Specfic also put Singapore on the world map when Yang and Vina Jie-Min Prasad became the first Singaporean finalists of both the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards in 2018. Four years later, Ng Yi-Sheng’s specfic collection Lion City co-won the Singapore Literature Prize for English fiction.

In 2016, Nuraliah Norasid’s fantasy novel The Gatekeeper won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, beating other more “traditionally literary” works to the $25,000 award. That same year saw the publication of specfic anthologies such as Fish Eats Lion, edited by Lundberg and The Ayam Curtain, edited by Yang and Joyce Chng. In 2012, Jason Erik Lundberg founded LONTAR, the first biannual literary journal to focus on Southeast Asian specfic. It was in the 2010s that Singapore specfic truly hit its stride. Despite this, specfic spent years relegated to the literary establishment’s margins, overshadowed by social realism. There have been landmark publications such as Singapore Science Fiction, an anthology of the winning entries from the 1979 Science Fiction Short Story Competition and Han May’s 1985 novel Star Sapphire, set on an intergalactic starship in the 23rd century.

Specfic-here defined as a blanket term for literature that asks, “What if?”-spans science fiction, fantasy and those works which fall into the cracks between these genres. While Singapore’s writers have long imagined other worlds, speculative fiction, or “specfic” for short, has only really begun to gain ground in the last decade.

Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong