Review

Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 7

Kate Osias, Alex Osias, eds.

2012

Kestrel & Flipside

Review by Peter Young in Big Sky #1 (2013).

With Volume 7 Philippine Speculative Fiction now becomes an entirely digital publication, and the plan is to make all past issues of this well-established anthology series that much more accessible for readers outside Asia. Vol. 7 is not my first dip into the waters of Philippine spec-fic, and PSF continues to be a broader style of anthology than the kind lately adopted by, for example, Singaporean anthologists. PSF does not feel tailored to a specific kind of reader, and is also notably varied in content: there are stories focussing on sword and sorcery and mythic quests, mixed together with digital-era kick-ass heroines, malevolent spirits, present-day retellings and riffs on Philippine folklore – all get an airing here. With such rich variety I quickly figured that not all would hit the mark for me, and I expect plenty of cultural in-referencing probably whizzed past me unnoticed as well. But it’s that referencing, when it is caught and understood, that opens eyes and makes anthologies like PSF interesting and worthwhile. The first story is a well-characterised one: ‘All the Best of Dark and Bright’ by Victoria Isabel Yap, in which a heartbroken youth discovers the ‘first woman’, Maganda, in a bamboo garden. Another worth re-reading is Arlynn Despi’s ‘The Scrap Collectors’, a brief post-apocalyptic sketch which has an unbeatable opening line: “At night, we burn the bibles to cook meat.” Dean Francis Alfar’s ‘East of the Sun’ is perhaps the most memorable story here for the way it puts a young girl right at the centre of a sexually-charged encounter with a mythical Tiq’Barang. For near-perfect satire there is Benito Vergara’s ‘The Changes’, in which a segment of the Filipino population is suddenly transformed to look like American celebrities.

At this point in the anthology, only four stories in, it was clear this anthology has a strong selection. Some way further in we encounter Kristine Ong Muslim’s cool and unusual ‘Pet’, something I’d like to see anthologised, and F. Jordan Carnice’s ‘The Day Nostalgia Swept Over a Town’, which despite the title is a positive, ultimately optimistic story. There were only a few stories that didn’t work for me at all, generally characterised by an overindulgence in either clichéd or violent imagery, or perhaps an over-reliance on technique over story, but that’s a minor criticism of the collection as a whole because for the most part, it rocks.