Editorial Team
Zubin Jain Editor-In-Chief
Urwah Muneer Editor
Steven Chua Editor
Wayne Low Ka Shin Editor, Social Media
Brandon Servos Editor, Social Media
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My Job at the post office Helps me Understand the Humans Better
A brilliant and heartwarming meditation on the barrier between the artificial and real-life, that uses the trappings of speculative fiction and the integration of artificial intelligence into everyday service industry tasks to tell a wonderful story.
Landscaping for Amnesiacs
Collection of lovely draw-from-life sketches that bring out a deeper hyper-reality to otherwise mundane occurrences. A university is reimagined as an airport, students fall but never land.
Baby+ With A Car Like Wolverine’s Claws
Carrying out “you wouldn’t download a car” to its absurd conclusions, this hilarious and cutting satire by Elizabeth Wong pokes at a society’s growing dependency towards automobiles, laughing its way through a uncomfortable truth of technology: that humans are often forced to adapt to it, and not the other way around.
The Simulation Hypothesis Is Real
A contemporary exploration into a classic thought experiment viewed through the lens of online culture. Yee’s expertly crafted story structure quickly leads us away from the actual experiment into a mise en abyme of reaction and meta-reaction, mirroring the structure and evoking the attendant sense of doom of web-hosted “discourse” today.
The Fragrant Sky
Dimensions are turned temporal, traditional mythological conflicts said to take place in the stars occur as they did in the tales of old with a modern twist.
Little Ghosts
A profile of the far-future, the meaning of artificial life is a question that’s been asked and answered innumerable times. This excellent story explores what it means to ask that question.
Incarnadine
A frightening haunting tale that leaves one on the edge of their seat without knowing..horror fiction at its very best. - A deep dive into the neglected influence of science fiction on the works of legendary Singaporean writer and playwright Stella Kon, which has gone unremarked for far too long
- Reviewing the first blockbuster science fiction film put out by the burgeoning Thai film industry.
Editorial Foreword
Opening
When the topic of the magazine comes up, I am faced with two questions, one of which fortunately has a simple answer. “Why Sengkang?” The suburban neighbourhood of towering high-rise estates, young families, and new BTOs has the honour of having its name stolen by my magazine for two reasons. The word “Sengkang” alliterates well with the word “Sci-Fi” , and it happens to be my place of residence. Happy at having received a simple answer, the unfortunate questionnaire continues on and asks “why?” which causes me to start sweating.
The genesis of this magazine was the observation that for a region populated with so many talented speculative fiction writers, we lacked an active magazine to call our own. Though the city has had a long-history of such magazines, they had sadly all gone defunct by 2024.(LONTAR being a notable inspiration), To bemoan this in the same passive tone that one discusses the closing of bookstores, shuttering of small-presses and other assorted literary closures is an easy and vacuous task. So instead I decided to try my own hand at literary entrepreneurship. The mission of this magazine is to platform stories that showcase the best of what speculative fiction can offer.
Stories that question, that invent new idioms, that stick in your mind like something true. Stories that aren’t just great constructions on the (web)page, but ones that feel material, present, and lucid to the world outside of it.
We stand for thinking, Narratives that raise questions without easy solutions. That experiment with form and function. That breakaway from traditional settings and tropes. That rejects the insulare debates and prescriptions of the established publisher.
On Singapore
Singapore has often been painted in western media as a neo-orientalist background for a certain vision of techno-capitalist triumphalism gone wrong, technology turned on the populace. Some of this stems from pioneering cyberpunk author William Gibbons infamous polemic “Disneyland with a death penalty” (1993) where he explored the city as a “techno dystopia”; but it has persisted in depictions in western movies such as “Equals” (2015), and the television series “Westworld” (2020) where the city’s aesthetics has served as its primary message.
The regrettable thing is not that these depictions are wrong but rather that, having picked up one element of the truth, they have persisted with a flat two-dimensional image. An image that reduces Singapore to the unfeeling backdrop of a moral parable regarding the use of technology to suppress individual freedoms, the squashing of the individual, and as a microcosm of the condition of the 21st century.
For all the attention these depictions seem to command, it remains a surprise that the local speculative tradition has attracted relatively little attention by comparison. Singaporean writers such as Ng-Yi Sheng and Rachel Heng have written much in the speculative realm that have dealt with the city and its complex relationship to the future as well as technology. Within this body of work, crucially, is the potential to both write back against these imposed essentialisms by complicating their narratives, adding specificity to these sweeping observations, or by simply writing about something else.
Western magazines have made great strides in representing Singaporean voices; part of my motivation for starting this magazine was my shock at how many Clarkesworld writers happened to be from Singapore. Disappointment at how the few local based magazines like LONTAR have become defunct spurred me to start this venture, to give a platform to the absolutely brilliant stories that originate from this city.
Zubin Jain,
Editor-In-Chief
Without further ado