Unharvested: The Forgotten Sci-Fi Legacy of Stella Kon
TAGS | editorial, local
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.
Stella Kon is a paradox. On one hand, she’s one of Singapore’s most famous writers, celebrated as the dramatist behind Emily of Emerald Hill (1983). This one-woman play nostalgically explores the heritage of the Peranakan Chinese: descendants of early immigrants of China to Southeast Asia who created their own syncretic culture out of Chinese, Malay and European influences. It’s the nation’s most performed theatrical work and possibly its most beloved, studied in schools and universities, reinterpreted through museum exhibitions, musicals and drag.
On the other hand, the phenomenal success of this play has eclipsed virtually all other aspects of Kon’s varied literary career, not least the fact that she authored some of the earliest sci-fi works in Singapore and Malaysia. Though she’s only composed four works in the genre—“Mushroom Harvest” (1962), Z Is For Zygote (1971), To Hatch a Swan (1971) and “A Hour in the Day of Johnny Tuapehkong” (1980)—each is fascinating in its own right, deserving of note in our local SFF canon.
I’ve highlighted Kon’s place in spec fic history before, in my Strange Horizons essay “A Spicepunk Manifesto”, as well as in various lectures on Singapore literature. This time, however, I’m attempting a close reading of her early works. How, I ask, can we make sense of their place in an oeuvre that’s dominated by realism? And what value do these tales, written half a century ago, have for readers and writers today?
“Mushroom Harvest” (1962)
First, some background. Kon was born in 1944 under the name of Lim Sing Po. As a child, she travelled between Singapore and the UK, participating in school theatre programs and reading voraciously, with favourites including CS Lewis’ Narnia and Perelandra series, the tales of Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson in Astounding Science Fiction, and assorted compilations of Asian mythology. JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings left such a huge impression that she decided she was destined to be a writer; with her father’s typewriter, she promptly produced a fantasy novel in tribute, titled The Orinsil (c. 1957), which ultimately went unpublished.1
In 1962, when she was an eighteen-year-old student at Raffles Girls’ School, she composed the science fiction short story “Mushroom Harvest”. It opens with the following epigraph:
-
“(In the event of a nuclear war)… the Chinese, South-East Asians and Africans—well over a billion people—would survive, and the human race, perhaps with its genes somewhat altered by fallout, would progress or retrogress on these continents.” 2
- J. F Wharton, lead article in Saturday Review, August 19, 1961.
The story itself takes the form of a diary written by an unnamed Singaporean woman chemist, four years after the end of a nuclear war that has decimated Europe and North America. As predicted, Southeast Asia has survived, but faces an epidemic of mutant births. The seven diary entries, dated Monday to Sunday, serve as a countdown to the moment when the protagonist’s sister Lily delivers a stillborn, deformed child: the mushroom clouds’ horrific harvest.
The future that Kon imagines is dystopian, spawned from her anxieties over the burgeoning nuclear threat of the Cold War, its perspective deeply informed by her identity as a young woman in the Third World. Yet it feels wrong to call this apocalyptic fiction—this despite multiple signs that another, more devastating war is on its way. Our protagonist not only survives; she has the liberty to chuckle at the radioactive contamination of her lab samples, to fume over her husband postponing their date night, to choose a pretty pre-war blouse for the evening, and to lie in the grass with him at Fort Canning Hill, gazing in wonder at the ruins of space stations overhead.
Furthermore, this is a future beyond Western hegemony, where “English currency is on par with mahjong chips” 3 and there are “cannibals in the Texas deserts” 4; where stranded Americans pretend to be Australians to escape racist abuse, where the great military superpowers are China and South America. It’s also subtly unpatriarchal: the protagonist’s colleagues at the lab are all women, and her friend Moi In, forced out of her literature degree into farm labour, is described as no less desirable after the sun has ruined her complexion—her handsome tractor-driving boyfriend says she has become “sweeter with a bit of cooking.” 5 The final lines of the tale, spoken by the protagonist’s husband, drive home the idea that fate lies in the hands of Third World women: “You’ve got it too, the guts to still laugh at the world and face life boldly. While we’ve got girls like you and Lily we’ll be okay.” 6
The story has flaws, certainly—I’ve never gotten over the clumsy opening lines 7—yet its lyricism and worldbuilding are remarkable, especially coming from the pen of a teenager in a British colony with no science fiction scene to speak of. Consider her description of the bombing of England in the mind’s eye of her protagonist:
-
I wonder if there is a single farthing left in England, or did the bombs really cover every square mile as prophesied? The green fields of England that all the poets wrote about, are they all melted down into a plain of glass that shines way off at night? That’s funny. Very apocalyptic. ‘Bring me my Chariot of Fire’, and all the clouds unfolded, the rockets arrowed burning out of the stratosphere over the dark satanic munition-mills of England. And then the sea of black glass stretching from the Channel to the Hebrides, and the dreadful glare over the desolation. The fireball shone upon the sea, shining with all its might; the fall-out rode the wind to make the billows hot and bright. The mushroom cloud rose like a breath to fill the burning sky; no birds were flying overhead, there were no birds to fly. 8
Small wonder, then, that the story received wide circulation. In 1962, it was published in the University of Malaya magazine Focus, with the endorsement of Kon’s English teacher Patricia Stephens 9; the same year, it was reprinted in the second issue of the journal Monsoon. In 1968, it appeared once more in Twenty-Two Malaysian Stories (ed. Lloyd Fernando), which went on to be reprinted in at least three further editions, most recently in 2005.
