[Sfts-faculty] My essay on two Singaporean sf novels

[Weihsin Gui]

Dear SFCS faculty,

My essay on "Neoliberalism and Two Novels of Speculative Fiction from
Singapore" has just been published in the latest issue of The Global South
journal (vol. 15 no. 1 2021). In it I talk about Surrogate Protocol by Tham
Cheng-E and The Gatekeeper by Nuraliah Norasid. This is part of a special
issue on "Contextualizing the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel" edited by Shun
Kiang.

Here's the abstract for my essay:  "This essay discusses two novels from
Singapore—Tham Cheng-E’s Surrogate Protocol (2017) and Nuraliah Norasid’s
The Gatekeeper (2017)—as speculative fiction (sf ), a broader term for
narratives that contain science fictional or fantastic qualities but are
particularly invested in socio-political questions rather than resolutely
celebrating a techno-scientific future. Through extrapolation and
speculation, Singaporean speculative fiction snatches truth from the jaws
of reality. Because these novels rely on imaginative speculation and
extrapolation rather than historical verisimilitude and authenticity, they
describe and invent a world that is similar to but a few steps removed from
Singapore’s status quo. Such estrangement allows the novels to create a
cognitive space in which readers can assess and question this status quo
and sidestep the government’s out-of-bounds or OB markers. By extrapolating
from Singapore’s present, they may evade a censorious state regime because
their narratives imagine possible futures rather than revisit a politically
sensitive past. Surrogate Protocol and The Gatekeeper raise questions about
Singapore’s ethno-racial politics and state-sponsored promotion of
biomedical technology and research. They employ technoscience and myth as
novums (Darko Suvin’s term) to speculate about socio-cultural structures
and strictures in Singapore. Although the novels do not offer explicit
blueprints for socio-cultural change, through the cognitively estranging
processes of extrapolation and speculation they question accepted norms
regarding racialization, biopower, and gendered identities in Singapore.
The novels’ protagonists try to resist the self-optimization called for by
neoliberalism’s technology of subjectivity, even if they may eventually be
compromised by its technology of subjection."

The essay is attached, and I hope it might be of interest to those of us
who are interested in global or postcolonial sf.

-- Regards,
WG

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Weihsin Gui (he/him/his) weihsing at ucr.edu <weihsin.gui at ucr.edu>
Associate Professor of English
University of California-Riverside
MLA Southeast Asia Forum mailing list <http://eepurl.com/hqu4cP>
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