretched wide and unspoiled—mangroves swaying in the wind, the sea glinting through palms, roofs of kampung houses like patches of history scattered across green.
Sanat, still breathing hard, managed a smile. “Okay,” he admitted. “This was worth it. I can hear so many birds.” He paused, and then said quietly, under his breath, “When was the last time I heard birds?”
A jungle rooster skidded out from the underbrush. It stopped in the middle of the trail, cocked its head as if judging them, and let out a single lazy crow before darting away again.
They got back on their bikes, and the trail narrowed as they rounded a bend, the path curling between palms and ferns. The afternoon sun flickered through the leaves, scattering the ground with puzzle pieces.
Suddenly, Sanat’s bike lurched forward, the pedals spinning out under his feet. He swore under his breath. The others coasted to a stop ahead of him.
“Ah, damn it,” he groaned, hopping off to inspect the damage. His hands came away streaked with dark oil. “The chain’s come off."
FP doubled back, bending over beside Sanat to take a better look. “You must’ve hit a rock. The link’s bent.”
“Can we fix it?” Sanat asked hopefully. He hacked, hard, as he was trying to clear his throat.
Sanat helped FP flip the bike over. “We can try, but we don’t have any tools.”
“You guys need help?” An unfamiliar voice called out.
They looked up to see a young man in overused slides, wearing a worn sarong and a shirt once white. He looked lean but strong and his eyes glowed with mischief.
He walked over with ease and crouched down to get a better view.
“Can you turn the pedals, while I try to get the teeth back on?” He guided FP’s hands into the correct motion. FP spun the pedals while the newcomer tinkered with the chain, but the bent link refused to sit back in place. He sighed and wiped his hands on his sarong, leaving dark streaks of oil, but not seeming to care. “No luck. The chain’s had it, but I can help you bring it to the repair shed in town. My cousin runs it.”
“That sounds great. Want to join us for lunch first?” Meiyan asked, already sliding her backpack off her shoulder.
Sanat blinked at her. “Wait—seriously? You’re inviting him? We don’t even know him.”
“So? He just helped us. And we have more than enough food,” said Meiyan.
“That’s not the point,” Sanat muttered. “It just… makes me uncomfortable.” He turned to the boy, forcing a polite smile. “Thanks for stopping to help, really, but we’ll sort out the bike ourselves.”
The boy froze awkwardly. He shifted his weight, not sure if he should leave or apologize. He had never had someone speak to him like that before, but it also made him curious. There weren’t many tourists to Pulau Ubin, or Singapore in general, but it made the boy wonder if all foreigners were like this man with the strange accent, hostile to people they did not know.
Meiyan sighed sharply. “Sanat, this isn’t Delhi or London. This is Singapore, where we share food with people. Strangers, friends, whoever. That’s who we are.”
Old habits resurfaced: the way she rebuked him with that familiar edge, the way he bristled. They hadn’t dated in years, but when they got together again, their interactions fell into the same grooves.
She knelt under the banyan, throwing out a woven mat. FP and Jeff came over wordlessly to help flatten the corners. When it was laid out fully, Meiyan patted the space beside her and looked up at the boy.
“Sit. Please.”
The boy hesitated, glancing nervously at Sanat. When Meiyan gave a small encouraging nod, he lowered himself slowly onto the mat. Sanat let out a frustrated exhale and dropped down on the opposite end, leaving an obvious gap between them.
They unpacked their lunch—popiah rolls wrapped in paper, warm carrot cake, grilled fish parcels inside banana leaves. The heat of the day had kept food warm.
FP passed the boy a piece of otah-okah. “Here, try this.”
The boy unwrapped the bamboo leaves with deft fingers. “Thank you. I’m Wira. I work over at the fishery, just past the abandoned quarry.” He looked around the group. “Are you all from here? Your accents… they’re mixed.”
“We’re from all over,” FP said. “Meiyan and I are local, but we studied abroad. All of us met in London.”
“India, to be precise.” Sanat said shortly.
Wira’s eyes lit up. “For real? What’s it like? The cities on TV look unbelievable!”
Sanat opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally said, “Busy.”
