Reviews and Comments

An interesting graphic novel about the life and art of fictional cartoonist Charlie Chan Hock Chye as told by Sonny Liew. The book is both the story of Charlie Chan and the art and comics he produces over the years. The comics featured in the book are also the story of Singapore as seen by Charlie Chan, covering the period of pre-independence to just before the present day.

The comics featured in the book, as produced by Charlie Chan, are a statement on how Charlie sees the society, culture and politics of Singapore at the time. The comics cannot help but feature the prominent political figures of the times like Lee Kuan Yew and Lim Chin Siong from Singapore, and Tunku Abdul Rahman from Malaya / Malaysia during the period of time when Singapore merged and then separated from Malaysia. Other comics tell the story of other events that affected Singapore, from the Japanese invasion, the period of Emergency (from Communist insurgents), to the development and modernisation of Singapore.

The last part of the book is a sudden change in tone, when Sonny suddenly pulls out an 'alternative history' version of Singapore (similar in style to Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"), where it is Lim Chin Siong instead of Lee Kuan Yew who goes on to become leader of Singapore, and Charlie Chan becomes a prominent cartoonist instead of a mostly forgotten person in the main story. Whether this version of Singapore is better than the capitalist version that is current day Singapore is left as an exercise to the reader.

A lower than average issue with stories that didn't really attract my attention, apart from stories by Cécile Cristofari and David Maskill. The tale by Maskill is the 2019 James White Award Winning story.

• "Cryptozoology" by Tim Lees: a tale of a couple who join a trip to track down a 'cryptid' or legendary creature. As the story goes, it turns out that the girl is fascinated by them while her boyfriend goes along, but is sceptical. As their journey looking for cryptids continue, tensions boil over, and they separate. At the end, he sees something that makes him rethink their relationship, but by then it may be too late.

• "The Ephemeral Quality of Mersay" by John Possident: on a space station, a reporter reports on a possible crisis that affects the entire station. But it later turns out to be a manufactured crisis to cover a criminal operation.

• "The Way of His Kind" by James Sallis: a story about the arrival of new people to a town, leading to changes to its way of life. Whether it is for the better or worse is left up to the reader.

• "Smoke Bomb" by Matt Thompson: a story of a future where people can be altered to become biological reactors to produce liquids of exquisite quality. The story is of one such person and her guardian who gets a well known artist as a client, but who may have other plans for the person that may not involve the guardian.

• "There's a Gift Shop Now" by Françoise Harvey: on walking through a place once used to do experiments on children, to horrible effect.

• "The Third Time I Saw a Fox" by Cécile Cristofari: a night watchman with the ability to talk and interact with the exhibits suddenly struggles to recall his encounters with foxes while telling his stories to the exhibits.

• "Limitations" by David Maskill: two researchers struggle to interact with a possible alien being who lives in a toxic atmosphere in their lab. Their attempts usually end in failure. But with each failure, the attempts repeat with changes and slowly the researchers realize what's going on and maybe what must be done to end the repeating cycle.

A fascinating tale set in a world where people are physically separated into six factions. To one faction, members of other factions are physically invisible, except at intervals when interactions between factions grow stronger, and they can start to see and interact with one another, only to fade away again. Non-living material can be made of up parts of all factions, so houses, etc. can be seen, felt and used by all. Ditto for writing implements (chalk) and there are scenes in this book where factions communicate with one another via ghostly hovering pieces of chalk that write.

In this world, people of each faction live in separate villages that trade with one another. As the tale begins, we learn of a town that has isolated itself from other factions because of a disease called the Dispersion. The disease causes parts of the body of a person to become disassociated with itself and become part of another faction, which is deadly. A girl from another village secretly visits it in order to get one of its scientific leaders to join efforts from other villages to study the Dispersion and figure out what is causing it and how to stop it.

As the group get together to study the Dispersion, with the help of volunteers who painfully contribute their own flesh for examination, radicals from the first town decide to take matters into their own hands over the Dispersion by attempting to get rid of the other towns by violent acts.

