The Philippine Online Chronicles

Crossed Genres is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine that “supports equal rights and equal treatment regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation or religion”. It releases monthly themed issues, challenging writers to combine that month’s theme genre with science fiction and/or fantasy (hence the name “Crossed Genres”) and has released an anthology called “Year One”, a collection of stories selected from the first twelve issues of the magazine. The theme for May’s Issue 18, the subject of this review, is “Eastern”, broadly defined as any story set in an Eastern culture. Spoiler Warning from here on out, so read the stories for free here (and if you like the issue, donate or buy a downloadable digital copy) then pop on back for the review.

I Will Come Home

This is not Earth, but in the main habitat ring of the Hong of Koan-tu stands a Nipponese, Kido Matsaru, chopping up cabbage, his woks filled with boiling broth. It is as though he has never left.

And yet Matsaru has no fond memories of Earth. His father is a powerful leader who has once controlled his life, from his studies to his choice of a partner. Once Matsaru loved a boy, but that boy has been sent away. Leaving Earth, Matsaru finally assumes a semblance of control over his own life.

But one day a messenger arrives. The Earth, filled now with dead seas and run by a single Senate, is on the brink of collapse under a greedy President. Matsaru has to come back to head their family’s zaibatsu and fight the administration.

I love the initial image of a young man cooking, in a steamy kitchen located off-Earth, and a later scene featuring two of the characters sitting on a tatami mat and sipping miso soup in low gravity. I do believe that if we Filipinos ever leave this planet we will also bring with us our adobo and our kare-kare and our bagoong and our steamed rice, the same way we bring all these distinctly Filipino foods whenever we leave the country. These details lend an air of authenticity to the story, as do the stiff, formal, Zen-businessman dialogues, with lines like, “This would afford our organization many opportunities for difficulty.” Talk about an understatement.

I find the technology crafted by author Chris Fletcher to be interesting. However, with the big reveal followed by a short denouement, I felt that the story ended too abruptly, as though it were simply an introduction to a longer narrative. And what a tragic tale this is, leaving us with the worst reason to finally decide to return home

The Only Motion Is Returning

Another story set off-Earth, with our planet visible in the distance, dying. Another story about longing for home, and bringing it with you into space. In the universe created by author Del Dryden’s, on the moon sits Earthlight Gardens Resort, a luxury hotel doing vigorous business catering to tourists. Li and her grandmother, the hotel’s curator, have their roots in Beijing, and so they have brought China to this lunar space, complete with the tropical setting, the dumplings and the tea. In the atrium, the décor mirrors the current season on Earth: “The stream was made even more charming by the addition of petals from the delicate flowering trees that dotted its edges in tidy patches of moss surrounded by rock. Cherry blossoms now, because it was spring in China. When fall came to Beijing, and Qian had to start wearing a jacket, maple leaves would be scattered across the water instead.”

Despite the orientations and safety videos, some tourists still get lost in the maintenance tubes. One day a tourist gets lost in the tunnels, and the hotel is rocked by a quake. Is this an explosion? Is the lost tourist in fact a bomber? Li and her grandmother flee from the elevator and are kept in a room by the emergency lockdown. Inside, while waiting for news from outside the hotel, Li and her grandmother talk about home, and lost loves, and returning.

Such a lovely title, and such a soft, tender story. This is one of my favorite parts: “She had traveled the world and then, once her wanderlust was satisfied, she had moved to the one place where she could see all the world at once. Or at least half of it at a time.”

While reading it I was expecting the story to go a certain way, but then it came to a halt, slowed down, and urged me to sit down for tea. I enjoyed this story.

Goddess

The story opens with a horrendous dream and an intriguing premise: a deity that dreams? But no, the collective narrator (the story is told in first-person plural) is no deity, but a three-headed, six-armed mutant rescued from squalor in a refugee camp. “There are three of us”, says Goddess, “though only two ever speak, and only one of us can be heard.” These are the heads: Muniya, who speaks. Bindiya, who speaks with a foul-mouth but is never heard. Chanda, who does nothing but sleep, and is the source of the nightmares.

Lavanya Karthik presents a tale of Hinduism gone crazy, faith replaced by a false religion revolving around money and power and a zeal so blind it is dangerous. At the beginning of the story a character talks about a woman killed for her land by followers of the Goddess. She’s a witch, they say as they burn her, and now the children are safe.

Oh what a familiar story. But Karthik’s use of an interesting perspective and simple narration makes this a compelling one.

The Last Rickshaw

Stephanie Lai’s little story about a man losing his lifelong occupation to technology in steampunk Malaysia didn’t impress me as much as it should have. A couple of paragraphs in, it suddenly dawned on me that it had a similar storyline to Pia Roxas’s excellent “Last Bus Ride”, which bagged the second place in the 2005 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature for Futuristic Fiction. In Roxas’s story, buses are being phased out in favor of the faster and sleeker bullet trains. In “The Last Rickshaw”, rickshaws are being replaced in the city by Rapid Transport Carriers. Trolley buses. Airships. A character rants: “With every line he reads he becomes more angry, feels more helpless; the rickshaws are just fine for the environment, better than these giant airships obscuring the sun, better than the single occupant bikes clogging up the roads.”

I found the story too much of a one-note. I did not feel an increase in outrage or drama – to me, the entire story felt like several variations of a single scene (Rickshaws to be phased out, Yu doesn’t approve, everyone else does) that failed to move me.

Or perhaps this was just brought by the loss in novelty, having read, as I’ve mentioned, a similar story years ago. In “Last Bus Ride” Roxas presents a tense commute, rallyists screaming in the night, the cold clinical interior of the trains believed to be “the future”. Though I found Lai’s story’s final image of a man riding in an RTC with the remains of a rickshaw poignant enough, the story in its entirety just didn’t reach that same level.

When the Earth and Sea Swapped Places

Kaolin Fire’s story assumes that the reader is already familiar with the “kappa” from Japanese folklore, so I urge everyone to read up on them before diving into this story. I have to admit that I wasn’t familiar with this creature and got quite lost on my first reading, but appreciated the story’s cleverness after some research and a second reading. With a creature that keeps the souls of the humans it has eaten standing before you, what’s a girl to do but bow and ask a small favor?

Growing Up

This issue closes with an essay by Joyce Chng about growing up in Singapore, writing in English instead of Mandarin Chinese, immersing herself in SFF, and treating writing as both an act of rebellion and as a much-needed sanctuary. As a Filipino woman writing in English and living in an archipelago with a colonial past, I can very much relate to her musings. She writes, “English became a shining blade. I wrote more, perhaps to prove to my parents that I could write well. I wrote more and my command of Mandarin Chinese grew cobwebs, became rusty and eventually atrophied. I thought I could burn bridges and set myself free.” But how better it is to cross bridges than burn them.

[Image source: “The New Enlightenment” by Padibut Preeyawongsakul, from Crossed Genres #18]