Rocket Kapre – Fantastic Filipino Speculative Fiction

I didn’t see this until yesterday, but in May, “Alternative Alamat” received a great new review on Goodreads from one Robin Edman. No, it’s not great because of the rating – although that’s awesome – but because this is how I was hoping the anthology would be received by those unfamiliar not only with Philippine mythology, but Philippine culture as a whole.

For those who are looking for additional reviews of “Alternative Alamat”, I’ve compiled some of them on the book page, including the wonderfully in-depth story-by-story review from Jaymee Goh. (Scroll all the way down – this post reviews three books.)

It’s always cool when local speculative fiction gets reviewed by international publications. This time around it’s a Publisher’s Weekly (hooray!) review of “Lauriat”, the upcoming Filipino-Chinese speculative fiction anthology edited by Charles Tan. It’s a largely positive review, and my story “The Captain’s Nephew”, gets a nice mention. The book will also have stories from Kristine Ong Muslim, Christine Lao, Fidelis Tan, Andrew Drilon, Yvette Tan, Kenneth Yu, Gabriela Lee, Crystal Koo, Margaret Kawsek, Isabel Yap, Erin Chupeco, Marc Gregory Yu, and Douglas Candano.

The anthology is being published in the U.S. by Lethe Press, and I hope the local bookstores order copies. It will be released on August 1, though you can pre-order from stores like Amazon as early as now.

The second compilation of Mervin Malonzo’s “Tabi Po” aswang webcomic is now out on Flipreads. As with Book One, this is an English edition of the online comic (which is written in Filipino), with a translation by Adam David. Those of you who’ve seen the webomic, or Mervin’s cover and interior illustrations for “Alternative Alamat“  know that he’s one of the most talented Filipino comic book artists in the field today, and this is a great chance for fans to support his work, or for those who don’t speak Filipino to be introduced to his work, so go check it out.

Speculative Fiction writer, and Usok contributor, Yvette Tan was interviewed by Charlene F. Sawit on her blog “Field Trips to the Real World” as part of an ongoing series called “Postcards on Writing.” The interview came out on the 4th of June, but I haven’t had the time to link to it until now. Go check it out if you haven’t already: Yvette talks about good stories, what creeps her out, and being labelled as a horror writer.

Another year, another #RP612fic… is what I’d like to say, but the rate at which our twitter-fiction celebration grows from year to year never ceases to astonish me. We even made the news this time, with GMA and ABS-CBN and Katipunan Magazine each doing stories on #RP612fic, and listing their favorite stories.We were also named Hashtag of the Week by the Philippine Star Supreme:

It’s reached the point where I can’t do my usual screengrab-and-paste aggregation of all the stories. What I’ve done instead is turned the search results for #RP612fic into a PDF–a 506 PAGE PDF, to be precise. It’s not as pretty as a screen capture, but my poor, old, PC just couldn’t take the size of the image, and it would take me too long to efficiently cu it by batches.

Before I give out the link to the PDF though, a few disclaimers: it includes every instance that #RP12fic was used in a tweet over the last few days, and while most of these are stories, some are not. This is also a raw list, as again it wasn’t feasible for me to pick and choose, so there are some bad eggs here, personal attacks masquerading as fic, or “jokes” in bad taste fueled by an ugly racism… but these are in the minority. A few bits of adult content – nothing raunchy – and a ton of slash fic, so if you’re offended by that, proceed with caution.

As a whole though, there was a lot of humor in this batch, and most people seemed to have a lot of fun looking sideways at history – and it shows. Here’s the PDF.

Here are around 30 of my personal favorites. Once again, thank you all for participating, and see you next year!

There are more Philippine Dr. Who fans on Twitter than I thought. A *lot* of WHO-related tweets…Who else would wear a mobile suit?

