Necessary Ficciones, Part One

DEAN ALFAR: It’s high time that I reviewed my position on this. The short of it is, in general terms, I agree with you – though with lingering doubts (being the type of person who will not happily accept presented evidence, haha) as to the level of “success.” I honestly feel we can do a lot more, achieve a lot more – which is why I’m resistant to the notion of already “being there” or having achieved “success.” You’re correct in that marginalization as a term is incorrect, inappropriate and ill-served, but in terms of very general metrics I have difficulty accepting that SpecFic is where it can be. I simply want more.

The Fully Booked award, as far as I know (and I could be wrong), was made possible by a contribution by Neil Gaiman, in partnership with Fully Booked, and as such is finite. I do not know if it will (or can) be maintained at its impressive P100k prize levels beyond a certain time period or if Gaiman ends the subsidy (for whatever reason) – this is speculation on my part. This award is amazing because it incentivizes writing and rewards good writing. My small issue with this as an indicator is that we do not know if will be around years into the future. I hope so, of course. Awards help with awareness for the general public (that these forms of writing are being produced, and are valued). The perception of “being valued” is important as this encourages new and young writers – that there is something of worth in what they do. Awards are certainly not the be all and end all of these things – but they do help (I’m not here to argue with your stand on awards). I’d like more of these awards, more frequently, spread throughout the calendar year, for the purpose of encouragement and reward. Is it fair to cite one award and say it is “enough?” Is this an adequate indicator?

Yes, you’re right. Sarge Lacuesta brought to my attention last year that SpecFic is getting more mainstream publication. I do wish for more exposure for SpecFic, but if the point is that it is being published, is out there, then yes. What I do want are more publications in general that will publish SpecFic (like Free Press or Story Philippines); more SpecFic-centric publications – both periodicals (like Philippine Genre Stories) and one-offs/annuals (such as Philippine Speculative Fiction, from different editors so we get the benefit of different aesthetics); and more of the above in Philippine languages other than English. I understand that other writing, such as poetry for example, is in similar situations (hence my thought that we are all in the same boat), but I cannot help but envision more for the kind of writing I love.

True, SpecFic is being taught in the classrooms, especially in the past few years, but we have to admit that the numbers are small. There are very few SpecFic critics who actually read both local and international current output. Again, I want more, in terms of quantity and quality. How many SpecFic stories are freshmen exposed to in the course of general curriculum? It would be great also if high schools include SpecFic – is this a pipe dream? My goal is to expose more young people to this kind of writing.

I agree, SpecFic is available and being read by people, if you’re talking about foreign books like Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings. Sadly though, I do not think the same can be said of homegrown SpecFic. We are being read, yes, and while the audience is growing, we are nowhere near the numbers that foreign books command. Similar to many Philippine books, PSF has a small print run, and it takes time to sell. People are not buying in droves. Availability (or distribution) is something that we publishers need to deal with (as well as the other business aspects as such collection which can take, in some cases, years). I’d like to see SpecFic in more venues other than bookstores (with their onerous terms). With small print runs (PSF has a print run of 500, for example) and limited distribution, I think it is fair to say that we are not reaching enough people. Financing (for a small press like mine), logistics, manpower and other aspects are always challenges.

So no, SpecFic is not marginalized. But with respect to what has already been done, I think there is still a lot to do, to aim for, to work at/out. My hope is that, as more people invest in SpecFic, we generate more new writers, editors, publishers, critics, teachers and of course, readers (even fandom, similar to how US science fiction grew). It is the work of many people, and will take time. I can just hope to see a bit of it in my old age.

KENNETH YU: I don't worry too much about marginalization. That was never my issue. My issue was to get more people reading. Period. My path to the love of books was through genre. I still remember buying old issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction Digest in my youth, among other similar genre mags. I thought I'd provide a similar road to others with a local mag. But I did encounter this marginalization a few times.