For years, I identified this as Singapore’s first English language science fiction short story. However, I’ve since discovered an earlier work: Goh Ewe Hock’s “The Last Rafflesian” (1960). 10 This too was authored by a teenage student, and it too envisions a future Singapore ruined by nuclear war, though on the whole it’s more amateurish than “Mushroom Harvest”, with its straightforward prose and more absolute, less complex apocalypse. Still, the two works complement each other, revealing the hopes and fears of young Singaporeans in the age of decolonisation, when promises of independence came hand in hand with the threat of annihilation.
- 1 Phone interview with Stella Kon, 17 July 2024.
- 2 S. Kon. “Mushroom Harvest.” Twenty-Two Malaysian Tales. Edited by Lloyd Fernando. Maya Press, 2005. P. 222.
- 3 Ibid, p. 224.
- 4 Ibid, pp. 228-29.
- 5 Ibid, p. 224.
- 6 Ibid, p. 232.
- 7 After the epigraph, the lines are as follows: “Today is a Very Special Day for Little Girl! It is a Happy Anniversary! Joke.” Ibid, p. 222. Compared to the remainder of the protagonist’s first-person narration, these lines are uncharacteristically childish. Kon agrees with this critique. “This is meant to be a young adult trying for self- mocking baby talk, I didn't pull off the attempt at sophisticated irony.” Email correspondence. 17 July 2024.
- 8 Kon, “Mushroom Harvest.” pp. 224-25.
- 9 Stella Kon. Email correspondence. 2 July, 2024.
- 10 First published in The Rafflesian. Vol. 34, No. 1, 1960. Reprinted in Some Dreams From Now: 135 Years of Rafflesian Writing, ed. Theophilus Kwek. Raffles Institution (RI), 2023.
Z is for Zygote (1971), To Hatch a Swan (1971) and
“An Hour in the Life of Johnny Tuapehkong” (1980)
Kon moved to the Malaysian city of Ipoh in 1967, having married a Malaysian husband just the year before. Here, she wrote her first full-length plays, later staged as a double-bill by the Ipoh Players under the title A Breeding Pair (1971). Both explore how technology may transform social conventions of sexual reproduction; both use characters displaced in time as audience surrogates. Both are also, as we’ll see, deeply problematic.
In To Hatch a Swan, American spaceship pilot Colonel Matthew Williamson returns to Earth after centuries in a cosmic time warp. In the world he returns to, positions of authority are held by women, but class distinctions are more prevalent than ever. His bride Clara explains to him that upper-class women no longer bear their husbands’ children, but instead plant their fertilised eggs into lower-class women, who serve as “brood-nurses”.
The scientific premises for these tales are strikingly prescient: the first test-tube baby was only born in 1978, while the first gestational surrogacy took place in 1986. Their dramatic styles, however, are decidedly antique, being drawing-room plays in the style of George Bernard Shaw—Kon even recommends Edwardian furniture and a “décor… reminiscent of the old South of the USA” as set dressing for the respective works. 11 Nor are there clear elements tying these tales to Asia, aside from a character named Helene Lee and references to “the Chung-Krishnan process” in Z Is For Zygote.
What’s truly astonishing for the 21st century reader is the politics of the plays, both of which lean towards profound sexual conservatism. 12 In Z Is For Zygote, Karl leaves his wife, whose vows he’s renewed for thirty years, but dies of heart failure before he can reproduce; meanwhile, Janice resolves to keep the child she conceived while under the influence of narcotics, and happily chooses to marry her date rapist. In To Hatch a Swan, Matthew rebels against the matriarchy, exposes the senior matriarch Beatrice La Fontaine for stealing his sperm, wins a knife duel with his brother-in-law Peter, then leaves Clara to run away with the wide-eyed 18-year-old brood-nurse Elizabeth. The defeated Peter actually joins him, declaring, “I want to leave this civilised world of women; it has suffocated me for long enough! I am a man now, Matthew, and I shall prove it.”13 Notably, both plays also end with men yelling slurs at women with sexual agency—“man-eater,” 14 “adulteress,” “whore.”15
Almost another full decade would pass before Kon ventured again into the world of sci-fi. By then, Singapore had developed the beginnings of a SF scene: her tale was an entry in the Singapore Science Centre’s 1979 Science Fiction Short Story Competition and was published with stories by twelve other authors in the anthology Singapore Science Fiction (eds. R. S. Bhathal, Kirpal Singh and Dudley de Souza, 1980).