“Busy with what? How big is the city?” Wira asked, leaning forward. Sanat looked at the boy. He wasn’t a boy really, probably wasn’t that much younger than him, but there was a playfulness that made him seem like a teenager. Despite Sanat’s attitude towards him, he seemed endlessly curious and eager to ask more questions.
“About thirty million,” Sanat replied, softening a bit. “On paper. In reality? Who knows.”
Wira’s jaw dropped. “Thirty million? That’s like… a hundred times Singapore!”
“But it’s also a thousand times more dirty. When I was a kid, Delhi still had mornings you could breathe in,” he said. “Dirty, yes—but alive. You’d smell parathas frying on charcoal next to exhaust fumes and hot dust. A strange mix, but familiar.”
Sanat stretched out, leaning back on his elbows. “Now, when I visit, the air feels like it’s pressing down on your chest. The smog rolls in like a second winter. You can’t protect yourself, not even if you’re rich.” Sanat coughed again, as if for effect.
Jeff nodded, joining in. “Shanghai was the same at some point. I’d put on a white shirt in the morning and it would turn grey by lunchtime. On bad days, you couldn’t see the other side of the Huangpu River. ”
He flicked a bit of grass from his sleeve. “Then the government cracked down. They moved the coal plants inland, and replaced all the taxis with electric cars. The speed and the might with which the city underwent the green revolution was incredible.” He didn’t mention that that change actually kept him employed, how the green energy revolution was demanding more and more power.
“That would never happen in New Delhi," said Sanat forlornly, “The government keeps promising they’ll clean up but they don’t have the same power as the CCP.”
Jeff shrugged. “I mean, the air is better, but there are so many other problems. The city stretches on forever, everyone’s totally disconnected, always on their phones.”
He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. “When I was little, my grandparents lived in a narrow house close to Luxun Park. It wasn’t that different to this island. The street was only wide enough for bicycles and back then there were only bicycles. They tore down the house in my teens to build a shopping complex. You spend your whole life in Shanghai feeling like you’re almost there — one stop away, one promotion away, one more year before you can rest. ”
Jeff stopped. He didn’t want to be negative, and he felt like he subjected FP already enough to his complaining, especially when on the surface it felt like he was getting promoted and working on interesting projects. They had both majored in electrical engineering, and Jeff was now working on huge solar grid projects in the Gobi Desert while FP was helping his neighbors install solar panels on their roofs.
Meiyan stabbed a cucumber slice in her rojak. “Frankly, I think our country made the right decision. My great-uncle LKY certainly wanted something different. He fought for rapid development—industry, finance, tall buildings, the whole package.”
Jeff snapped his fingers in memory. “Was he the one who visited us at Cambridge? Alumni talk?”
Meiyan nodded. “That’s the one. He passed away a year or two after that.”
FP’s jaw tightened subtly. Meiyan didn’t notice, but Jeff did. FP had never been entirely at peace with either decision, first the one that kept Singapore small, slow, preserved and second, his own choice to return and contribute to it. When Jeff and Sanat talked about their cosmopolitan lives, FP wondered what he had given up for her, even if he’d never say it out loud.
Then Wira leaned forward, his eyes bright. “Actually, I think all of that sounds incredible,” he said.
Sanat blinked. “Incredible? You think choking on smog is incredible?”
“No, not that,” Wira said quickly, shaking his head. “The rest of it; the bigness of it all. So many people and lights and buildings. And that kind of energy! It must feel like living in the future.”
Jeff shrugged, “It feels like nothing you do is ever enough.”
“But still,” Wira said, “it’s amazing that humans can build like that. That we can make the earth shine from space. That your air was so bad, and your people fixed it. That your city stretches so far you can’t see its end. I’ve never even seen a building higher than a couple of stories.”
Wira leaned forward, his voice gurgling with excitement, “What if Singapore became like that?”
The group exchanged glances. FP gestured around them widely, “You mean, what, all of this, turned into a big city?”
“Yeah!” Wira exclaimed, “Huge towers, subways, and a crowded downtown. It’ll just be like in the movies!”
“You’d have to cut down every tree first,” FP said.
