The Bibliophile Stalker Responds

The Bibliophile Stalker responds in this post to the reaction mentioned here. An excerpt:

Bhex has written a reaction to my previous essay on Philippine speculative fiction. In her essay, she writes it from the stance of a Filipino writer.

Much of her thesis revolves around the idea that both in the past and the present, local publications do not reject stories simply because they have speculative fiction elements or because they lack Filipino elements. I don't really disagree when it comes to that part, although it is distressing that she was quoting an excerpt from my essay which led her to that supposition. I mean in my essay, it's not like I didn't mention the numerous Futuristic Fiction winners. Or writers like Gregorio Brillantes and Joy Dayrit and Alfred Yuson whose stories have speculative fiction elements and certainly predate Dean Francis Alfar's work (and they ought to have been published somewhere...).

And while we're on the subject of "Literary" local publications, this year's Philippines Free Press award for fiction went to F. H. Batacan's story, "Keeping Time", which is a speculative fiction piece. (And for the record, the current fiction editor of The Philippines Free Press, Angelo R. Lacuesta, has gone on record to say that he "happily dismisses notions of genre.") So no, I never claimed that local literary publications rejected speculative fiction stories. Perhaps that could have been a reasonable interpretation based on the quoted passage alone but hey, that's the problem when you read excerpts and not the entire essay--a writer's thoughts and beliefs can be misconstrued.

So where did the problem originate? A mutual acquaintance posted her own reactions to my essay and it is the same quote which Bhex was referring to. If you read the comments section, the author of the post posited the theory that her fiction would have otherwise been deemed unpublishable in magazines like The Philippine Graphic and The Philippines Free Press. It's probably more appropriate to claim that Bhex was responding to her interpretation of the essay. Maybe the title of Bhex's "A Reaction to an Essay on Philippine Speculative Fiction" should be "A Reaction to A Reaction to an Essay on Philippine Speculative Fiction". Not that I don't mind the extra hits coming from her blog, but let's give proper credit where it's due.

That aside, there are some complaints that I have with regards to her essay (the rest of her article is advice on writing and one's path as a writer).

Click on this link to read The Stalker's full reaction. In addition, click on this link to read another response (and quite a number of comments) to The Stalker's original essay. And further, don't forget this link by Bhex, where an interesting discussion between her and Banzai Cat is ongoing.