Kon’s story, “An Hour in the Day of Johnny Tuapehkong”16, is set in Singapore on the 23rd of February 2058, between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. It describes a young man’s leisurely morning ritual as he rises from his computerised bed, cleanses himself using the complicated water conservation mechanisms in the bathroom, thinks fondly about his Russian physicist girlfriend Olga Wongovna and her artificial black hole project beneath Bukit Timah Hill (renamed Stannous Hill), surveys the green high-tech city from his window and consumes his breakfast of seven pills. Suddenly, he experiences an existential crisis, consults a city-wide internet called Central Information, and is inspired to solve the island’s water problems by building an artificial mountain in the New Territories of Johor. Then, on his monorail journey to work, he witnesses the landscape implode into his girlfriend’s black hole, which goes on to swallow “the rest of the city, the planet, and eventually most of that quadrant of space.”17
It’s a brief, slightly absurd story, but full of subtle worldbuilding and pointed satire at new Singapore: increasingly prosperous, obsessed with technology and engineering megaprojects. It’s also a delightful inversion of masculinist tropes in sci-fi. Johnny is athletic, sophisticated and intelligent—he’s studied Russian and Italian, the latter so he can read the letters of Enrico Fermi—yet he fails to exercise heroic agency. Instead, it’s Olga, a woman he sees primarily as a sex object, who triggers the apocalypse.
The tale’s been praised as “a compelling parable about the dangers of instrumental reason,”18 and it’s arguably the most polished of Kon’s sci-fi works. Unfortunately, it’s never been studied in the context of her greater oeuvre, due to a ludicrous administrative blunder. The author submitted it for the competition under her then legal name, “Mrs. Kon Liew Min née Lim Sing Po”. As a result, the story remains published under her husband’s name: Kon Liew Min.19
- 11 Stella Kon. “To Hatch a Swan.” A Breeding Pair. Raffles, 2000. P. 105.
- 12 Kon clarifies: “The wooden characters, their melodramatic pronouncements and their fossilised sexual attitudes (especially the 2 Rip van Winkle protagonists) are not meant to be taken seriously. The suggestion for Victoriana or Edwardian setting and costumes implies this is not a realistic work! Rather a Brechtian one whose devices make us step back, alienate us from taking the characters as real people.. but as mouthpieces for ideas which we must question. I couldn't have verbalised it then. But I knew the melodrama and the old times setting for futuristic stories was meant to be deeply ironic.” Email correspondence, 17 July 2024.
- 13 Ibid. p. 171.
- 14 Stella Kon. “Z Is For Zygote.” A Breeding Pair. Raffles, 2000. p. 95.
- 15 Kon. “To Hatch a Swan.” P. 167, 165.
- 16 Kon notes that the original title for the story was “An Hr in the Day of Johnny Tuapekkong.”
- 17 Kon Liew Min. “An Hour in the Day of Johnny Tuapehkong.” Singapore Science Fiction. Eds. R. S. Bhathal, Kirpal Singh and Dudley de Souza. Rotary Club of Jurong Town, 1980. P. 48.
- 18 Cheryl Julia Lee and Graham Matthews, “Intelligent Infrastructure, Humans as Resources, and Coevolutionary Futures: AI Narratives in Singapore.” Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, eds. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal. Oxford University Press, 2023. P. 389.
- 19 Stella Kon. Email correspondence. 2 July 2024.
Later Fantasies (1977-2023)
Kon returned to Singapore in 1987 in the wake of her divorce. Buoyed by the success of Emily of Emerald Hill, she’s since turned her attention to historical and heritage projects, such as The Scholar and the Dragon (1986), about the Chinese community of 1910s Singapore, and Lim Boon Keng – The Musical (2019), a biographical drama based on the life of her Peranakan ancestor.
