The Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler

Mia Tijam (author of "Blink, Wake Up" from PGS4) and Charles Tan (author of "The Devil Is In The Details" from PGS3 and "The Jar Collector" from The Special PGS Horror Issue) are the co-editors for The Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler, which has just been launched.

The Introduction (by Charles Tan):

My first and foremost goal in setting up this website is to promote Philippine literature, specifically those who write in the field we call speculative fiction. In the past four years, it seems like there's been a huge boom in this category, whether it's the appearance of publications like Philippine Speculative Fiction, The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, and Story Philippines, or the emergence of competitions like the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards.

However, as prolific or talented Filipino writers might be, one of my concerns is that their work doesn't get read outside of the Philippines, or even Metro Manila for that matter. And in this day and age of the Internet, it's not an impossible hurdle to overcome. That's not to say Filipino writers aren't being published abroad or online. They're even being acknowledged in anthologies like The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. In case of the former though, that only accounts for a small percentage of our output and in the case of the latter, prospective readers don't really have convenient methods of reading the said work.

Thus me and my co-editor, Mia Tijam (a talented writer in her own right and perhaps even a keener literary critic) selected various locally-published stories which might serve as a sampler of sorts. As much as possible, we avoided texts that were readily available online, and we looked through publications printed in the past four years to limit our scope. What we hope is a selection of stories that both Filipinos and readers abroad can appreciate.

It's not only Mia and Charles who are familiar names from PGS involved with this project. I see Dominique Cimafranca, Andrew Drilon, M.R.R. Arcega, Michael Co, Dean Francis Alfar, F.H. Batacan, and Apol Lejano-Massebieau.

Click here to visit the site and read the stories!