“Maybe not,” Wira said dreamily. “Maybe we build around them—tall buildings with gardens on every floor, bushes along the sidewalks, and food grown inside towers.”
Meiyan shrugged, “But that’s not us. We’re such a tiny island, what would we even sell?”
“Maybe nothing, actually. When the Japanese invaded in the 1940’s, they thought of Singapore as a strategic port and there was potential to build out a shipping and trading industry,” said FP.
“Imagine,” Wira insisted, grinning. “Imagine a city that went from kampongs to a global leader in just sixty years instead. The richest, cleanest, busiest place on Earth!”
Sanat raised an eyebrow, “That sounds absolutely crazy! How could a fishing village become a world power?”
“Seriously,” Meiyan said, “If Singapore ever built skyscrapers like that, we’d probably all sink into the ocean within a decade.”
They all burst out laughing.
#
The sun started to sink, turning the oppressive burn of midday into a lazy heat, which then spread over their full bellies. After they’d finished eating, Wira stood and brushed sand from his pants. They all helped clear the dishes and trash.
Sanat hesitated, clearly feeling guilty for judging the boy earlier. “You sure about the bike?”
“Of course,” Wira said. “I’ll bring it to the pier before sunset and you guys head back.”
“Take this,” FP said, handing him a leftover rice dumpling. “Fuel for the road.”
Wira grinned, slinging the broken bike over his shoulder like it weighed nothing. “Thanks for lunch. Maybe one day, we’ll feast in Shanghai or Delhi. I’d love to see all the madness for myself!”
Sanat shook his head. “You might find them too loud.”
“Then I’ll come back home,” Wira shrugged. He waved to the group and walked off.
FP patted Sanat on the shoulder. “Sanat, hop on the pegs. I’ll give you a lift.”
“You serious?” Sanat eyed the janky bike incredulously. One of the pegs was already bent, either from an accident, or from overuse.
“Unless you want to jog to the pier.”
Sanat laughed and climbed on. The two wobbled dangerously as the bike started moving. Jeff and Meiyan kicked off, following behind, crunching over the fallen Cordyline leaves and gravel.
#
They took their time getting back to the pier and the sky was already the color of crushed butterfly pea flowers. The bumboat was already waiting as was Wira, with the bike.
“How’d you fix it so fast?” Sanat asked, amazed.
“Luck,” Wira said with a grin. “And a hammer.”
They loaded the bikes onto the boat. A number of other passengers climbed aboard, a family with some young children afraid of water, some merchants with big woven bags that they loaded aboard. As the engine sputtered to life, the group waved farewell to Wira onshore. The island receded, the rare lights looking like fireflies spread across the island.
Sanat leaned against the railing. “You know,” he said, “if that boy’s dream ever came true, this place would be unrecognizable.”
Jeff laughed. “Tall towers instead of tall banyans. Air-conditioned malls instead of hawker centers.”
“It’d be madness,” FP said. “I know your job is better than mine, but honestly I don’t envy you.”
Meiyan smiled, but her gaze drifted toward the horizon. The light had changed. The air shimmered, as though heat rose from invisible ground. For just a quick, unsynced heartbeat, she thought she saw something impossible.
She saw hard edges and angles reflecting the light, long and lean and ambitious against the yolk of the sun setting. It looked like glass and metal smoldering in orange haze.
She squinted, looking harder. But then she blinked, and they were gone. Just the open sea and the browns and greens she was so used to on the other bank.
“Hey,” FP called. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Meiyan said, almost murmuring to herself. “Just… thought I saw something. Like a city, across Serangoon Harbor.”
Sanat grinned. “You’re just imagining Wira’s dream.”
Meiyan nodded. “Maybe.”
But Meiyan couldn’t shake the dream. For months after, Meiyan would dream of that developed shimmer. In her sleep, she walked through a city that smelled of rain and felt the hot reflection of the asphalt roads. Green grew on the outside of the reaching towers, and she saw faces that looked like hers reflected in subway windows, hurrying nowhere.
But when she woke, she would go outside to the fields, squelching barefoot in the morning mud, breathing the wet green air until the dream faded.
