#YISHREADS November 2024

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

This month’s column covers speculative fiction from South Asia and the diaspora! It was supposed to be a Deepavali/Diwali thing, like last year’s edition,[1] but it occurred to me after the fact that, in some alternate universe, it would’ve also been a celebration of the election of the first Desi President of the USA.

Alas, we’re in the darkest timeline, and as it turns out, identity politics is bunkum. Kamala Harris’s Democratic campaign ended up allying with war criminals, endorsing xenophobia and genocide, ultimately losing the enthusiasm of the party’s base and winning over very few Republicans in the process. And it’s all been frickin’ depressing—not only because Donald Trump’s gonna wreak havoc for the next four years, but because it ruins a whole bunch of our cultural assumptions as left-leaning intellectuals: that women and minorities represent a progressive future; that younger voters will always be more liberal; that American-style democracy is better than the unfree system that Singapore’s got.

In light of that, it’s fitting that this month’s books are tales of chaos, dystopia, mourning and revolution. Which is what’s special about spec fic—first, it offers you escape; then it offers you hope that another world, a better world, is possible.

The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera
Solaris, 2024

Damn, this book's kind of blowing my mind—not just because it's good, which it is, but because it's so damn weird and original, considerably more so than I'd have expected from an internationally published and award-winning fantasy novel from the global South. It goes way beyond conventional tropes of hashtag-diverse-stories, which tend towards racebent versions of Tolkien, Lucas and George RR Martin.

This, you see, manages to be both epic secondary-world fantasy and urban fantasy. It follows Fetter, a young man with levitation and devil-seeing powers, trained by his cruel mother in the wasteland of Acusdab to be a magical assassin against his father, a mysterious cult leader named The Perfect and The Kind. Yet most of the story takes place in the city of Luriat, where Fetter lives a slacker life in his early twenties, hooking up with his boyfriend, going to therapy with other Unchosen (i.e. survivors of failed Chosen One narratives), and becoming embroiled in weird conspiracies involving the Bright Doors of the city, cross-caste impersonation and political theatre.

Regarding diversity checkboxes: sure, the characters are brown-skinned, camisa-wearing folks, as you might expect from the mind of a Sri Lankan writer. But what he's giving us isn't a celebratory representation of cultural heritage: it's a harrowing exposé of how crazy it is to live in a country with so much history and richness but also utter dysfunction, where religious uprisings and pogroms and plagues (many transparent references to Covid policies) are regarded as routine and cyclical rather than apocalyptic; where brutal executions and riots co-exist with middle-class civility; where an endless open-air prison is characterised more by janky computers and paperwork than torture. It's genuinely reflective of Sri Lanka as a nation, with both high levels of development and anarchic rule of terror—and though I suppose you could say this of many other nations, I don't think I've seen this communicated in fiction quite the same way before.

One caveat: the worldbuilding's dizzyingly complex, because of all the layers of colonisation and the competing religious groups and ranks at play—but you don't need to remember the details to get the brilliance of how the author's playing with history, granting The Perfect and the Kind reality-altering powers which collapse centuries and expanses—it's revealed that he and Fetter's mother were in fact the original Coloniser and Colonised (a reference to the legend of Vijaya and Kuveni, I’m told), and that he was able to change the world so the whole modern history of the supercontinent of Jambudvipa fits into the 23 years of Fetter's life. (See what I mean about weird?)

And though I can't get all the cultural references (the term Jambudvipa comes from Hindu-Buddhist cosmology!), something that blows my mind with its daring is the realisation that The Perfect and the Kind is an analogue of the Gautama Buddha, with the name of Fetter a ref to Rahul (the son the Buddha abandoned when he sought enlightenment, whose name does mean "fetter"), and the character of Vido the disciple Ananda (who shares his eidetic memory, if not his malice). I.e. on one level, this work is an excoriation of Buddhism as it's practised in Sri Lanka: sanctimonious, power-hungry and bloodthirsty. Ballsy as hell—and who else does this in global SFF, where Buddhism's usually all about warrior space monks?

