Review
The Greenest Gecko
2017
Tor
Review by Peter Young in The White Notebooks #9 (June 2017).
A recent addition to the series of Tor Originals ebooks, Pirapokin’s novelette is not her first published work but she is happily a new Thai name on the spec-fic scene. It’s set in either an alternate-present or near-future South East Asia; I’d hesitate to specifically say it’s modelled on Thailand, although the parallels are implicitly there with the situation of a much-loved President of a country known as Bankim being succeeded by his playboy son, and the nation’s propensity for superstition being exploited by the country’s Ministry of Merit. There are references to a Third World War in the West and the President himself also being Lord of All Orbiting Planets. What sets the story off is the random interaction of one gecko with the ailing President, something that was perceived as particularly fortuitous and something that the Ministry wants to be duplicated at a later date. But for Fon, the lady put in charge of the whole strange project, things do not go according to plan; indeed she has no idea that her life is actually in peril. The story (slightly re-edited from its first appearance online) has a neat structure and a central absurdity that I found humorous and attractive, and I’d like to read more from whatever universe this is set in.