UC Press Becomes Publisher of Science Fiction Studies, which Releases New Special Issue on "Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction as Slipstream"
We are pleased to welcome Science Fiction Studies to UC Press's publishing program.
Science Fiction Studies (SFS) is a refereed scholarly journal devoted to the study of the genre of science fiction, broadly defined. It publishes articles about science fiction and book reviews on science fiction criticism; it does not publish fiction. SFS is widely considered to be the premier academic journal in its field, with strong theoretical, historical, and international coverage.
A new special issue of the journal, "Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction as Slipstream," (March 2025, 52.1)—the first issue published by UC Press—is currently live on the journal's new website.
We invited the issue's guest editor to tell us more about the special issue.
Southeast Asia and Speculative Fiction
by Weihsin Gui
Why have a journal special issue on Southeast Asian speculative fiction? This question has a short and straightforward answer and another that is slightly more complex and open-ended. In simple terms, over the past twenty years there have been numerous publications of speculative fiction from Southeast Asia and its diasporas.1 There are journals devoted to the subject, as well as single-author novels and short story collections.2 That most of these speculative fiction works are published or have been translated into English suggests that their authors and publishers are trying to garner a readership that is not only regional or specific to Southeast Asia but also global. Despite the proliferation of speculative fiction by Southeast Asian authors and their attempts to reach a wider, international audience, at present, academic research on Asian speculative fiction has primarily focused on texts and authors from East Asia and South Asia.3 Our journal special issue tries to fill this gap in scholarship by throwing a spotlight on Southeast Asian speculative fiction and explaining how these works are informed by the distinctive cultures of the region, and how they may be representing and critiquing important socio-political matters affecting its countries and communities.
This brings me to the second more complex but also intriguing rationale for discussing speculative fiction and Southeast Asia in a journal special issue. Speculative fiction itself is a broad term in definition and scope, and its latitude is not uncontested. Some critics contend that speculative fiction is too obtuse because it encompasses a wide range of non-mimetic or non-realistic literary genres ranging from science fiction to fantasy to magical realism to horror and Gothic tales. However, this broad remit may allow non-realistic writing by non-Western, postcolonial, and minority authors to be examined seriously as works of literature rather than as ethnographic expressions or cultural artifacts. Speculative fiction shifts readerly attention from questions of “what” (i.e. does a literary text fulfill a checklist of speculative characteristics?) to questions of “how” and “why” (i.e. in what ways does a literary text extrapolate from our current situation and speculate how the situation might develop or deteriorate in an imagined future or alternate reality?).
The same might be said of Southeast Asia itself as a heterogeneous geographical grouping. The name suggests that the region’s heterogeneity is due to its location at the confluence of South Asia and East Asia. The linguistic, cultural, and social differences between Southeast Asian countries and cultures can appear to be more pronounced than their similarities. The regional appellation might even have belligerent origins in World War II as Allied forces established a “South East Asia Command” in the closing years of the conflict, perhaps suggesting that Southeast Asia is a geopolitical entity without a cohesive identity. But the apparent lack of a unified or common Southeast Asian-ness need not be disabling, just as the breadth of speculative fiction’s parameters need not be confusing. This meeting of genre and geography can be productive and provocative.
Speculative fiction from Southeast Asia can introduce new ways of thinking about the region through a series of questions: How does such writing draw upon existing generic currents of established Western and East or South Asian speculative fiction? How does the inclusion of Southeast Asian elements reconfigure or challenge existing narrative and representational modes of literary speculation? How might such writing make Southeast Asia strange to Southeast Asians themselves, prompting those who may be familiar with the region by virtue of residence or scholarship to see it afresh through provocative and critical lights? These questions, among others, are taken up by the contributors to our journal special issue of Science Fiction Studies.
Notes
1. Examples of edited anthologies include The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005-2010 by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar, Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction by Jason Erik Lundberg, Cyberpunk: Malaysia by Zen Cho, and the regionally focused The SEA is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng.
2. LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction ran from 2012 to 2018 and more recently The Sengkang Sci-Fi Quarterly began publication in 2024. Examples of novels and short stories include Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper, Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang and Possibly the World, Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl: A Lovesong, Victor R. Ocampo’s The Infinite Library and Other Stories, and Intan Paramaditha’s Apple and Knife.
3. For example, Liu Cixin’s award-winning The Three-Body Problem, originally published in 2008, translated into English in 2014, and subsequently adapted into a Netflix mini-series in 2024, has been the topic of numerous scholarly essays and led to a resurgence of interest in speculative fiction from China.
We invite you to read the special issue, "Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction as Slipstream" (Volume 52, Issue 1), for free online for a limited time.
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