Skip to main content

Jaymee Goh's Intro to Malaysian SFF.

From Jeff Vandermeer's Ecstatic Days, Jaymee Goh writes (too) briefly about Malaysian science fiction and fantasy:
I’m not home enough to be able to judge Malaysian sf/f very much. I’ve got one book from PTS Publishing, and I didn’t like it. The writing was poor, like that of a new scifi writer who has yet to master the craft of storytelling before going on about How! Cool! This! Hero! Is! I like wish fulfillment fiction as much as the next person – it’s one of the reasons why I read sf/f – but like my friend cycads says, about another different genre of writing in Malaysia, “Can do better.”
However she fails to give any examples, save for a link to the science fiction section on the PTS website.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Chet26/7/10 9:06 am

    Ted - you can leave a comment to ask for more examples.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ted Mahsun26/7/10 9:33 am

    I should, huh?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jha5/8/10 1:38 pm

    If you want to know the book, it's Adamus, from PTS.

    I wrote too briefly on the SFF scene because it's barely there. Much of it is in Malay, and I'm not home enough to be able to dedicate myself to look for them (that, and my Malay is pretty poor! which, as it happens, is more encouragement for me to look for Malay SFF, if I were home more often).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ted Mahsun5/8/10 9:32 pm

    Oh hi jaymee, thanks for dropping by.

    Thanks also for telling me the title of the book you were referring to. Now I'm intrigued to check it out myself.

    If it's of any use, there's a (fairly recently updated) website dedicated to Malay(sian) SFF here. Their SFF book registry isn't complete yet though.

    And if you're back in Malaysia, or can get someone to send you a copy, check out 1515 by Faisal Tehrani, if you haven't already. It's what you might call "literary fantasy" or -ugh- magic realism, so it isn't marketed as SFF but it's definitely a fantasy, and a brilliant one, too boot.

    It is a crime that the book has never been translated into English but apparently the author himself told me the reason why is that no translator has been brave enough to translate it.

    Such a shame! Oh, and if you do get it one day, you'll have to drag out your old kamus dewan cos you'll be needing it :D (but it's worth it... I swear!)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm going to Clarion West!

So yeah! I'm going to Clarion West this year! If you didn't know, Clarion West is a really awesome science fiction and fantasy writing workshop that runs for six weeks in summer every year at Seattle and is usually taught by a faculty of award-winning authors and editors. Many students who attend this workshop also go on to have illustrious writing careers of their own too. I've been meaning to attend this workshop (or its sister workshop, Clarion UCSD, which is the original Clarion workshop but runs in San Diego around the same time) for years now but never had the courage to apply. Many reasons as to why: didn't think I'd have money for the most part, didn't think I was good enough, didn't think I could leave work long enough, didn't think I could leave family behind, etc. But something sparked inside of me late last year. I felt I should at least give it a go this time round. So I did. They requested a sample of my best work and an applicatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dedicated by Burgess.

I've been wanting to blog this for ages, but I've never managed to make the scanner work properly... that is till now. Some years back, my dad was browsing the shelves of NovelHut, Ipoh's best second-hand bookstore, and found a copy of Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger . Price? RM2. (That would be approximately USD$0.60 or GBP£0.30). Did I mention it was a hardcover first edition? Here's the dedication page, with the famous dedication written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written in Arab script, a norm early last century. Nowadays, Malay is written in Romanised form. The dedication says: " Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu " which translates into "To my friends in Malaya." On the opposite page, proof this is the first edition. A first edition is probably valuable by itself. But this copy has something extra that makes it even more special--a personal dedication by Burgess himself to a friend: If you can't make the writing out...
15 comments
Read more

REVIEW: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami.

UPDATE: My Wind/Pinball review can be found here . ISBN: n/a Publisher: n/a Paperback: 160 pages In Murakami fan circles, simply owning a copy of Pinball, 1973 is a mark of hardcore-ness. Like Hear the Wind Sing before it, Haruki Murakami does not allow English translations of Pinball, 1973 to be published outside of Japan. Back in the 80s, Alfred Birnbaum translated it into English and Kodansha published it as a novel for Japanese students who wanted to improve their English. While the English edition of Hear the Wind Sing continues to be reprinted and sold in Japan (and available for a moderate sum via eBay, see my review ), Kodansha stopped its reprint runs of the English edition of Pinball, 1973 and has now become a collector's item, fetching vast amounts of money on auction sites and reseller stores. Last time I checked, the cheapest copy went for USD$2500. Of course, Murakami addicts or the curious can always download a less than legal PDF of the book, painst...
18 comments
Read more