A Look Back at the Unmasked Ones, Part 1

It took me a while but I managed to finish reading the Fully-Booked contest's short-list. An interesting bunch of stories, to say the least.

Of the eight stories there, one was a horror story ("Stella for Star"), two were science-fiction ("The Great Philippine Space Mission" and "The Omega Project"), and two were written in the magical-realist style ("A Song for Vargas" and "A Strange Map of Time"). The rest were hard to categorize except that one was a horror-satire ("Monstrous Cycle"), another was an action-packed thriller dealing with math and religion, demons and angels ("The God Equation") and the last... I suppose the terms New Weird applies for its outright strangeness as some have deemed such an approach as the crux of speculative fiction ("Atha").

What's interesting to note that given such an eclectic bunch of stories, none of the above styles held supreme. On the other hand, it seemed like the weirder the story, the better as evidenced by the fact that the top two stories were hard to categorize. As such, the winning entries were:

1st place (tied) – “The God Equation” by Michael Co and “A Strange Map of Time by” Ian Casocot

2nd – “The Great Philippine Space Mission” by Philbert Dy
3rd - “Atha” by Michaela Atienza

So what does this mean?

I'm not going to review the individual stories but will refer you to three sites-- skinny, sean and dominique-- who did an excellent job of it, better than I'll ever do. However, I can give my two centavos on the matter. Of note is the backgrounds of the three reviewers as they came out with almost-differing assessments of the stories: which ones worked, which ones didn't and which one they considered the best.

(I may be wrong here but I found skinny's review coming from one with a background of the genre, dominique's with a more literary and mainstream pop culture approach, and sean's as dealing with the more technical aspects of the stories. But I digress.)

Personally, I thought that these stories were slipstream, given how all the writers tried to keep in touch with both genre and literary fiction even as they tried to transcend it. One could say there was a certain tension to the stories: the feeling I got was that the writers had struggled to stay true to the idea of a Filipino identity during the writing process. This was unlike Dean's first anthology of Philippine Speculative Fiction which ran the whole spectrum of genre to literary fiction. For example, compare Sean's story epic fantasy "Regiment" to Khavn's surrealist-social realist"The Family that Eats Soil." Nothing wrong with that, I know, but at least it gives me a clue to how the submissions were judged.

Likewise, I can also see the various influences that came on board as the stories were written. In skinny's interviews of the winners, Phil Dy cited SF satirist Douglas Adams while Mike Co pointed at spymaster Len Deighton and Michael Crichton of the techno-thriller fame (and yes, the excellent SF writer Alfred Bester too). Meanwhile, Mikey Atienza took a more literary approach as she enumerated Dave Eggers, Joseph Conrad and Toni Morrison, which was ironic considering how weird her story was. Funny enough, even Phil and Mike were outright fans of her story. (I thought she had the best turn of a phrase.)

I did see how some of the other stories were reminiscent or outrightly influenced. A lot of people were puzzled over the inclusion of "A Song of Vargas" (no author cited) in the short-list even as some have said it plagiarized from Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Personally, I didn't pick up this vibe though I did find it sorely in need of a good editor. After all, if one were to try to weave a magical-realist tale of a ship captain and a talking skull, one had better control of their prose. In this kind of a story, prose is all.

I'll continue with my part-time review, part-time commentaries of the stories on the morrow. In the meantime, I need to sleep...