Pinoy Speculative Fiction Stories Recognized

Check out these two links:

From The Bibliophile Stalker
From Notes From The Peanut Gallery

Sometime just before the release of PGS2, someone whose name I can't recall but whose face I still remember, told me that he didn't think there was much hope that the rest of the world would find our genre fiction interesting. He spoke with the confidence of a gloomy soothsayer, saying that the few successes here and there were aberrations. His solution was that writers should stick only to the stories that are set in the reality of the country, stories that can say something, and to leave genre to foreigners. I still remember him saying:

"How will we be taken seriously if the writers here don't take themselves seriously?"

My answer then, and my answer today, is that a story is a story is a story, my old mantra; if the story works, then it works, never mind the genre, never mind if the story can't even be classified. And who is to say that genre fiction can't say something? Or nothing at all? Those two links above show that we have stories to tell that the world can indeed find interesting.

The stories mentioned in those two links were all cited as Honorable Mentions by The Year's Best Fantasy And Horror (edited by Ellen Datlow for Horror, and Kelly Link & Gavin Grant for Fantasy).