2008 has proved to be a very, very dismal year for Philippine Speculative Fiction. No great shakes compared to the output last year. Still, this year PSF had its moments: A Spec Fic story winning the Philippines Free Press Literary Award (Keeping Time by F.H. Batacan), Two Filipinos published in the International Issue of Weird Tales (chiles samaniego and Rochita Leonen Ruiz), and seven honorable mentions at the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: -Hamog by Joanna Paula L. Calias -The Datu’s Daughters by Raymond Falgui -Pedro Diyego’s Homecoming by Apol Lejano-Massebieau -In Earthen Vessels by Rodello Santos, -Sidhi” and “Stella for Star” by Yvette Natalie U. Tan -The Ascension of Our Lady Boy by Mia Tijam -The River Stone Heart of Maria Dela Rosa by Kate Aton-Osias. The year has been criminally underwhelming when it comes to both output and the quality of the stories being published both in print and online. Among those stories, only a few are worthy of mentioning or discussing. This year I combed through most of the print publications which featured speculative fiction. The only overt SF anthology would be Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo’s awful Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy. Once you get past its equally awful cover, you know you’re better off reading something else. Tales is mostly an awkward collection of ‘fantastic tales’ written by writers commissioned by Hidalgo. To get to the stories worth reading, you’d have to endure the bad or mediocre ones. Out of the twenty stories in Tales only three or four are worth a damn. Kenneth Yu’s Philippine Genre Stories didn’t have a good year either. Despite the projected four issues, only one came out (Philippine Genre Stories Volume 4). Story Philippines came out with two issues for 2008 which featured a host of overtly SF stories but with varied qualities which range from ‘meh’ to ‘mediocre’. Like last year, I wasn’t able to keep up with the SF stories published in Philippines Free Press. By some weird stroke of luck (or lack thereof), the issues that I was able to get my hands on didn’t even feature SF stories. By the end of the year, Free Press underwent some staff changes which included Adam David as the resident book reviewer. So far he has reviewed Gerry Alangulan’s Elmer and Khavn’s collection, Ultraviolins, which may be construed as ‘spec fic’. Mia Tijam and local spec fic’s golden boy Charles Tan published the ‘Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler’ on-line. The sampler was met with resounding applause, earning kudos from the international SF scene and from writers such as Cory Doctorow and Anna Tambour. The sampler featured some of the best local SF stories so far including Dean Alfar’s ‘Six from Downtown’, Doug Candano’s ‘Dreaming Valhalla’, which was last year’s best SF story, and Michael A. R. Co’s excellent ‘The God Equation’ which should be catapulted into massive success by now. FHM Philippines jumped into the SF bandwagon with their Erotica: Ladies Confessions annual which featured erotica stories with a fantastic bent. Like Tales, this was an awful collection of stories. The stories were largely disappointing, even to some writers’ libido. This 2009, we’ve got a more promising year for PSF with an interesting array of publications to come such as Joseph Nacino and Dean Alfar’s secondary world anthology The Farthest Shore, Yvette Tan’s much awaited collection Waking the Dead and the Dean and Nikki Alfar’s Philippine Speculative Fiction 4. More are under the wraps including an anthology on criticism on PSF and a massive horror/sci-fi/fantasy collection from a major publisher. So here are five of 2008’s best speculative fiction stories. I didn’t actually have a hard time compiling the list. It was easy to discern the best of the lot since, like I previously mentioned, only a handful of stories were remarkable. I’d also have to note that I wasn’t able to read Leonen Ruiz’ Weird Tales story (The Wordeaters). 1. Time and the Orpheus-Chiles Samaniego (Weird Tales) Unlike last year’s ‘The Saint of Elsewhere’, ‘Time and the Orpheus’ mines down a different kind of rabbit-hole and emerges into a stretch of Wong Kai War-esque aestheticism (gloomy surroundings occasionally strewn with subdued neon-lights, jazz music and kinetic atmospherics). Like true mark of a ‘weird tale’, Orpheus doesn’t all too encompass the supernatural but it is often unsettling, like sailing through remarkably lucid waters under iron cast-skies. Or like a late night encounter in the murky districts of the city. Martinés- Anna Felicia Sanchez (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy) ‘Martinés’ wonderfully revitalizes the folk tale with Sanchez’s unique approach