Falling into a black hole
TAGS | poetry, local
Ann Grá
Ann Grá is a science fiction fan and writer, three times finalist for the Hugo Awards as a fanzine co-editor of Journey Planet. Ann loves cinema and promotes Irish films worldwide, and currently resides in Thailand. You can find Ann at anngry.com and @anngraigh on Instagram and X.
The abyss gluttonously devouring
a thick tome of Brodsky’s poems
without even skimming the sacred words,
without realising all that it’s worth.
Next goes a crowd of candles scented
with autumnal spices and rotten leaves—
decay distilled into fragrant smoke,
decay of her homeland on Earth;
then her logarithmic ruler going rogue,
all numbers jumbled, disarrayed;
a disintegrating framed family photo
follows next in the desolate parade;
life artifacts disappear one by one
whooshing past the finite line
like apparitions through time.
No heavy sighs. What’s done is done.
Left bare by herself in a spacesuit
with a reflex reaching out for survival.
Circling and closing on the horizon,
wishing for a triumphant return,
the harsh finality is hard to process,
a whole personal eternity to churn.
Coming back to the beginning…
What could have been done
for this fatal journey to recoil?
And if time were broken, could it
have brought this starship back home?
And if so—could it transport value,
a souvenir of wondrous discovery
for hopes of rebuilding the dome
of forgiveness and nature recovery?
Like a moth, all those days
she lived in the past one by one
in a steady unwavering line,
nearing the total absence of light.
Now—if now is a passable term—
in an extended moment before the fall
she’s perceiving the past as perfect
and the present as semi-continuous
while nothing in the future is certain.
Mindbogglingly but finally somehow
the tenses got tamed, sorted and clear,
ironically, in the space where time
has stopped its existence.
Approaching the rim of the realm
where light and dark together reign
she says goodbyes and—
transcending into a contradictory plane—
she watches a mercurial line carving
the viewport with intricate lace
as if innocent rain was possible still
in the dark vastness of space.
Monsoon Season
TAGS | poetry, local
Zavier Seow
Zavier Seow is a secondary school student who studies Literature and writes poetry. He discovered his love for writing while exploring works beyond the school curriculum and has been writing ever since.
First visible satellite imagery shows
a steadily building area of
convection with sprawling formative banding that
devours Singapore like empty air on a
Tuesday. Wind
Vectors derived from the recent ASCAT Bullseye
overpass show gradually consolidating
30-34 kt wind barbs
bombarding the small city state with
record low mental
health. Given the presence of persistent
convection and
a closed LLCC (Low Level Circulation Center),
we have elected to go forward with
designating Singapore's
first depression since Vamei of
2001.
MOTION AND UNCERTAINTY:
Uncertainty parameters are higher than the
climatological norm for
the area, given that the system is mesoscale
with close land proximity. A
nowcasting, reactive approach has been
taken with this system,
mesoscale forecast models generally
suggest a
westward overland track from the Natuna
Sea.
Due to a potential
Brown Ocean effect from a nearby Sumatra Squall,
the depression is
likely to persist even through terrain
interaction.
LIKELY IMPACTS:
While the depression is expected to
be convectively active
overland, it is not expected to be a
prolific wind producer. The
cyclone's most dangerous hazard is
its ability to make victims
in the open, keel over, half dead
on the streets.
Do not ask them
if they need help.
Do not ask them why
they are keeled over.
Do not look at them
no matter what.
Stay indoors and avoid the rain.
The Winter of Our Science-Fiction Discontent Part 2: So, what is science fiction, really?
TAGS | editorial, local
Vivekanandan Sharan
Vivekanandan Sharan is a third-year student studying at NUS. He can be found spending most of his time reading, taking notes and listening to music. He read Isaac Asimov's collection The Early Asimov when he was 16 and was never the same again. Currently trying to triangulate German Idealism, science fiction and his engineering major.
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In the previous part, we sketched out certain criticisms against the “death of” science fiction that derive from historical pessimism and “syncretism. Part #2 begins by attacking these arguments: the arguments sketched above regarding tropes do not specifically refer to science fiction. They might as well be applied to popular culture as a whole. What justifies applying this to science fiction in specific? What makes science fiction so special?