As matters come to a head, the girl, with the help of other versed in mathematics, make discoveries about how the factions interact with one another and how the Dispersion may fit into it and how it can be stopped. In a desperate attempt to prove her hypothesis, the girl deliberately infects herself with the Dispersion to try to cure herself.

While the beginning of the story may sound like some kind of strange, ghostly tale where invisible beings interact with one another, the story is grounded in the mathematics of multi-dimensional geometry (an area of interest to the author) and the characters start to make sense of how the interactions can occur geometrically and figure out how the Dispersion is another geometrical aspect of their world. The descriptions of various events (like invisible fires, floods and assassination attempts) also fit the world view where people can only see one-sixth of what is actually happening around them.

A fascinating tale of a world that is different from ours, yet feature the same kind of fractured politics, radical views and attempts to understand the world as it is.

An interesting collection with good stories from Nadia Afifi, Nick Dichario, Lyndsie Manusos and an interesting take on the zombie invasion story by Sarina Dorie, trying it with school safety protocols that may or may not work.

• "The Bahrain Underground Bazaar" by Nadia Afifi: an interesting story of an old woman waiting to die from cancer. To pass the time, she visits the Underground Bazaar, to be immersed in the memories of people who have died. But one memory she experiences haunts her, and she must find out more about the person involved. The journey of discovery would change her attitude towards her coming death and her relationship towards her son and daughter-in-law.

• "La Regina Ratto" by Nick Dichario: a man finds himself sharing a flat with talking rats. At first, all is well, and they get along. But then the man gets a new boss at work, who turns out to be a giant Queen rat who begins to dominate his life. In the end, one of his rat friends tells him of a way to get rid of the Queen, but even then, he would never be free of the rats.

• "How to Burn Down the Hinterlands" by Lyndsie Manusos: a woman who is a blacksmith has reason to hate her country: her blacksmith mother was taken away and killed when she created a magical sword that could destroy anything. So when the country's king sends a group to persuade her to make another powerful magical sword, she agrees while planning her revenge. But her plans change when she learns more about the group and finds herself sympathizing with them.

• "The Glooms" by Matthew Hughes: another tale about the henchman of a (now former) wizard, now retired to a village. But he gets word that two other wizards with whom he crossed paths with in a former story are looking for him, for they believe he holds information on some magical weapons owned by his former master. His journey to escape them would involve running into an unfindable region ruled by a goddess, a journey through a gloomy path, and his elderly neighbour.

• "The Homestake Project" by Cylin Busby: a researcher goes deep down into a mine in search of organisms that survive in the depths. Little does she know an accidental injury there would lead to a life-changing view of the world.

• "On Vapor, Which the Night Condenses" by Gregor Hartmann: another detective story set on Zephyr, this one has the detective and her partner solve the mystery of a murder and another possible murder attempt at an artist who can produce irresistible scents that make people recall entire environments. Deduction would help her solve the case.

• "The Silent Partner" by Theodore McCombs: an antique dealer goes to a house to look at a piece of furniture kept there when its original owner was held in a Japanese-American interment camp during World War Two. But owning the furniture would come with other unusual responsibilities.

• "A Tale of Two Witches" by Albert E. Cowdrey: a missing child leads a woman who can treat with spirits to investigate a house formerly occupied by a family with abusive parents, and their strange house guest who may have a hand in previous missing child cases.

• "A Civilized and Orderly Zombie Apocalypse per School Regulations" by Sarina Dorie: a standard zombie invasion story that takes place in a school, it involves a teacher who follows regulations to keep her charges from the zombies. But as the story progresses, it becomes apparent that it would have an inevitable, horrible, ending.

• "Skipping Stones in the Dark" by Amman Sabet: on a colony ship heading for a distant world, the entity controlling it prizes conformity over individualism. So when people start to exhibit their individual selves, the ship takes what seems like drastic action to isolate them and hope that they return to become members of the ship.