to the dry and dredged up tropes of Filipino folklore. Like Douglas Candano’s ‘A Reply to A Query’, what Martinés does is it takes the reader back into a time when myth became the stuff of possibilities, crossed boundaries with the everyday, hinging on the borders of time, bloodlines and the shape of things to come. I’d also have to say that ‘Martinés’ features one of the most darkly mesmerizing creatures ever to emerge this side of the world. Blink, Wake Up- Mia Tijam (Philippine Genre Stories 4) The story reads like a Lynchian mind trip into the vast chambers of the sub/unconscious and out into the cosmos. While its varying degrees of expositions and hallucinogenic tendencies leave you wanting for more (it’s the shortest story in the issue), the story winds up and sits into your system long after you’ve finished it. While Tijam’s stories have been remarkable for their eerie sense of melancholia (see ‘Wishes Do Come True’, and ‘The Ascension of Lady Boy’), ‘Blink, Wake Up’ resists positing into the complex variations of a ‘genre story’ and possibilities presented by its heavily fragmented structure. Bound- Nikki Alfar (Rogue Magazine, May 2008) In terms of writing aesthetics alone, ‘Bound’ reads like something out of a book written by a long forgotten scribe for fairy kings and queens; or a first hand account of a captured woodland pixie. Reveling on the story’s sexually charged premise, ‘Bound’ proceeds to weave a tale about the negotiations, compromise and all-too consuming desire. Seek Ye Whore- Yvette Tan (Rogue Magazine, July 2008) Like ‘Time and the Orpheus’, ‘Seek Ye Whore’ (a play on ‘Siquijor‘) has ‘weird tale’ written all over it. Suffice it to say that no description would fit how remarkable unsettling the tale is. Mail-order brides, mouth watering lunches and sex with displaced body parts are just a few of the things loitering around this black comedy of sex, marriage and stereotyping. This year, I’m hanging my balls out there for the taking: I’m also going to feature five of the year’s ‘Low 5’ SF stories, in no particular order. Well, not really ‘worst’ in the sense that these stories should have never seen the light of day (well, maybe). These stories are the most disappointing and unremarkable of the lot. Haunted – B.J. Patino (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy) Meandering and exasperating, Patino thankfully cuts the story short. ‘Haunted’ is an uninteresting exercise into ‘domestic paranoia’ which never gets going until the last few paragraphs.  Most of the ‘hauntings’ feel like displaced incipit from another bland horror story. Love and Noir in the Time of Call Center – Joseph Nacino (FHM Erotica Collection) While Nacino has been consistent with his output, this story is one large disappointment. The story reads like a convoluted set piece from one of the minds of the Saw filmmakers (like Repo! The Genetic Opera) or a hackneyed attempt in channeling bits of Tarantino’s visceral stylings. Mallinda the Lovely – Tara F.T. Sering (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy) A botched working of the doppelganger story line. The story is so short there is nothing left to work on except for the protagonist’s angst which essentially sets the tone of the whole story into a non-engaging rant. Unlike Mia Tijam’s ‘Wishes Do Come True’ (Philippines Free Press, May 2008), which also explores the doppelganger territory, ‘Mallinda..’ doesn’t give us much to actually care about the protagonist. The only thing we know about her is that she hates being happy. 4. Graveyard Shift- Andrea Peterson (Tales of Fantasy and Enchantment) Like Charles Tan’s ‘Urban Legends’ (Philippine Speculative Fiction 3) or Nacino’s ‘Love and Noir..’ Peterson’s story is an attempt to suffuse mythic urban/folk creatures into a contemporary setting. ‘Graveyard Shift’ is stale and it doesn’t really take off given the story’s premise. 5. The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Heartbreak – Ian Rosales Casocot (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy) I know, this won second place in last year’s Philippine Graphic Fiction awards but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It seems like a reworking of Dean Alfar’s ‘The Kite of Stars’ only with a protagonist brimming with such passion and stripped of substance. Epefania is characterized as a mindless barrio lass looking to get hooked up. That’s about it for 2008. Pretty boring compared with the previous years. But still, the most important thing is that we were able to make some noise in the international spec fic community. Still, I would’ve preferred a year with very minimal output but has stories which can be featured in a Year’s Best anthology, like what all PSF geeks dream about.