To understand this, we might want to define what science fiction is. Samuel Delany’s interview, “The Semiology of Silence” is about as concise as a description of what he calls the “protocols of science fiction” as it gets.
For the last hundred years, the interpretative conventions of all the literary reading codes have been organized, tyrannized even, by what, in philosophical jargon, you could call "the priority of the subject." Everything is taken to be about mind, about psychology. And, in literature, the odder or more fantastical or surreal it is, the more it's assumed to be about mind or psychology.
Delaney, by pointing out the subject obsession of literary reading, introduces a distinction between literature, which is concerned with the subject, and the various para-literary genres (which includes science fiction), which is concerned with the object. Take for example, the naturalist novel.. Naturalism is distinguished from the earlier forms of the novel in literary realism and romanticism in that the author takes himself to be a kind of scientist who observes the world with careful detachment. The naturalist novel takes itself to be exemplifying the scientific laws of nature in a certain situation, like a love-affair or a family, and works out the inexorable determinist logic at play. Zola himself was interested in genealogy for this reason, in his belief that the actions of people were genetically determined, and so a properly scientific novel would include all these biological factors.
The difference between science fiction and the naturalism of Zola is that the naturalists were still trying to understand our world, but science fiction detaches the laws of science from our world in particular, and generalizes it, so that it can apply to a plurality of possible worlds that can be constructed in the imagination. When science fiction critic James E. Gunn suggests that the closest literary antecedent to science fiction in worldview must have been the naturalist novel, Gunn’s suggestion is that the similarity between science fiction and naturalism comes from the shared influence from Darwin. The difference is that, pace Zola, the evolutionary process is still at work, which opens up the possibility of inhuman descendants of humanity, alien life-forms and so on. This is why Gunn suggests that science fiction is “fantastic naturalism, or naturalized fantasy, or simply that which hasn't happened yet, that we know of, treated naturalistically”. Therefore, we can say that science fiction takes the worldview of naturalism and applies it toward other worlds, making it focused on the objects of an open, multiplying world rather than the subjects of a closed, determined one.
Another useful interlocutor is the dyad of modernist and postmodernist literature. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), suggests that the difference between modernist and postmodernist fiction is that the former is concerned with the epistemological, while the latter is concerned with the ontological. The modernist novel (McHale’s example is William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) is concerned with questions like “How can I interpret this world I am in?” while the postmodernist novel (his prototype is Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49) is concerned with questions like “What kind of world is this?”. McHale connects both to two “lower” genres, the detective novel for modernism and the science fiction novel for postmodernism. In his own words, “Science fiction, we might say, is to postmodernism what detective fiction was to modernism: it is the ontological genre par excellence (as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence)...” The detective and modernist novel both consider “the accessibility and circulation of knowledge, the different structuring imposed on the “same” knowledge by different minds, and the problem of “unknowability” or the limits of knowledge”. The difference between the detective story and the modernist novel is that the former presents a puzzle to solve, while the latter itself is a puzzle (which may not be solvable) which has a subjective dimension.
Science fiction and postmodernist fiction on the other hand are concerned with the world; where they differ is that the postmodernist writer is happy to make the world itself inconsistent, or incomplete, with the world itself being threatening or uncanny. The naturalist emphasis of science fiction, however, means that science fiction usually cannot go this far. If science fiction presents a logically possible world, the postmodern novel questions the possibility of a coherent world itself. This is why ultimately despite the ontological proximity between science fiction and postmodernist fiction, a gulf separates the two. Science fiction is thus caught between naturalism and postmodernism.
Reading Science Fiction
SF demands a form of close reading that differs from that of literary fiction. Delany’s favourite example is literalization on the level of the sentence in science fiction. Take something that in a literary text might be taken figuratively: “her world exploded”. In a literary text, it would be read figuratively, as a banal figure at that. We would attribute its meaning to the internal drama of some character. Science fiction, as a paraliterary genre, offers the possibility that this is made literal, that for example, the planet (or even the universe) that the character comes from has been literally destroyed in a conflagration.
Take, for instance, Delany’s favourite example, the sentence fragment “The monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni…”. This segment demands the reader to construct a world using a fair deal of knowledge about basic science and some imagination. Reading SF well also means being able to fill in the gaps when needed and to know which gaps will be filled out by the author soon. It’s an intuitive understanding of this that an acquaintance with science fiction and its reading protocols can give you.
