ICYMI: links round-up, November 2021

• Kris Thomas on The Unknown World Of Sinhala Science Fiction, at Roar Media. (11 November)

Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures

Now here’s an stellar anthology, with more than half of the contributors being Asian/diaspora. Of the twenty-four stories, favourites include the opener ‘Listen: A Memoir’ by Priya Sarukkai Chabria, ‘In Two Minds’ by Joel R. Hunt, and ‘The Birdsong Fossil’ by D. K. Mok, all of which are easily good enough for award nominations. The overall mood is bittersweet and largely optimistic, but with pauses for melancholy and reflection on what a mess we’ve made of this planet. Congrats to the editors on putting together an excellent constellation of stories.

ICYMI: links round-up, July 2021

• The History and Politics of Wuxia from the medieval through the modern era, by Jeannette Ng at Tor.com (2 July)
• Singapore now has its own superhero: Big Red Dot. (12 July)
• Arabic YA Literature’s Fantastic Worlds and Where to Find Them: a Zoom discussion led by Susanne Abou Ghaida, on YouTube. (12 July)
• “State of Matter is on a quest to define what Speculative Fiction means from a South Asian perspective.” – congratulations on State of Matter’s first issue. (15 July)
• The Mithila Review Show: In Conversation with Lavanya Lakshminarayan. (16 July)
• Tarun K. Saint interviews M. G. Vassanji, at The Beacon. (17 July)
• The latest free issue of Southeast Asian Review of English (SARE) is edited by Gabriela Lee: “Worldbuilding and the Asian Imagination”. (18 July)

ICYMI: links round-up, June 2021

• Stephen Theaker reviews Tarun K. Saint’s anthology The Gollancz Book of South Asian Speculative Fiction, available in the UK from 3 June as New Horizons. (4 February).
• Indrapramit Das interviewed about his writing process in The Hindustan Times. (4 June)
• A roundtable discussion on Indian Science Fiction with Suparno Banerjee, Sumit Bardhan, Sandipan Ganguly and Dip Ghosh, at Facebook’s Asian Science Fiction & Fantasy group. (6 June)
• Lavie Tidhar on The Unsung History of Jewish Writers and the Birth of Science Fiction, at LitHub. (14 June)
• Ng Yi-Sheng summarises Dean Francis Alfar’s talk Asian Speculative Fiction 101, at Facebook. (25 June)
• Trailer for Marvel Studios’ Chinese superhero movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, in cinemas from September. (25 June)

ICYMI: Links round-up, May 2021

• Kazuo Ishiguro goes into the history of his novel Never Let Me Go and compares it to his latest novel Klara and the Sun, at Goodreads. (1 May)
• E. Lily Yu’s personal ‘A Love Letter to Libraries’ at Uncanny Magazine. (4 May)
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews E. Lily Yu’s first non-genre novel On Fragile Waves and assesses the minimal fantasy therein, at Locus. (10 May)
• “Is there such a thing as Indian science fiction?” Sumit Bardhan assesses Suparno Banerjee’s Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity, at Scroll.in. (16 May)
• Sean Wilsey in conversation with Haruki Murakami, at InsideHook. (25 May)
• Kerry Dodd reviews the Strugatsky Brothers’ The Doomed City, at the BSFA Review. (29 May)

Arrivals: Usman T. Malik’s Midnight Doorways

Slightly jetlagged from its journey all the way from Lahore, Pakistan to Liverpool, England, but otherwise in excellent shape: Usman T. Malik’s limited edition and illustrated collection Midnight Doorways. Looking forward very much to getting into this, and do remind me to nominate the lovely cover for a BSFA ‘Best Artwork’ Award at the end of the year. Have a sample: the short story ‘The Wandering City’ at the Arizona State University website.

ICYMI: Links round-up, April 2021

• Hillary Kelly butts up against Haruki Murakami’s latest collection First Person Singular, reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. (1 April) … Rob Doyle at The Guardian is a little kinder, but not by much. (12 April)
• A 1-hour podcast from Kuzhali Manickavel on writing English in India, plus a short story she discusses, ‘Item Girls’, at Granta Online. (2 April)
• Aamer Hussain on Usman T. Malik: The Fabulist of Lahore at Dawn. (4 April)
• Singaporean spec-fic authors Suffian Hakim and Jocelyn Suarez discuss telling dark stories at Singapore Time Out. (5 April)
• Emad El-Din Aysha interviews Malaysian writer Chuah Gaut Eng about her only science fiction story ‘Memoirs of an Aranaean Harpist’ at Eksentrika.com. (22 April)
• Lee Mandelo at Tor.com reviews Terminal Boredom, the first of two collections from the iconic Japanese writer Izumi Suzuki. (22 April)
• Asian SEA Story on Facebook has an overview of 10 ghosts and ghouls from across Southeast Asia. (25 April)

Short story: ‘The Knowing’ by Neelu Singh

Neelu Singh’s short fantasy ‘The Knowing’, at Mithila Review. (22 March 2021)

ICYMI: Links round-up, January–March 2021

• Desirée Custers on Arab and African Science Fiction: (re)claiming the past, reflecting on the present, and envisioning the future. (26 February)
• Ziya Jones interviews Zeyn Joukhadar about her new novel The Thirty Names of Night: “It’s Powerful to Let People Love You with a Name that You Chose for Yourself”, at Hazlitt. (2 March)
• Okuma Yuichiro interviews Liu Cixin on Humanity, Crisis, and Changes at Chinese Literature Today. (5 March)
• Aliette de Bodard at LocusMag: excerpt from the interview ‘Where Is It Written?’ (15 March)
• Ng Yi-Sheng at Facebook on Zen Cho’s 2020 novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water ... some useful commentary. (21 March)
• Emad El-Din Aysha interviews Dr. Csicsery-Ronay Istvan on The Golden Mean Between Local and Global SF, at The Levant News. (25 March)
• Marc de Faoite’s review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun at The Vibes.com. (27 March 2021)
• Jaideep Unudurti reviews the latest tome from J. Furcifer Bhairav and Rakesh Khanna, Blaft Publications’ encyclopedic Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India at Open Magazine. (26 March)
• The latest Strange Horizons issue is a Palestinian Special. (29 March)

Adorable!

Minimum 45 degrees means they really are spectacularly sorry!