2008 has proved to be a very, very dismal year for Philippine Speculative Fiction. No great shakes compared to the output last year. Still, this year PSF had its moments: A Spec Fic story winning the Philippines Free Press Literary Award (Keeping Time by F.H. Batacan), Two Filipinos published in the International Issue of Weird Tales (chiles samaniego and Rochita Leonen Ruiz), and seven honorable mentions at the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror:

-Hamog by Joanna Paula L. Calias

-The Datu’s Daughters by Raymond Falgui

-Pedro Diyego’s Homecoming by Apol Lejano-Massebieau

-In Earthen Vessels by Rodello Santos,

-Sidhi” and “Stella for Star” by Yvette Natalie U. Tan
-The Ascension of Our Lady Boy by Mia Tijam

-The River Stone Heart of Maria Dela Rosa by Kate Aton-Osias.

The year has been criminally underwhelming when it comes to both output and the quality of the stories being published both in print and online. Among those stories, only a few are worthy of mentioning or discussing.

This year I combed through most of the print publications which featured speculative fiction. The only overt SF anthology would be Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo’s awful Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy. Once you get past its equally awful cover, you know you’re better off reading something else. Tales is mostly an awkward collection of ‘fantastic tales’ written by writers commissioned by Hidalgo. To get to the stories worth reading, you’d have to endure the bad or mediocre ones. Out of the twenty stories in Tales only three or four are worth a damn.

Kenneth Yu’s Philippine Genre Stories didn’t have a good year either. Despite the projected four issues, only one came out (Philippine Genre Stories Volume 4). Story Philippines came out with two issues for 2008 which featured a host of overtly SF stories but with varied qualities which range from ‘meh’ to ‘mediocre’.

Like last year, I wasn’t able to keep up with the SF stories published in Philippines Free Press. By some weird stroke of luck (or lack thereof), the issues that I was able to get my hands on didn’t even feature SF stories. By the end of the year, Free Press underwent some staff changes which included Adam David as the resident book reviewer. So far he has reviewed Gerry Alangulan’s Elmer and Khavn’s collection, Ultraviolins, which may be construed as ‘spec fic’.

Mia Tijam and local spec fic’s golden boy Charles Tan published the ‘Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler’ on-line. The sampler was met with resounding applause, earning kudos from the international SF scene and from writers such as Cory Doctorow and Anna Tambour. The sampler featured some of the best local SF stories so far including Dean Alfar’s ‘Six from Downtown’, Doug Candano’s ‘Dreaming Valhalla’, which was last year’s best SF story, and Michael A. R. Co’s excellent ‘The God Equation’ which should be catapulted into massive success by now.

FHM Philippines jumped into the SF bandwagon with their Erotica: Ladies Confessions annual which featured erotica stories with a fantastic bent. Like Tales, this was an awful collection of stories. The stories were largely disappointing, even to some writers’ libido.

This 2009, we’ve got a more promising year for PSF with an interesting array of publications to come such as Joseph Nacino and Dean Alfar’s secondary world anthology The Farthest Shore, Yvette Tan’s much awaited collection Waking the Dead and the Dean and Nikki Alfar’s Philippine Speculative Fiction 4. More are under the wraps including an anthology on criticism on PSF and a massive horror/sci-fi/fantasy collection from a major publisher.

So here are five of 2008’s best speculative fiction stories. I didn’t actually have a hard time compiling the list. It was easy to discern the best of the lot since, like I previously mentioned, only a handful of stories were remarkable. I’d also have to note that I wasn’t able to read Leonen Ruiz’ Weird Tales story (The Wordeaters).

1. Time and the Orpheus-Chiles Samaniego (Weird Tales)

Unlike last year’s ‘The Saint of Elsewhere’, ‘Time and the Orpheus’ mines down a different kind of rabbit-hole and emerges into a stretch of Wong Kai War-esque aestheticism (gloomy surroundings occasionally strewn with subdued neon-lights, jazz music and kinetic atmospherics). Like true mark of a ‘weird tale’, Orpheus doesn’t all too encompass the supernatural but it is often unsettling, like sailing through remarkably lucid waters under iron cast-skies. Or like a late night encounter in the murky districts of the city.