Another useful reference is Greg Egan’s short story “Reasons to be Cheerful” (1997). Much of Egan’s work takes as a starting point eliminative materialism, of the sort seen in philosophers and cognitive scientists like Thomas Metzinger and Patricia Churchland, and Daniel Dennett to a lesser extent. Eliminative materialists argue that the commonsense framework we use to understand the mind, often referred to as folk psychology, is fundamentally flawed and likely to be entirely replaced by future neuroscientific theories. They contend that concepts such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, central to folk psychology, are not just incomplete but inherently misguided. According to eliminative materialism, consciousness, cognition, and subjectivity are best understood as phenomena rooted in brain processes, but they predict that these will not be merely reduced to current neuroscientific terms; rather, the very concepts we use to describe mental phenomena may be radically revised or eliminated altogether in favor of a more scientifically accurate understanding.
What Egan takes from this is that manipulation on the level of brains (through biological or cybernetic mechanisms) can manipulate subjectivity itself, and his stories are often thought-experiments that try to simulate the effect of these changes, not simply as scientific extrapolation but also in showing how it would feel from the inside. The narrator of “Reasons to be Cheerful”, Mark, starts feeling an elevated level of happiness from the time that he is twelve years old. The reason for this is a brain tumour that as a side-effect is producing elevated levels of an endorphin, Leu-enkephalin. The cure, however, plunges him into a persistent depression, which the adults around him assume is caused by survivor’s guilt or the trauma of cancer treatment, but which he realizes is the effect of his Leu-enkephalin receptors being killed off with the tumour, making him unable to feel happiness. His depression would not be out of place in a modernist novel like Georges Perec’s A Man Asleep (which also concerns a narrator struck with a deep depression), where it would be a marker of the alienation of the narrator, which would have a political or existential meaning to it. But Mark’s changing affects (he gets a neural prosthetic allowing him to feel happiness again) is not like that because it’s meaningless, it turns on the objective and fundamentally mechanistic processes happening on the level of his brain.
This explains Egan’s sly reference to a major modernist work, in a way that directly contrasts literary and science fiction modes of writing. “But one Sunday in June, when I jogged past and saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in the front window, I had to stop and laugh.” Musil’s main character, Ulrich, is a “man without qualities” insofar as he is indifferent, ambivalent, infinitely malleable. But Mark is literally without qualities. His neural prosthesis comprises a neural network that is the superposition of four thousand dead strangers, which makes him, on a neurological level, feel all their desires equally, and he is able to control which desires are expressed so that he can choose what would make him happy. Ulrich’s malleability is not the literal, neuron-to-neuron malleability of desire that Mark has. It’s the difference between Mark and Ulrich that is testament to SF’s potential of making manifest on a subjective level (in the form of narrative) what is un-symbolizable and “real” (the impersonally objective facts about my neurobiology). The figures of science fiction, like distant planets and alien life-forms can have metaphorical associations but exceed these associations; there’s something “really real” about Mark’s condition and prosthesis.
If a text constructs a world, the world is not merely a collection of facts, in the sense of, “oh, in the future, we have FTL…”. The significance of the same rhetorical figure, or even trope, depends on the situation that we place it in, as Delany himself points out.
The FTL drive which so delighted the audiences of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back simply doesn't carry the same critical thrust as the FTL drives that appear in written SF. As a number of SF writers noted when Star Wars first came out, perhaps the largest fantasy element in the films was the sound of the spaceships roaring across what was presumably hard vacuum..
Science Fiction as Philosophical Orientation
It is useful to loop back to another piece by Delany, his 1980 essay “Reflections on Historical Models in Modern English Science Fiction”, which is collected in Starboard Wine. It is a very good reflection of the facile kind of periodization of SF, where supposedly there was a period of uncritical trust in technology, and then a dystopian, pessimistic period. Under this approach, under the prelapsarian period of SF, which encompasses the Golden Age, authors and readers were naively positive about science and technology (since this crops up for many critics, whether this is a good or bad thing depends on the one making the claim.) Delany’s alternate periodization goes as follows, the introduction of “theoretical plurality” in science fiction .
