Where there is life: Science fiction in Singapore

Abstract

This article seeks to situate certain works of Singaporean science fiction within their historical circumstances, demonstrating that Singaporean science fiction has historically served as social criticism, challenging both state narratives and foreign readings of the city state along the axis of East and West and “new” and “old”. The argument centres upon four texts: the anonymously-authored series “The Travels of Chang Ching Chong” (1989), Jahan Loh’s Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth (2013), and two texts by Sonny Liew, namely Malinky Robot (2011) and The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015). These texts, I believe, share certain thematic connections: each is interested in the relationship between new and old and foreign and familiar, and each seeks, in different ways, to counter dominant narratives of the time. Accordingly, this article is divided into two imbricated sections. The first examines science fiction responses to popular and state narratives of the West as a source of technological capital both under British rule and after independence. “The Travels of Chang Ching Chong” and the “Ah Huat’s Giant Robot” sections of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, I demonstrate, trouble this narrative, offering stories in which Asia provides a source of technological advancement. In the second section I explore popular depictions of hypermodernity in Singapore and the enduring myth of the destruction of “traditional” Asian cultures in the wake of the post-independence industrial turn. Both Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and Malinky Robot, I argue, complicate this narrative, presenting both hypermodernity and “old Singapore” as fantasy.