If I've a criticism, it might be that the ending's not exactly satisfying—but this is also kinda in keeping with the work's consistent frustration of expectations and subversion of tropes. In many other ways, the plot's kinda masterful, with foreshadowings and callbacks you wouldn't expect, and mysteries left unsolved because, you realise, they were never meant to be solved. Call it dream logic: chaotic but intuitive causality—but that really is the way the developing world is, no? Systems work, but not as dictated.

But yeah, now I'm rethinking everything I've written in the past that urges Southeast Asian writers to represent our culture almost as a form of didactic education for readers. Chandrasekara isn't using fantasy to convey facts—he's communicating the nightmarish vibe that is his nation's politics, and in the age of genocide, is also the world's. How much more powerful is that?

City of Red Midnight, by Usman T. Malik
Tor, 2020

Hailing from Pakistan, this novella's brief, but epic, taking the form of a nesting-doll Thousand and One Nights tale in which a group of global SFF writers at a Lahore convention hearkens to a traditional storyteller, revealing voices within voices, corroborating and contradicting each other, all comprising a feminist subversion of the tale of “Marouf the Cobbler and His Wife Fatimah.” (Yeah, I've never heard that one either, but it’s from the actual Thousand and One Nights.)

Bonus nightmarish elements of puppets and donkey-legged jinns, which I kinda wish the author had explained the cultural origins of in an appendix—but that’s me looking to spec fic for education again, and we don’t need that. I’ve also got a sneaky suspicion that there’s a religious allegory going on here too: Marouf is referred to as M____, as if the author’s making a taboo reference to the Prophet’s name and his patriarchal legacy.

Some thoughts: this is fundamentally a story of female rage. But how much do us male authors have licence to channel this trope? It's certainly profitable, given the predominant femaleness of SFF readership, and it does give us the pleasure of writing about women doing magnificently terrible things. Still, there's something that doesn't sit right with me regarding the ultimate gender reveal of the tale. (This is too soon after the book's 2020 publication to deliver a spoiler.)

And another fascinating thing: the author labels the work as a "hikayat", which I'd previously believed to be only a Malay form. Not so: it's also a Sikh tradition, e.g. the Hikayatan of Guru Gobind Singh... but there's very little info I can find online about that tradition. A reminder of how interconnected Southeast Asia is with South Asia and the Middle East.

All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva
Random House, 2018

We’re now moving into literary fiction! Of the nine stories in this American collection, four of them don't actually involve obvious spec fic elements—e.g. "The World By Night" could simply be about a country girl trapped in a cave and going mad; ""Anything You Might Want" is pretty much about a millionaire's daughter believing she's conjured up a man through magical thinking, when he clearly has a life of his own.

The others, however, are full-on SFF: there’s an alien takeover of the USA in "Manus"; a siren in "Robert Greenman and the Mermaid", an uncanny scenario in "All the Names They Used for God" in which the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram are able to command men to do anything they wish. And they're all kinda stunning—not just in terms of craft but also the way they make you stop and steep in the pain of the characters, these lonely women and desperate men and vice versa, all suffering terrible loss, all lost.

Surprisingly, there's no Asian elements here, defying expectations—the only tales that aren't set in the USA are the title story and "Killer of Kings", in which John Milton meets an angel. The Americana on show isn't NYC cosmopolitan stuff either, but one of road trips and motels, national parks and beach towns. Vast emptinesses of land, vast emptinesses of the heart.

The Grand Arcade, by Vinita Ramani
Epigram, 2024

Another literary short fiction collection, this time from Singapore! And damn, these stories are something else: intense, unexpected, slightly deranged, heavy with myth and trauma. 

There’s just seven tales here, but three are novella-length—one of them was even published independently in 2012: “Parvathi Dreams About His Sex”, about a teenage Tamil Brahmin girl's visit to the archaeological sites of Southern India, searching for the yoni to all the shivalingams she sees worshipped, a spiritual journey that culminates in her orgasmic loss of virginity to her Jewish boyfriend. 

In context, this is one of the saner stories. “The Grand Arcade” focuses on precarious expats and foreign workers in Singapore, centred on a Hong Kong man who goes insane and ritually destroys everything in his flat before annihilating himself. (Memorably, immigrants to this city are described as moths to a flame.) “The Life of a Cunty Woman” follows another Tamil Brahmin woman whose narrative of childbirth, motherhood and miscarriage runs alongside an unapologetic series of vivid extramarital sexual encounters with men and women, in zoos, in labs, in toilets, without commentary on morality or fidelity, only answering visceral hunger. 