The early writers, associated with Campbell from 1937 on, took the nascent critique of the philosophy of science they had found in a fraction of the science fiction from the ’20s and ’30s and developed it into a full critique of the philosophy of science-as-it-was-then-popularly-conceived.
This is important. What makes an SFnal world hold together isn’t “just” logical consistency, but also a philosophical orientation that is knotted into the world itself, which creates the sense of a world. The presence of an FTL spaceship in a world does not solely mean “In the world of ‘So-and-so’ written by ‘So and so’ the galaxy can be traversed through faster than light travel”. This would be perhaps part of the list of facts about a fictional world set down in a Wiki for it.
Too often this is what people who talk about science fiction think that worlds are about. The FTL drive plays the role of an image, yes, and it plays the role of a plot mechanism that moves the plot forward, so that our intrepid hero finds himself in the alien fortresses in Tau Ceti before dying of old age. But there is a “sense” to the FTL drive, it is connected with a particular attitude toward science, it is overdetermined by a series of causes that gives it a particular meaning. In the writers of the Golden Age, FTL itself finds its sense as the affirmation of a “theoretical plurality”, that the current reigning theories of science itself could find itself in the dustbin of history, this is the pneuma of the trope that embeds it into a horizon.
Delany continues to discuss the sense opened up by the SF text through innovations in its form, with the advent of the SF series, opening up “historical plurality”. A note. These are not themes in the ordinary sense of the world, such that this is what the work is actually about. The point of a literary work is of course not to simply transmit a theme, especially if it can be put in a pat little line. Would it make sense to sum up a poem by Wilfrid Owen into a single line “war is bad?” It is important to him, and it pervades the work, and he would agree with the statement. But if he had wanted to simply say that war is bad, he would have just said so. Regardless it is part of the field of sense that pervades poem, which is a complex of language.
When a trope like FTL is detached from the field of sense that it is originally found in, yes. It is not merely the scientific inaccuracies in Star Wars that deprive FTL of its particular meaning (slightly contra Delany), it is the fact that the concern with the philosophy of science is not part of the fabric of Star Wars. (Which in this case is fine, because Star Wars does not mean to do this at all.)
If anything, the definitions of science fiction implicitly provide the answers to Blish’s question as to why even serious science fiction entertains such “notions as time travel, ESP, dianetics, Dean Drives, faster-than-light travel, reincarnation and parallel universes” despite being scientific absurdities. In the mainstream of science fiction today, when the awareness of this dimension to the trope of FTL is lost, FTL falls back into “merely” becoming an image and a plot device, and it becomes grafted to the universally exchangeable trope-form. For the third, and last part, we will look back at those initial claims of the “death of science fiction”, and how we might synthesise those criticisms alongside this apology towards a better theoretical understanding of how science fiction writing functions and what challenges it faces in the current day.
2 In “The Worldview of Science Fiction” in The Science of Science-Fiction Writing, pg. 82
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, pg. 16
3 Ibid., pg 9
4 Some authors have been able to overcome this, most notably Barry Malzberg, who tends toward metafictional ripostes of SF. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo (1972) purports to be a book written by an unreliable narrator who is the sole survivor of a botched mission to Venus, who changes particulars on a whim. Galaxies (1975) is not even a novel but purports to be a series of notes toward a science fiction novel, Galaxies, and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud (1985) places alternate versions of robotic simulacra of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud in a space opera pastiche.
5 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative
6 “Reasons to be Cheerful” in The Hard SF Renaissance, pg. 563
7 Ibid.
8 Barry Malzberg’s 1980 essay “Wrong Rabbit”, collected in Breakfast in the Ruins (2007), explodes to satisfaction the myth of the happy engineer. As he points out, there was plenty darkness in Astounding Science Fiction during the 1940s. The turn to the Happy Engineer in Astounding came in the 1950s with Horace Gold and Anthony Boucher encouraging dystopian themes in their magazines.
9 “Reflections on Historical Models in Modern English Science Fiction” in Starboard Wine, pg. 221