Fish Eats Lion Redux: Singaporean Speculative Fiction
In 2012, author and editor Jason Erik Lundberg released Fish Eats Lion, the first anthology of literary speculative fiction to be published in Singapore, a groundbreaking work that opened the floodgates of acceptability for the genre in the island-nation, forever changing the landscape. Now, a decade later, he returns with Fish Eats Lion Redux, proving that SF is still alive and strong in the Lion City, and exploring Singapore from the distant past to the far future and many points between, as well as alternate versions along the multiverse. With original stories by Meihan Boey, Ng Yi-Sheng, Nuraliah Norasid, Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, Suffian Hakim, Inez Tan, Cyril Wong, Daryl Qilin Yam and many more, this new collection shows beyond doubt that the realm of the imagination has never been so strange or so local.
Alaska had a story of a monster that lives in the reservoir. The otters don’t see it, but they feel its presence in the rustles of the reeds, in the shadows that shift on the footpaths, in the ripples that dance across the pond with no apparent origin. It’s a spectre that hangs like a rain shadow. Parents tell stories to their children: the monster waits for the right conditions to emerge. We do not know what these conditions are.
Alaska said: when the otters leave the reservoir, the monster follows. It does not like to be abandoned.
— “Wife, Skin, Keeper, Slick”, a feral otter spin on selkie wives
Fright 1: Winners of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize
Ghost stories and tales of fright have a long verbal and written tradition in Singapore, and so Epigram Books is proud to present a new annual anthology series of terrifying local fiction. Featuring all the winners of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, Fright 1 celebrates all subsets of the horror genre, told with a Singaporean twist.
The contributors include Meihan Boey, Dew M. Chaiyanara, Dave Chua, Jane Huang, Wen-yi Lee, Kelly Leow, Kimberly Lium, O Thiam Chin, Quek Shin Yi, Tan Lixin and Teo Kai Xiang.
There is another kind of budding. In the process of endodyogeny, two daughter cells are produced within their mother. Before they can separate, they must consume their mother entirely. Maybe mothers are meant to suffocate their daughters and daughters are meant to consume their mothers, and then they go on to suffocate and be consumed, every single one of them the same. Maybe I’m destined to ruin this baby, even if she hadn’t made me like this. So when she presses her bony palms to my stomach, I don’t flinch away.
— “That Is Their Tragedy”, on how daughters become their mothers