And though Vinita assured me she's not intentionally writing SFF, the shorter stories are strange too. “The First Night of Initiation Was Far From Transcendental” has a woman's lover turning back into an 18-year-old (a metaphor, magical realism or a bad drug trip?); “The Hearing Aid” has an old man opt for deafness rather than countenancing any criticism of his virago wife; “Same Same But Different” looks at the plight of Khmer Khrom refugees of Cambodia through forgetting and dementia; “Junk” has a man spending seven decades building a trash sculpture garden in the wake of Partition—the nation as an assemblage of garbage.

Perhaps what's most striking to me is how Vinita really isn't interested in making you judge whether a character is right or wrong, moral or amoral—there's invocations of divine wrath, e.g. the bloody destruction of Shiva and Periyachi Amman, which sanction even cruelty as divine. Yes: this idea that when we're unreasonable, we are closest to being holy. And that as readers and writers, our duty is to behold, not to pass judgment.

The Ten Percent Thief, by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Solaris, 2023

Don’t be fooled by the lovely jacaranda tree on the cover: this Indian novel is hardcore cyberpunk, taking place in a future Bangalore/Bengaluru, now renamed Apex City, that’s been taken over by an evil AI-administered corpocracy, Bell Corp. Society’s been divided into three: the top 20% with access to high-tech luxuries, the middle 70% with a little less, and the bottom 10%, the Analogs, exiled to the desolate fringes of the city, beyond the electric shield of the Carnatic Meridian, where they have to do ghastly things like handle paper money and read physical newspapers and get only one bucket of clean water a day.

Unlike traditional dystopias, one’s rank is determined by productivity rather than birth. This means slip-ups can result in tumbling downwards to the Vegetable Farms, where the lowest of the low are harvested for organs, or (in rare instances) climb the social ladder to the very top. In other words, this is a meritocracy—and yes, my countryfolk should cringe, since Bell Corp (named after the Bell Curve) is specifically stated to have originated in Singapore! Wouldn’t Lee Kuan Yew be proud of having inspired this hellscape?

Lakshminarayan’s constructed the novel as an accretion of short stories, many of which work as standalones (the titular first story did in fact appear solo in Lavie Tidhar’s Best of World SF: Volume 1), but when read together, mark the progress towards a hacker-led Analog revolution. Each is told from a different perspective, giving a fascinatingly layered view of the society: Nina Anand, the piano prodigy from the Analogs given a chance at attaining Virtual citizenship; Teresa Fernandes, the tour guide tasked with indoctrinating Virtual kids into the horrors of Analog society; Aditi Rao, the superstar newscaster rebelling against her optimization software which is trying to break her up with her (frankly iffy) boyfriend. There’s men and women, straight and gay, with Hindu, Muslim and Christian names, light-skinned and dark-skinned, scattered all over the hierarchy—evidence that the old social divisions have indeed been transcended. But also icky memories of caste: “ten-percent” is a swear word, and the Analogs are addressed with the pronoun “it”.

I shouldn’t overstate the Indian-ness of this story—the author, once again, seems uninterested in the exotica of cultural representation, hinting instead that this is a world where Europe and Asia are equal, where almost everyone speaks English, where the old Bengaluru is only represented by ruined forgotten statues of Queen Victoria and the Pillar of Ashoka. Like Bong Joon-Ho, she’s writing about capitalism as a disease of the world. But I do think it’s relevant that she includes a chapter where men debate the merits of the revolution, pointing out that it’s doomed to be inadequate, just as nationalism and Communism and wokeism were before.

It’s not the kind of thing Americans like to say—rather, it’s an Old World sentiment, drawn from a civilizational understanding of the cyclical nature of history. Every revolution fails. Every revolution is necessary. Rise again.

Endnotes

[1] Ng Yi-Sheng. “#YISHREADS November 2023.” Suspect. 1 December 2023. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/12/1/yishreads-november-2023

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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