The earliest I remember ever being told by my elders not to indulge in genre fiction was in college (1989-90). I was a business management major who decided to enroll in a creative writing class as an elective; go figure, a business major voluntarily getting lost in an arts course. I stood out like a punk rocker in the Middle East: during the round of introductions when each had to say something about oneself, the course “Business Management” rolled off my tongue quite self-consciously. There were philosophy majors, communications majors, literature and humanities students, interdisciplinary studies and education enrollees, etc, and me. One of the stories I submitted for that class was a crime story; nothing more genre than Crime, right? Our professor, a National Artist for Literature, told me very clearly after reading my work, “Don't write these kinds of stories anymore.” I remember it still, quite well in fact. Did that bug me? Initially, yes, 'coz he wanted us to write what we label as “Social Realist” stories, especially those that serve the country, the national interest, that show the Filipino identity and social circumstances in all its gravitas, and I failed to do that because I didn't have any interest in writing that kind of story yet. And so, my guilt was born. But this conflict didn't last, I'm happy to say. I shook off what he said quite easily. How? I stopped writing soon after that class. I never stopped reading (I enjoy reading too much), but I stopped writing. If you don't write, you can't be bothered by this conflict between what you want to write and what your elders are telling you you should write, right? But I continued to read, I'm happy to say, both local and foreign books. I did make up for this initial failure by eventually writing the kind of stories the professor liked for his class, but once that was done, I just stopped. Went back to my course and what it trained me for; went back to where I belonged. Never bothered joining writing contests, not the Palancas, not anything. Never bothered with trying to get words onto paper except for myself, and only in a private journal/diary. Just lost interest. Isn't that a great way to deal with the conflict? Because of that, and over time, I lost all guilt! But the reading stayed on, thankfully, because I grew up as a reader, and went beyond genre, and learned to read story for story, and to take labels only on its surface, and try to get to the tale the author is trying to tell. Eventually, when I surprised myself by trying to tell my own stories again, what my professor said about what I should write didn't bother me anymore. I felt safe and confident enough to write whatever I wanted to write, whether it was genre or not.

Years later, I'm in a second-hand bookstore, and I find old issues of Hitchcock's, Ellery Queen's, Asimov's, and other genre magazines, and not for the first time I wonder why no similar mags exist locally. By this time, I'm the general manager of a small printing press, so I think: maybe I can do this. It's going to take time, and it's going to be by myself because I don't know anyone out there and can't afford to hire anyone, but I bet I can make one. I wanted people to get into reading the same way I did. I still liked genre, so I decided to make PGS a genre vehicle. Pure and simple plan. I guess I forgot (or chose to ignore) what my professor had told me. Easy enough to do so if you're years removed from college. Besides, I wasn't writing the stuff (though like I said, it didn't bug me anymore). I was publishing it, with the goal of getting people into reading.

Some years later again (of course, by this time, Dean Alfar's volumes 1 and 2 were already out. If I had known that there was a venue like this already, I probably wouldn't have come out with Philippine Speculative FictionPhilippine Genre Stories. But by the time I discovered Dean’s PSF, the pre-production of PGS was already halfway through. No backing out by then) and PGS1 is just out (I got it out ... somehow). I'm selling it in a booth at a gathering of book lovers. A noted member of the academe whose stories I've read online walks by. She's a multi-Palanca winner and member of the academe, and quite noted among her peers. She stops, checks out PGS1, and then throws her hands and head up to the sky. Her comment? “What is this 'genre' fiction? You're adding more confusion to the market! First 'speculative fiction,' then 'genre fiction'?” I had no answer for her. How could I have one? All I wanted was to get people reading, and my path involved going through genre books before my tastes widened to include anything written. I thought others might walk the same path, and PGS might help. She walked away after a moment, but I wondered why it bugged her so much. It's hard enough getting people to read in today's modern world. Every little bit helps, right?

