Links and Announcements

First off, congratulations to Miss Kristin Mandigma! Her short story “Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang” is now out as the October 2007 feature on the web-based Clarkesworld Magazine.

[ Check it out! ]

A few days ago, we got an announcement from Kenneth that the esteemed Butch Dalisay of the Pinoy Penman was writing a blog post about “Filipino” speculative fiction. I’m only too happy to link to it now:[ Filipino-ness in Fiction]Kenneth has also put up scans of the blog post as it appears in the national broadsheet the Philippine Star. Check out his post for those, and for some choice quotes.

Speaking of Kenneth – I’d just like to remind everyone that the deadline for submissions to the Philippine Genre Stories’ Christmas special is ending in a few days. October 5, people! Unless um, I missed an announcement about this? I sure hope not. I like to think I have four more days to cram XD

Interested parties may check out PGS’ submission guidelines.

I kind of slid out of the blogosphere a while back, so I missed some earlier (2005-2006) blog entries raising the issue of whether or not spec fic written by Filipinos should strive to reach a local audience. I spotted a few posts during a casual Google search today and thought I should post them here, if only for my reference:

[ Philippine Speculative Fiction (or Phabulism) ]by The Kawanga Kid, circa July 2006.

[ Salamanca and Other Matters on Philippine Literature ] by Dirg, circa Dec 2006. This is mostly an excellent review of Salamanca by Dean Alfar (which I haven’t read yet I’m sorry to admit ahahah but I WILL!). It’s a great post with lots of food for thought, such as the following passage:

This year’s fellow of the Dumaguete National Writers Workshop, Dominique Cimafranca, once shared his sentiment on this matter. He said that Philippine novels don’t have the preference for readership by the Filipinos, because they lack the element of entertainment, which is a very important ingredient for any novel. He said that Filipino writers aim more on writing to earn praises from literary critics rather than on writing to entertain general readers. This could be one of the explanations why the only Philippine novel that most young Filipinos know are Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

Professor Emil Flores also has an interesting take on speculative fiction in popular television. I wish I could better tie this up with what I wrote above re: non-Pinoy influences in Pinoy pop media, and a post I made earlier re: telefantasyas as spec fic influences, but I’m afraid typing up this post exhausted me. Anyway, this is a much more interesting read than anything I could put together:

[ Sugod Mga Sugo: Speculative Fiction in Filipino Popular Television ] by Prof. Emil Flores, via Panitikan.com.