Tuesday, November 18, 2008

International Game-Face Day

I know this is a bit late but coming back last weekend, I heard two pieces of excellent news and I wanted to blog about it.



First is the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler which is now online. A kind of best-of speculative fiction collection in the Philippines from 2005 (when the first volume of the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology came out) to 2008, the sampler displays works of Philippine speculative fiction for those abroad interested in reading them.

The 11 stories were chosen by Charles Tan and Mia Tijam, an editing tag-team that is definitely strange bedfellows worthy of the name. Think of an editorial team composed of Jay Lake and... Harold Bloom? *winks*

Given that most of these stories were first published in print locally, having them online will help broaden the audience of these stories. And it also helps that charles, the promoter of this site, has a lot of online connections with the international genre market.

In other news, I heard that 31-year old Miguel Syjuco (good God, he's younger than me?!?) has won first place in the Man Asian Literary Prize. Ain't that a-- happy-- kick in the balls. Some people may wonder why do we need to compare our writing to the world. I say because we can and because this proves we can do writing of international stature. (More on this later...)

Hmmm... maybe I should start writing me own novel, eh? Any ideas?

Update: This just in! SF writer Cory Doctorow likes the sampler! Wow, I guess you can say we've now been boing-boinged.

And here's another one by Paul Raven of Futurismic, one from SF Signal, and one by fantasy writer JM McDermott.

(Links courtesy of didipusrex.)

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