Rocket Kapre – Fantastic Filipino Speculative Fiction

To those of you who have a copy of today’s (27 November 2009) Business World, you might be surprised to find a familiar piece of awesome SF artwork in the Weekender section… yes, opposite the articles on Susan Boyd and Adam Lambert ^_^:

Johanna Poblete of Business World has a feature on Rocket Kapre and excerpts from an interview with me, as well as her review of Usok 1. For those of you who can’t snag a copy of the paper, you can catch the article and the review at Business World’s site here. The review comes after the feature article. As with any print interview, there was more to the conversation than what made it into the final version, so when Johanna puts the full Q and A up on her site, I’ll let you all know.

While most of the sites/publications mentioned in the article should be familiar to you guys, for any newcomers to the site drawn here by the article (welcome lords and ladies!) here’s a quick rundown:

• The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories edited (usually) by Kenneth Yu
• The Philippine Daily Inquirer (and my Youngblood article)
• SF Signal
• Bibliophile Stalker run by Charles Tan
• The World SF News Blog
• Locus Online
• Angry Robot Books
• Io9
• Clockpunk Studios
• Fantasy Magazine
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies
  

Thanks to a few posts from Kyu, I’ve learned of two new pieces of fiction, and one creative non-fic piece, from Filipino SF authors which are now available online:

• “Malikmata” over at Writers Connect

• “Fifty-Five Percent” by Celestine Trinidad at Everyday Fiction

• “Wake From” by Mia Tijam, a creative non-fiction piece also up at Writers Connect

Table of Contents:

* The Startbox by Crystal Koo

* The Saint of Elsewhere: A Mystery by chiles samaniego

* Mouths to Speak, Voices to Sing by Kenneth Yu

* The Coming of the Anak-Araw by Celestine Trinidad

* The Child Abandoned by Yvette Tan

~ Coverart by Kevin Lapeña

Psyched yet? I know I am.  See you all tomorrow at 11 for the launch! See issue #1 here!

Celestine Trinidad is newly licensed physician, currently taking up her residency training in Pathology, but she still tries to read and write as much as she can in her (now unfortunately very little) free time. Much to her surprise, she won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature for her short story for children “The Storyteller and the Giant”.