And if you think I only had to deal with marginalization from the academe, you'd be surprised. Being a nobody then (and still pretty much a nobody now, in my opinion), when I made the call for submissions I received a lot of comments like, “Who are you to set this up? Where do you get the right?”, much of it anonymous. Let me state that as far as I'm concerned, this is a legitimate question. I had, and still have, doubts about my ability, but I still can't afford to hire anyone to do this. All I can do is do my best, and to listen to suggestions to improve. Knowing this, I went out of my way to meet people, introduce myself, state my case. But I still received the same questions. One person - a member of fandom, and proudly representing it, as he himself pointed out - even went so far as to outwardly say that he suspected me of being a scammer, out to fool him and his friends out of their story rights and to take advantage of their desire to be published for my own profit. He wrote a long eMail to me. Quite harsh, too. I think I still have it. He was telling me how I should run my Digest, giving me instructions, that I should do this, do that, etc. He even asked for my printing press's list of clients and financial statements (and my company isn't even public!) to prove that I exist because if I were to say that “he and his group should investigate me on their own” then he'd rather not help me. When we met in person so I could state my case face-to-face, he continued to tell me what I should and shouldn't do, and when I tried to explain why I set PGS up, pointing to my love for reading as my only credential, he began to expound on his own reading history, and I felt like I was suddenly in a pissing match, with him trying to one-up me and show me his “goods,” when my intention was simply to ask him to endorse my call for submissions to his members! So the marginalization came from somewhere else in this case, and it was borne out of other people’s suspicion of my motives, and nothing to do with the content of the digest. If you're talking “marginalization,” as in making you go through the wringer because you were a stranger and an unknown, unaccustomed element, when all you were offering was a chance for the group's members to see their genre fiction published, then here it is! A prime example!

I suppose the marginalization may have run its course for the most part. At least, I hope so. Hey, if Jing Hidalgo, a member of the academe and award winning writer herself came out with her Tales of Fantasy and Enchantment, then the conditions must be better now, right? If Butch Dalisay wrote about his youth when he read genre (Tarzan and the like), then he sees just where genre readers are coming from, right? He promoted PGS too, and for that I'm forever grateful to him. If other mags are publishing SpecFic, then great! I think this lessening of the marginalization is also thanks in no small part to the Internet (as well as other means of promotion) as SpecFic has received a lot of ink, real and virtual. All this attention surely may have pushed it into being just a bit more accepted. But surely there must be those who still doubt whether genre fiction has a place in “serious” literature, and my answer is the usual “a story is a story is a story” and if it works for the purpose it was written, then it works, and no one can question that. It's the reader who decides what to bring of himself into the story, and what to get out of it. If the story was made for the LOLZ and only that, and it succeeds, then it's a success. If it was meant to say something serious and heavy and bring out this and that of the human condition and succeeds, then great! Likewise for everything else in the middle. If any fail, then whoops, they fail, sad to say. The readers are the kings, and they'll decide, and surely even then not all readers will agree with each other.

I wonder though if the SpecFic competition you bring up will last. If it does, then yes, it means something. If it doesn't, then sadly, it's going to have a short-lived effect. As for your comment on the sales of SpecFic, that's mostly foreign. Local work, SpecFic or otherwise, is not. I'm not really against that, 'coz I'm for anyone reading anything (with all the modern day distractions, any kind of reading is a boon), but I do want to balance it out a bit by making local fiction be read too. I don't know if there are SpecFic classes being taught now in schools, other than in UP, but if there are, then I'm glad. Sorry, for this, I'm not in the know. But if they exist, well and good.

I think the marginalization simply was borne from the fact that genre fiction wasn't considered “serious” by so many, but my point is it can be. If a story is a story is a story, then there must be good and bad stories no matter how you label them. And the good stories, SpecFic or not, can only help make a person better for his reading effort.

If all this brouhaha makes everyone pick up a book and read to decide for themselves, then I say, “Yes! My goal to see more people reading has been met!” But real success would be to see a huge percentage of youngsters consider reading (in print or online) as one of their regular habits, like watching TV and movies, playing video games or sports, or surfing the web.

You know what? “Marginalization” will always exist in some form or another. Deal with it. That's what we do. Then pick up the books we want to read. Or even those we don't, if only for curiosity's sake. We can only be better for it.

AD: I think we all agree on wishing our work will generate more readers and writers and editors and critics, et al, and all these things happening in our lifetime, that is pretty much my very own delusion, too, and I wholeheartedly agree with both of your skepticism about your apparent “successes,” something that a lot of writers lack with regards to being measuring sticks for their own “successes” and output and whatnot. Comfort should always be an indicator that it’s already time to change your tune somewhat. I really thoroughly believe that we should always suffer for our art, emotionally, financially, no matter how mind-numbing or mindless it might be for other people, i.e., lots of stuff out there.

