Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Can I Get A Woot?

Well, this is nice.

I just found out that Philipine Genre Stories has just accepted my Lovecraft-in-vein horror story for their 1st issue. Thankfully, this will justify my absence from a friend's housewarming party last Friday (sorry RJ!).

Of course, just in case I haven't mentioned before, dean also accepted my version of Aliens! In! The! Philippines! for the 2nd volume of the Philippine Speculative Fiction. So that's two stories to be published before the year ends, and three stories altogether for this year if I include the short-short Manual magazine accepted and published without telling me. (There are also pending stories in the pipeline but will wait and see for further developments.)

Funny enough, both stories represent a certain theme I'm trying to develop, a kind of synthesis of something dean and skinny have advocated online. dean of course is pushing for speculative fiction rooted in the Philipines whereas skinny wants an introduction of pulp stories in the field of local speculative fiction. Both ideas, I thought, have very good points so I thought why not combine both?

After all, there are a lot of science-fiction/fantasy/horror tropes in genre literature but nothing, I think, that deals with such-and-such and its effects on local culture. To be specific, in my aforementioned two stories, I tried to see how Filipinos would deal with two ideas that are common currency in genre stories abroad: extraterrestial aliens and the unspeakable horror akin to Lovecraft's stories.

This also forced me think and analyse "why this is so" when for example, local writers write about vampires or robots in a local setting. And its damn fun in trying to claim such ideas in a Filipino sense. A kind of empowerment, yes?

What's more thrilling is the fact that there are now two-- count 'em, two-- sources of local speculative fiction that can be bought on bookshelves.*

  • Philipine Genre Stories, of course, is a small publishing firm with the excellent goal of growing the readership for Philippine genre stories, including fantasy, science-fiction, speculative, crime, mystery, detective, horror, suspense. A most laudable goal, I would say.
  • Then there's dean's advocacy for fantastic literature with his annual Philippine Speculative Fiction, which is going from strength to strength every year.

Of course there are other compilations out there that push for specfic (like PsiCom and that book published by Anvil, Nine Supernatural Stories) but still, the two upcoming anthologies don't limit themselves to horror. Yes, I've also read bayaw's editorial SF antho debut with PsiCom but I can't find a link to it, dammit.

I am so hyped. Of course I'd be more hyped if you people would support such efforts to make local speculative fiction as good as to those abroad.

9 comments:

Dean said...

w00t!

JP said...

wOOt Hoot tOOt! This is very cool and very inspiring. :D

banzai cat said...

Hehe thanks guys. :-)

And JP! You! Update your blog! :-D

Mahesh Raj Mohan said...

Huzzah!!!!!!! :D :D :D :D You rock, dude. Great job!

banzai cat said...

Thanks mahesh! :-)

Don said...

woot!
heheh.

BTW, is that anvil antho available now? I can't seem to find one here.

yeah, the psicom SF antho did good. I was not expecting it to be that good.

LiVEwiRe said...

Big ol' Woot to The Gatto! Excellent news about the PGS. Will you still remember us when you're the really big ever-so-famous Gatto? ;)

skinnyblackcladdink said...

start calling yerself BANZAI! Cat, dude.

god i love that show.

banzai cat said...

fuhrer: Hehe thanks man. As far as I know the Anvil antho is available in most bookshops, including NBS. Try the filipiana section. As for the Psicom antho, will try to do a review. You too and let's compare notes. :-)

livewire: Will always remember my friends, friend livewire. Especially cat ones. ;-)

skinny: Congrats also, man. Hehe I think we'll meet up eventually with PGenre so we can debate with Dean when we do so.

And at least I'm not the shake-hands man. :-D