And then we were all obliterated, Independence Day style.
Ol’ Douglas is fast catching up to Magellan as the most popular foreign character in #RP612fic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a reminder that the 11th annual Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention (TOYCON) takes place this weekend. Here’s some relevant info:

11th Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention 2012
June 15-16-17,2012
10:00am – 9:00 pm
SM Megatrade Hall 1-2-3, and Conference Room

June 15 – retailers day only (toys, comics and collectibles sales)
June 16 – retailers day, cosplay contest, exhibits, bands etc.
June 17 – retailers day, cosplay contest, exhibits, bands etc.

www.toyconph.com
www.facebook.com/toyconph
www.twitter.com/officialtoycon

Program schedule – http://www.toyconph.com/p/program.html

Contest mechanics – http://www.toyconph.com/p/contest.html
(no need to pay any registration fee to join in our contest)

Contact us only at
email: toyconph@gmail.com
PM us: http://www.facebook.com/messages/toyconph

TICKETS
entrance fee: P100/day

For Philippine komik fans, there will also be an artists’ alley where some of your favorite local artists will be doing sketches, and likely selling their komiks as well. Here’s the list as posted on 100 Araw ng Komiks:

JUN 16

Heubert Khan Michael (Vampirella)

Gilbert Monsanto (Bayan Knights)

Lui Antonio

Elmer Damaso (Hero Factoty / former Culture Crash)

JUN 16 – 17

Ariel Atienza (KOMIKON / West Side / Class)

Lyndon Gregorio (KOMIKON / Beerkada)

Jon Zamar (KOMIKON / Digmaang Salinlahi)

Sherry Zamar (KOMIKON)

Lei Muncal (KOMIKON)

Melvin Calingo (former Culture Crash)

Joanah Calingo (Cresci Prophecies)

Freely Abrigo (Kulas / Kapitan Tog)

Tepai Pascual (Mark 9 verse 27 / Maktan 1521)

Mel Casipit (Mukat)

Rommel Estanislao (Lipad / Tupang Itim / Bruho Barbero)

Ruben Nacion (BENNAC Cartoons)

Last June 5, science fiction master Ray Bradbury passed away. GMA7 News Online had an article up yesterday featuring the thoughts of Filipino speculative fiction writers on the death of the great author. Included in the piece are Karl de Mesa, Joseph Nacino, Carljoe Javier, Dean Francis Alfar, and Timothy James M. Dimacali.

This coming Tuesday is June 12, Independence Day here in the Philippines, an occasion which I, and a growing number of Filipino writers, like to commemorate with a little something we call #RP612fic.

For anyone lat to the party, here’s all you need to know:

• What is #RP612fic? It’s Filipino authors coming together on Twitter to create tweet-length stories (130 characters, because you need to leave space for the hashtag) and sending them out into the wild with the #RP612fic hashtag. When the event is over, I’ll collate all submissions into a single post here on the site.
  • What’s a Hashtag? It’s a word/code you put in your tweet after the “#”. It acts as a label of sorts and makes it easier for me to find all participating stories.
• When does this take place? At least once a year on Independence Day, but starting in 2009 we also do it to participate in other events, such as a Blog Action Day. For Independence Day 2012, I’ll be looking for stories sent from 6PM on June 11, to 6AM of June 13.
• What kind of stories should I submit? For Independence Day, I’d love to see alternative history stories, but it’s not like I’m going to tell you to delete your 130 character realist micro fiction opus.
• What if I’m not on Twitter and I want to participate? Just send me your tweet length stories via rocketkapre[at]gmail.com and I’ll try to tweet them or at least include them in my compilation.

Spread the word! For those who want to see the previous RP612fic stories, you can check out these links:

• RP612fic 2009
• RP612fic 2010
• RP612fic Corals and Reefs Edition
• RP612fic 2011

(Image of old school Philippine soldiers from Filipiniana.net)

This Friday, SM Megamall is hosting an exhibit of artwork from a host of independent komiks artists. Dubbed “Comics Arthology – Imagination Takes Flight“, the exhibit opens 6pm on June 8 at the Artasia Gallery, 4th Floor, SM Megamall (Bldg A). Visitors will also have the opportunity to buy the artwork on display.

LONTAR is a new quarterly literary journal of Southeast Asian speculative fiction in English, published and distributed by Math Paper Press in Singapore. It’s now open to unsolicited submissions — it uses an online submissions system (you can’t submit by email) and you can find that and the guidelines here. They are accepting not only fiction, but non-fiction, poetry, and comics. Of special interest to Filipinos is that the poetry editor is none other than our very own Kristing Ong Muslim.

Here’s an excerpt from their guidelines, which should give you an idea of what they’re looking for:

The editors of LONTAR are looking for quality literary writing with elements of the fantastic*, which is in some way connected with the cultures, traditions, mythologies, folk religions, and/or daily life in Southeast Asia**. While we are happy to look at works by writers outside of the region, we want to actively encourage Southeast Asian writers to submit your work.