A Side Look at the PSF5 TOC

Courtesy of Kyu, here's the tentative table of contents of the upcoming Philippine Speculative Fiction volume 5 edited by Nikki Alfar and Vin Simbulan that's coming out this February 2010. It also has a shortlist of possible story submissions-- so for those writers, it's time to bring out those kneecappers, hmm? *winkwinknudgenudge*

But seriously, was looking over the TOC and it looks like a lot of stories-- 25 in all. Geez, is it me or are the number of stories in the PSF volumes growing every year? Based on charles' database, PSF4 had 24 stories, PSF3 had 21, PSF2 had 19, and PSF1 had 18.

What's nice though is that 12 stories were written by women so there's no Genderfail here. Moreover, I don't recognize 1/3 of the names here so that's also good: PSF has always had the rep of introducing new writers to the stage.

On the question of why should there be more recognized writers than unrecognized ones, well... the field of local spec fic still needs its writers to have some body of work and this is one way of doing it. Maybe in a couple of years, the ratio can shift from recognized to unrecognized.

Funny enough, me and andrew hold the awards for longest runs on the PSF volumes. But Allan B. Lopez still holds the award for the longest-title for a short story in PSF 2.

What's even cooler? It looks like Alex Osias has a new Pinoy Western story in the collection. Yes! Score another one for Filipino dicklit!