  1. Martinés- Anna Felicia Sanchez (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy)

‘Martinés’ wonderfully revitalizes the folk tale with Sanchez’s unique approach to the dry and dredged up tropes of Filipino folklore. Like Douglas Candano’s ‘A Reply to A Query’, what Martinés does is it takes the reader back into a time when myth became the stuff of possibilities, crossed boundaries with the everyday, hinging on the borders of time, bloodlines and the shape of things to come. I’d also have to say that ‘Martinés’ features one of the most darkly mesmerizing creatures ever to emerge this side of the world.

  1. Blink, Wake Up- Mia Tijam (Philippine Genre Stories 4)

The story reads like a Lynchian mind trip into the vast chambers of the sub/unconscious and out into the cosmos. While its varying degrees of expositions and hallucinogenic tendencies leave you wanting for more (it’s the shortest story in the issue), the story winds up and sits into your system long after you’ve finished it. While Tijam’s stories have been remarkable for their eerie sense of melancholia (see ‘Wishes Do Come True’, and ‘The Ascension of Lady Boy’), ‘Blink, Wake Up’ resists positing into the complex variations of a ‘genre story’ and possibilities presented by its heavily fragmented structure.

  1. Bound- Nikki Alfar (Rogue Magazine, May 2008)

In terms of writing aesthetics alone, ‘Bound’ reads like something out of a book written by a long forgotten scribe for fairy kings and queens; or a first hand account of a captured woodland pixie. Reveling on the story’s sexually charged premise, ‘Bound’ proceeds to weave a tale about the negotiations, compromise and all-too consuming desire.

  1. Seek Ye Whore- Yvette Tan (Rogue Magazine, July 2008)

Like ‘Time and the Orpheus’, ‘Seek Ye Whore’ (a play on ‘Siquijor‘) has ‘weird tale’ written all over it. Suffice it to say that no description would fit how remarkable unsettling the tale is. Mail-order brides, mouth watering lunches and sex with displaced body parts are just a few of the things loitering around this black comedy of sex, marriage and stereotyping.

This year, I’m hanging my balls out there for the taking: I’m also going to feature five of the year’s ‘Low 5’ SF stories, in no particular order. Well, not really ‘worst’ in the sense that these stories should have never seen the light of day (well, maybe). These stories are the most disappointing and unremarkable of the lot.

  1. Haunted – B.J. Patino (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy)

Meandering and exasperating, Patino thankfully cuts the story short. ‘Haunted’ is an uninteresting exercise into ‘domestic paranoia’ which never gets going until the last few paragraphs.  Most of the ‘hauntings’ feel like displaced incipit from another bland horror story.

  1. Love and Noir in the Time of Call Center – Joseph Nacino (FHM Erotica Collection)

While Nacino has been consistent with his output, this story is one large disappointment. The story reads like a convoluted set piece from one of the minds of the Saw filmmakers (like Repo! The Genetic Opera) or a hackneyed attempt in channeling bits of Tarantino’s visceral stylings.

  1. Mallinda the Lovely – Tara F.T. Sering (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy)

A botched working of the doppelganger story line. The story is so short there is nothing left to work on except for the protagonist’s angst which essentially sets the tone of the whole story into a non-engaging rant. Unlike Mia Tijam’s ‘Wishes Do Come True’ (Philippines Free Press, May 2008), which also explores the doppelganger territory, ‘Mallinda..’ doesn’t give us much to actually care about the protagonist. The only thing we know about her is that she hates being happy.

4. Graveyard Shift- Andrea Peterson (Tales of Fantasy and Enchantment)

Like Charles Tan’s ‘Urban Legends’ (Philippine Speculative Fiction 3) or Nacino’s ‘Love and Noir..’ Peterson’s story is an attempt to suffuse mythic urban/folk creatures into a contemporary setting. ‘Graveyard Shift’ is stale and it doesn’t really take off given the story’s premise.

5. The Sugilanon of Epefania’s Heartbreak – Ian Rosales Casocot (Tales of Enchantment and Fantasy)

I know, this won second place in last year’s Philippine Graphic Fiction awards but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It seems like a reworking of Dean Alfar’s ‘The Kite of Stars’ only with a protagonist brimming with such passion and stripped of substance. Epefania is characterized as a mindless barrio lass looking to get hooked up.

That’s about it for 2008. Pretty boring compared with the previous years. But still, the most important thing is that we were able to make some noise in the international spec fic community. Still, I would’ve preferred a year with very minimal output but has stories which can be featured in a Year’s Best anthology, like what all PSF geeks dream about.