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Publisher: Small Beer Press (February 23, 2021)

Length: 248 pages

ISBN: 9781618731821

Adult Horror/Fantasy/Science Fiction

 

I’ll always have a soft spot for Small Beer Press; it was the first press to re-release Ted Chiang’s story collection. In this post, I'll cover some of my favorite stories from a more recent release of theirs: Isabel Yap’s absolutely outstanding debut Never Have I Ever.

“Good Girls” opens the collection with a reconsideration of the Filipino folk figure the manananggal, which is a kind of female vampiric construct. In this story, Yap employs the manananggal to explore the friendship between Kaye and Sara, two girls who attend boarding school together. The story moves dips in and out of two temporalities: in one, Kaye deals with a hunger that pushes her to locate and feed off the unborn. In the other, Kaye and Sara attempt to forge a connection despite the fact that Kaye might be considered to be a monster. 


“A Cup of Salt Tears” takes us to Japan where the main character, Makino, takes care of her dying husband, Tetsuya. Makino strikes a deal with a kappa, a kind of water spirit, to help save Tetsuya. The deal is successful, but Makino must also confront the complexities of her strange relationship with Kawataro, the water spirit.

“Milagroso” pushes us into a science fictional terrain in which a Filipino family lives in a future in which most foods have been genetically modified to the point where what is considered miraculous is the consumption of natural products.


My favorite story in the collection is hands down “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” which follows the on-again-off-again romance between two coworkers, Karl and Patrick. This story is set in San Francisco and showcases Yap’s masterful understanding of the cityscape. There’s startups, coffee, and lots of fog, and then there’s the slow burn connection between Patrick and Karl. This story made me wistful for my time in the Bay Area! 


In “Have You Heard the One about Anamaria Marquez,” the collection moves into a more traditional ghost story in which school girls must consider the possibility of a vengeful apparition stalking the school grounds. 


“Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing)” is a fun one. This spritely story explores the lives of a group of women after they discover they have superpowers, as well as their desire to balance a normal life alongside their duties as superpowered women.


“All the Best of Dark and Bright” reimagines a pre-colonial origin story of the first man and woman. 


One of the darkest but most engaging stories ends the collection. In “A Canticle of Lost Girls,” Yap tackles the traumas that can emerge when encountering the institution of Catholic schooling. The story employs supernatural spirits to enact a form of retributive justice. 


Every story is outstanding, and I certainly plan to use this book in future courses. I haven’t read many texts which so deftly explore the murky boundaries between Filipinx folklore and speculative conceits, so it’s a real treat to have this book out in the world. A definite must-read! 


Buy the book HERE.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Allie Arend


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Review of Peter Tieryas’ United States of Japan (Angry Robot 2016)


Peter Tieryas’ new science fiction novel, The United States of Japan (USJ), opens in a Japanese American prison camp in 1948, written from the perspective of internees who are by turns angry, scared, and conflicted. Then, the American soldiers disappear and the Imperial Japanese Army arrives to announce that the U.S. has surrendered in the face of attacks by mecha-like giant robots unleashed by Japan. Reactions of the newly-freed internees are mixed. I was hooked.

I’m a fan of Philip K. Dick, and as the back of the book notes, USJ takes its initial cue from the premise of The Man in the High Castle. But just as Dick’s 1963 classic reflected its own time period’s values and concerns (particularly in its fetishization of the I Ching), USJ is a text of the twenty-first century. Social forces, ideas, ideals, and texts are suffused throughout social networks, personal electronic devices (called “porticals” in the novel), and decentralized webs, and thus impossible to pin down. Yet, stubbornly, characters continue to search for meaning, connection, and justice..

The bulk of the narrative takes place in 1988 Los Angeles, in which Beniko “Ben” Ishimura, is a Captain in the Japanese Imperial Army, Office of the Censor, and Akiko Tsukino, an agent of the Tokko, or the Japanese imperial secret police. Although a talented programmer, Ben is something of a disappointment; he is the only person in his class from the Berkeley Military Academic for Games Studies who has not reached the level of colonel. As a child, Ben had turned in his parents to the authorities for speaking against the empire. But despite this early show of loyalty, he meanders through life in a state of ambivalence and borderline paranoia. Agent Akiko Tsukino, in contrast, is a true believer; in wielding the torture and bioweapons that are the tools of her trade, she finds grim righteousness as well as scorn for her weak victims.

When Ben is contacted by his former boss, General Kazuhiro Mutsuraga, about the death of the general’s daughter Claire, Akiko is sent to question him. There is an unauthorized video game circulating called the United States of America, which not only imagines that the U.S. won in 1948 but also trains people to fight to overthrow the Empire in the present. This game is tied to the George Washingtons, or GW’s, an underground resistance movement, and the now missing General Mutsuraga is suspected of having created this game. Ben, due to his proximity to the General and his facility with games, is by association also suspect. But in pursuing Mutsuraga, the GWs, and the video game, neither Ben nor Akiko – nor the reader – find what is expected.

Amid complex layers of political and personal dynamics, these initial narratives unravel to explore what it means to be mixed race, to be a cyborg, to be loyal, to be a patriot, to be a resistance fighter, to be a gamer, to a be a human being. The novel is great fun – intellectually, ethically, and aesthetically – and I’ll be pondering its implications for a while.

As other reviews have noted, the novel pays homage to Japanese pop culture as well as classic science fiction. But what resonates most with me are the political-ethical-philosophical questions raised by an early, unresolved conversation debate early in the novel:

            “Think about the way the Americans treated us. Even when we weren’t in camps, they’d always call us nips or chinks, vandalize our stores, and harass us. They think we all look the same – Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean.”
            “But America stood for something, a dream that goes beyond race or background,” Ezekiel said.
            “Something even they didn’t believe when it came time for action.”
            “It’s what they were striving for.” (USJ, 28)

As much and more than ever, this captures the central conundrum we face in the U.S. Peter Tieryas, author of the award-winning Bald New World and Watering Heaven, has given us an Asian American sci-fi classic that draws on the best traditions of speculative fiction to meditate seriously on what any of us can/should think and do in a world of repression, surveillance, disillusionment, and uncertainty.

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/United-States-Japan-Peter-Tieryas/dp/0857665332 ;

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