Review
Red Dot Irreal
2011
Math Paper Press
Review by Peter Young in Big Sky #1 (2013).
Lundberg’s first collection is centred on Singapore, where he has lived for many years now. The ‘Red Dot’ of the title is Singapore itself: as he mentions in the story notes, Singaporeans take pride in the fact that their entire country, for all its impressive wealth and economic success, disappears completely beneath a small red dot on a world map. Lundberg is becoming a bit of a useful player on the Singapore spec-fic scene, and his stories can act as a useful bridge between cultures: several of them focus on Westerners in Asia and the cultural differences they encounter (while also having to deal with some more urgent fantastical or science fictional problems at the same time), and these help to give the collection as a whole a semi-autobiographical feel – there are certainly several elements present that are drawn either directly or indirectly from Lundberg’s own life. His writing often feels whole, in the sense that each story has been not so much ‘worked out’ as ‘grokked in its fullness’ first and written out subsequently. It’s hard to pick a favourite here, but I’d probably go for ‘Bogeymen’, a picaresque, semi-steampunk tale of a young Victorian English sailor and his encounters with malevolent Singaporean myths; ‘Hero Worship, or How I Met the Dream King’, describing an almost totally believable encounter with Neil Gaiman; also ‘Taxi Ride’, a Kafkaesque piece that takes the reader on a one-way noir-like journey into the beyond. Ten stories in all, each a memorable trip into “equatorial fantastika”. I’m looking forward to whatever Lundberg does next, and a novel would be very welcome.