This is one of those good tales that starts out funny, but then turns grim and serious, but hopeful, towards the end. In the story, the student body administrator has to deal with handling various student 'emotional support animal' issues (like: are pigs allowed to wallow?). But one student, who claims to have various other issues like ADHD, etc. shows up with a request (actually no: a DEMAND) to be allowed an unusual supernatural support animal that she has somehow restrained using witchcraft.

This humorous situation turns grim when those involved (except the student) realize the animal is intelligent and is suffering due to the restraining spell. But attempts to get the student to let it go only escalate the crisis that can only be resolved by making the student face the truth about herself. Fortunately, that would also involve the university taking the long view about what the student actually achieved during the crises.

An average issue of Interzone, the last to be edited by Andy Cox, with interesting stories by Alexander Glass (three of them here), Cécile Cristofari and Tamika Thompson.

• "Wet Dreams" by Rich Larson: a story about a cat who appears to have swallowed something bad and it's consequences.

• "The Pain Barrier" by Alexander Glass: a man seeks a way to free a girl from an augmented prison surrounded by a wall of pain. It is only at the end does he realize how things were arranged for him to achieve his objective.

• "The Faerie Engine" by Alexander Glass: a Faerie visits a woman to ask for help to fix an engine. When the woman refuses, the Faerie finds a way to get her to help. In the process, the woman learns more about the Faerie world, and we learn it may be more real than fantasy.

• "The Soul Doctors" by Alexander Glass: an investigation by a detective goes wrong, and he gets help from a pair of truck drivers. As the story proceeds, we learn the drivers may be from an alternate world line and in this world, souls can be real and can affect how you live.

• "Thank You, Clicking Person" by Jeff Noon: a machine learns about the world through clicked images and makes some disturbing conclusions from the lack of people seen in clicked photos.

• "Subira's Lattice" by Val Nolan: an enslaved girl on Venus eventually gets freedom and learns of a secret after a catastrophe overtakes the planet, and she is one of the few survivors.

• "Walking in from the West" by Charles Wilkinson: an upper-class man who looks down on his neighbours is forced to accommodate them for a while due to a flood. As the story progresses, we learn about his high-class servant who takes liberties with his wealth and is punished as a result, and a strange ability of his neighbour's wife which will have consequences for the man.

• "Wind, river, angel song" by Cécile Cristofari: in a future when a strange disease can turn a human into a tree after heading an 'angel' sing, one new mother, who has been infected, has to struggle to raise her daughter, while hoping never to hear the singing.

• "The Thing About Ants and Astronauts" by Justen Russell: an astronaut in a scout ship investigates a mysterious dark nebula while thinking back to a time when her family had to deal with ants and realizes the connection between her situation and the ants investigating the contents of the house.

• "Bridget Has Disappeared" by Tamika Thompson: a journalist investigates the mysterious disappearances of his wife, which his wife constantly denies. The investigation would end with her final disappearance, but not before realizing what it may mean for their son and the world.

• "Rusting" by Lucy Zhang: a young girl gets infected and starts to 'rust' by turning into metal from the outside in. Eventually, a robot is sent to fetch her out of the house, and they begin an unknown journey into a rusting world.

(Note: review based on one of numerous rereading of the book.)

What started out as a request for another story about hobbits (after the success of "The Hobbit") grew in the telling until it became an epic tale about the quest to destroy the One Ring of Sauron; and how it was the 'least of heroes', unlooked-for even by the wise, would prove to be one to fulfil the quest and free Middle-Earth from domination by the Dark Lord.

This book has been released in many editions and in many forms over the years. The one I read was a one-volume edition that celebrates the birth of J.R.R. Tolkien and includes fifty paintings specially commissioned from artist Alan Lee.

Reading it now after watching the Peter Jackson films, it is easy to put the actors in the film into the scenes from the book, modified by the illustrations of Alan Lee of the various places in Middle-Earth. And after all these years, the words in the book still have the 'power' to bring the reader to Middle-Earth and put you in the footsteps of the Fellowship of the Ring as they strive to do what they can to thwart the plans of Sauron and distract him for the peril that is slowly entering his stronghold on hobbit feet.