Editorial Foreword
The artistic world often responds with sentimentality; nostalgic retellings of the past and stories about the victims of development cast contemporary Singapore as a identity-less wasteland whose spotless, sterile infrastructure has been inhabited by dull corporate drones leading meaningless lives. SingLit, and particularly Singaporean poetry, is infused with this overwhelming nostalgia and yearning for the past that often leaves the present and future neglected, troped as the big bad from which we must escape from.
Science fiction, with its focus on alternative futures and possibilities, struggles to conform to this fundamental binary at the center of the Singapore Story. Utopian worlds in SF are not so cleanly built through merit, and neither are dystopian outcomes so simply caused by clearly identifiable acts of social deviance. However, since this sentimentality is so deeply infused into the local literary imagination, it makes it hard for sci-fi to find its footing. Yet writers try, again and again, to make sense of this uncertainty, to bridge the gap writing science-fiction, complicating the clean-cut, official imaginaries we inherit. Stripping away these narratives and presumptions, we find ourselves in a city-state whose troubled relationship with its own pasts and futures is well suited for the exploration that science fiction enables.
In this second issue of Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly, we’re proud to present works that reflect the genre’s range and its ability to address and interact with the many dimensions of our city-state. We have a review of Club Contagion by Eliane Boey, a recently released science fiction novel that portrays the city-state as a crumbling dystopia, an interview with Han May, the first published Singaporean sci-fi novelist, several stories that satirize modern life by exploring phenomena ranging from our troubled relationship with foreign domestic workers, endangered species and Human-AI relationships. And for the first time, a dedicated science-fiction poetry section to inspire poets to branch into the genre.
Leave yourself at home, and take the long line deep into SF.
We hope you enjoy the journey.
Zubin Jain,
Editor-In-Chief
Without further ado