The Fully Booked award is one of two that people really see as major award-giving bodies, and “major” here is synonymous first with “money” and second with “prestige,” “prestige” being associated with Neil Gaiman. I think the FB award’s sustainability beyond Gaiman’s partnership is rather shaky, considering how they’re presently handling 2008’s contest, nary a word about it after the deadline and only hushed whispers of the goings-on behind the scenes about its delay being related to Gaiman’s conceptual book tour later this year – it really does seem like it’s Gaiman’s name that’s greasing the wheels of that particular machine, sadly not even Greg Brilliantes’ or Alex Niño’s, and the awards were named after them, so how’s that for honour? That said, I’d say, yes, it’s still an adequate indicator, even if its heart is only really in the capitalist side of things. I wouldn’t say “enough,” but it’s definitely a very good start, especially when you consider how the other genres are faring by way of specialized contests and promotion and whatnot. I mean, we don’t have any local annual prose poetry contests here sponsored by Robert Hass or Charles Simic or anyone, let alone a capitalist institute that annually doles out one hundred grand per piece and a promise of sure publication, however late. We don’t have that for the Realist school of writing. We don’t have that for the essays. In that sense, SpecFic has really been a very spoiled genre, most certainly more spoiled than any Filipino-language writing of any sort, Realist or SpecFic or poetry or prose or whatever.

I agree, we really do need more regular publication venues for everything we do, poetry, prose, SpecFic, etc etc, new and sustainable venues, as we pretty much already rattled out all the available ones for the English-language output. The Filipino-language venues are more tricky, though, being only really Liwayway by way of something like the Free Press or Graphic and nothing much like that thereafter.

I’m really not too big with relying on schools to further our goals, at least not in elementary and high school. The primary and secondary educational processes have too many issues inherent to them that effectively blocks the potential for quality education of any sense that’s really beyond the scope of this conversation, with, say, as an example, how school goes out of its way to associate “reading” with “work,” thereby effectively turning potential readers off of just the sheer entertainment value of reading. And true education begins outside of the classrooms, anyway, be it elementary or high school or college. We also tend to forget that young people are already reading these things at home or during recess, with no thanks to the school system, which is pretty much how I started, with Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov and Michael Crichton and Michael Moorcock (“Behold the Man,” my gad) and Terry Pratchett, novellas and anthos and comic books, and I know for a fact that I wasn’t the only kid who read these things in our school, more or less 20 kids out of 500 who were into science fiction, which is probably the average. And kids are still reading these days, with Gaiman and Meyer and Brown and Rowling and maybe still Tolkien and Lewis.

In the local side, it’s the trashy horror anthos, which was what I was talking about when I said that there were SpecFic books that sold by the thousands country-wide. Those books reportedly sell as much as ten thousand copies per issue per annum! And yeah, I really do regard these trashy ephemera as literature, no matter how low we may think of them, these are very important in the process of reading and writing as it’s how people get started – it’s pretty much how I got started, with komiks like Horror and ST and a bunch of other stuff that had the late great Vincent Kua rendering his Gigeresque things. They’re what I call “the Training Bras of Literature,” and it is what it sounds like, it’s what we train our budding bosoms on, and from there we graduate to our double-Ds or triple-As or whatever, so we shouldn’t discount these things too easily when talking about anything “lit.”

And I’m afraid by “regular SpecFic critics” you only really have me matching the criteria you mention (and a very unacademic academic one, at that), and with that as a segue, one of my major criticisms of Speculative Fiction as practiced here is that it lacks a Bigger Politic - I'm tempted to say that maybe it's looking for one but more often than not it actually even tries its best to not even bother looking for one - but really I think it already had one since its inception here, and that's the whole Anti-Realist, Anti-Academic stance, which I think is wholly Dean’s than Kenneth's, despite your common trauma and neurosis. But recognition of that begs a few questions: why pit Speculative Fiction against Realism? Why pit Speculative Fiction with the Academe? And while we're at it, why transact along the level of the Enemy via the Palancas and the insistence for Academic Approval - dare I say Parental Approval? Isn't engagement with the Academe a recognition of its power over you? Isn't the saner, more morally-sound approach to just do your own thing outside of the policing eyes of the Academe? I ask because all of Speculative Fiction's successes so far stemmed from that impetus - do your own thing - via both of your regular anthos and Charles Tan's and Mia Tijam's online compilation - all self-published efforts - and yet all still seemingly wanting a pat on the back from F. Sionil Jose.

TO BE CONTINUED