Nevertheless, she’s never completely abandoned the world of the speculative, as can be seen by the number of her works that exhibit elements of fantasy, magical realism and mythology. We see this in plays such as The Bridge (1977), which uses the epic of the Ramayana to discuss recovery from drug addiction, and Dragon’s Teeth Gate (1985), where the spirit of one of Admiral Zheng He’s lieutenants battles with the bodhisattva Guanyin over a superstore development. We see this too in her novels, such as Eston (1995), which describes an angel’s descent into Singapore to transform the souls of ordinary people, and 4 Pax to Emptiness (2023), in which four people work to pacify the ghostly victims of the Great Chinese Famine, guided by a divine spirit named Bezalia.
Nor is science fiction altogether absent in her later works. In Dracula and Other Stories (1982), a collection of condensed Gothic novels for children, she includes sci-fi classics Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In “The Biggest Ice-Cream Cone in the World” (1982), she takes time to delineate the structural engineering and flavour chemistry that might go into constructing such a marvel. Even the prologue to Eston feels ripped from sci-fi, with its description of the angel as “a comet whose long orbit starts in the galactic heart, in the seething vortices of primeval matter; where the stripped-down particles collide and reassemble and the stars are born.”20
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Kon made a deliberate shift in her literary focus, one perhaps best emblematised in her 2013 play Forbidden Hill. Here, we return to Fort Canning Hill. Civil servant Aloysius Foo plans to redevelop it as EcoUrb Singapore, equipped with “kilometer-high condensation towers,” “a vast array of solar cells,” “a dome of energy force covering the sky… which will hold in a cool air-conditioned atmosphere for the whole country,”21 and even a space elevator linking the island to the future Singapore Space Station. To accomplish this task, he’s willing to demolish all surrounding archaeological and religious sites. He’s foiled when his key investor, Mrs Widodo, experiences mystical visions and withdraws from the deal—and he's utterly destroyed when a storm erupts, paralysing him with a lightning bolt and revealing a perfectly preserved 8th century temple beneath the hill.
For Kon, science fiction may be glamorous with its glittering gadgets and stardust, but it’s also a genre fundamentally defined by hubris. In the end, heritage and tradition must always be triumphant.
- 20 Stella Kon. Eston. Constellation Books, 2006. P. 1.
- 21 Stella Kon. Forbidden Hill. Unpublished manuscript. 2013. National Library, Singapore. P. 2-3.
Harvest Season
It’s a little bizarre to argue that Kon deserves the respect of the Singapore science fiction community, given how she’s devoted only a fraction of her career towards the genre. Nevertheless, it feels necessary, given our general ignorance of any sense of local sci-fi history. Ask the average aficionado here, and the earliest Singaporean work they’re likely to have heard of is the speculative fiction anthology Fish Eats Lion (ed. Jason Erik Lundberg, 2012), or, if we’re counting audiovisual media, the schlocky superhero TV series VR Man (1998). Our current crop of sci-fi writers—folks like Neon Yang, Megan Chee, Farihan Bahron—aren’t drawing from a legacy of Singaporean space opera and cyberpunk; they’re principally building on global influences, forging a tradition for themselves. 22
The fact is, there’ve been plenty of Singaporean science fiction pioneers: creators of fiction, comics and plays in all four official languages—English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil—some dating back to the 1950s. 23 Their works have fallen into obscurity, partly because of a historic lack of respect for genre literature, partly because there’s never been a significant movement of Singaporean science fiction till now. Still, as a writer and researcher, I find it fortifying to remember them, knowing that there’ve been others here before my generation, performing their own thought experiments, venturing into new media, leaving records of their successes and failures in the archive.
As role models go, Stella Kon isn’t half bad. She’s an author who began her journey as a schoolgirl six decades ago, and who’s worked across borders of nation and genre, through motherhood and divorce, shifting in her sexual politics, shifting in her visions of the future, but never quitting the written word. And through it all, whether it’s been fashionable or gauche, she’s never disguised the fact that her career began with science fiction.
“Mushroom Harvest” and its sister texts may be odd, imperfect works, but they’re more than mere juvenilia. They’re little treasures in the storehouse of Singapore’s sci-fi heritage; reminders that we too have a tradition of speculating strange futures. Let them too be remembered. Let them be a legacy.
- 22 The same can’t be said of other branches of Singaporean speculative fiction. Our fantasy and horror authors take inspiration from the pre-colonial legends of the royal chronicle of Sulalatus Salatin (c. 1612), our mid-century wave of monster movies, e.g. BN Rao’s Pontianak (1957), plus the late 20th century boom in pulp horror, e,g, Russell Lee’s True Singapore Ghost Stories (1989-present).
- 23 See Nadia Arianna Bte Ramli, “Sci-Fi in Singapore: 1970s to 1990s”, BiblioAsia, Vol. 13, Issue 2, Jul-Sep 2017. https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-13/issue-2/jul-sep-2017/sci-fi-in-singapore/.