Get Hold Of Cyberpunk: Malaysia Written And Illustrated By Zen Cho Accessible In Readable Copy

don't know if it's fair to rate a book that I have a story in, but well, I guess I'm rating all the stories in the book other than mine.
Anyway, as much as I was hoping that I would fall desperately in love with Cyberpunk: Malaysia, I didn't, I liked it well enough, It's pretty decent. But it's not gripping, But as far as debut Malaysian SciFi goes, it's a good offering, So that's.from me!



There is a quote I think which says something about writers reflecting the state of their country through their stories.
I think Cyberpunk: Malaysia does that, In imagining the near future, the writers in this anthology give vent to their worries about religion and religious control, the greed of our politicians, the growing racial divide, the growing economic divide, the burgeoning anger of the populace, the treatment of foreign workers and the polarizing effect of knowledge or the lack thereof.




Likes:
Attack of the spambots sitelinkTerence Toh
What the andromaid reads at night sitelinkTed Mahsun
The wall that wasn't a wall sitelinkKris Williamson
The twins sitelinkAdiwijaya Iskandar
October Chin AiMay
Undercover in Tanah Firdaus sitelinkTina Isaacs
Unusual suspects sitelinkTariq Kamal
The White Mask sitelinkZedeck Siew
i am not impressed with "heywecanseethefuture" type of stories in this collection but if i am destined live long enough, it would be great to have a grab of DMZINEJANUARY.

Robots and AI's and cyborgs, oh my!

Scifi stories of all that can go wrong and right with computers set in Malaysia.
Not all the stories were my cup of tea some skewed heavily dystopian but I loved seeing scifi from a different point of view.
The cover of the book is really pretty and special, I've never seen it before, I'm not sure about some short stories, most of them were strange and I didn't understand them, Butorwere really good, It's a nice collection of cyberpunk short stories, respect for the work, As with most short story collections, some worked at least for me better than others, but overall worth reading, Maybe three and half. wow, this anthology was a roller coaster of emotions, will rate and give thoughts on each short story later I must admit that before picking up this book I hadn't read anything marketed as "cyberpunk.
" I requested this book because I wanted to read some Malaysian science fiction, From this collection, I got the feeling that "cyberpunk" isn't my favorite subgenre of SFF, That being said, I did enjoy this collection of short stories set in Malaysia of the future or alternative present, A majority made me think, like good speculative fiction should,

There were two related things that made this collection difficult for me, First was that the authors tended to assume that the reader knew certain things about Kuala Lumpur or about Malaysian society, My knowledge of Malaysian society is scanty at best, so sometimes I had trouble understanding the references, A bit more description would have been helpful to smooth this out, Since SFF usually creates an alternative reality, this is an important part of genre storytelling that sometimes felt missing in this anthology, When reading speculative fiction, I shouldn't have to know any background except what the author gives me which wasn't the case for several of these stories.


Second, and related to the first, is that in several stories some of the most important lines are spoken in what I assume is Malay.
At least, I guess that they're the most important lines, Having no background in the language, I was again left at a loss trying to figure out what they could possibly be saying.
I think that this is partially because of Fixi Novo's publishing manifesto:

, We believe that omputih/gwailohspeak is a Malaysian language,
. We will not use italics for nonAmerican/ nonEnglish terms, This is because those words are not foreign to a Malaysian audience, italics are a form of apology,

While I understand these sentiments and I applaud the publisher for saying in no uncertain terms that Malaysian words are not inferior to English ones!, it makes it difficult for a nonMalaysian reader to understand.
Perhaps footnotes or endnotes explaining what the words mean would help Or, since this is a speculative fiction book, the authors could have used the genre's techniques for introducing words from completely new languages.
In other words, I totally understand why these Malaysian terms were used, but as a nonMalaysian reader I want to understand the stories too!

Read the rest of the review, including my thoughts on each story, on my blog: sitelink blogspot. co ebook here: sitelink kobo. com/us/en/ebook/cybe, . .
Or here: sitelink smashwords. com/books/view
ebook not available from Amazon,

First story, "Underneath Her Tudung" by Angeline Woon is available free on the preview kobo.
Unfortunately, I gave up on it, and, after tryingother stories, found the MalaysianEnglish opaque, So I'm putting it aside, Not for me, I'm afraid, Oh, well. Maybe try more another time

But here's the editor's best story: The First Witch of Damansara,stars! Wonderful story. Don't miss!
sitelink

com/article/f To b fair, Cyber is not a particular genre of interest difficult to digest towards the end, Abstracts of a post modernistic Malaysia and creative weird futuristic concepts somewhat made my eyelids heavy and mouth a perpetual "O" shape, . . Of course literary/ writing skills are pretty good, . . Just not enough to make it a mouth watering page turner, There r other better Fixi short story books one shelf I would happily reread, Not this one. Many of stories require some development it's not interesting to read some scene setting and a conclusion, The more memorable stories question or satirise the conventions of Malaysian society, such as whether an android who selfidentifies as a woman still needs to wear a tudung head scarf over her motile nanotech hair and zombie humans spamming people with advertising.
Any collection is going to have better stories and ones that are not so good, There are some clunkers in here, but there are some brilliantly horrifying ones too, ones that fully deserve the title cyberpunk I say this as someone who is frustrated with the tendency to add "punk" to everything as if that is anything other than a marketing ploy.

The two or maybe two and a half gleaming jewels make this book absolutely worth reading, Most scifi short stories seek to highlight society's idiosyncrasies by casting them in a new light, emboldened by technology and leading readers to question if commonly accepted norms, are in fact somewhat peculiar Cyberpunk: Malaysia is no exception.
Employers holding up foreign workers' passports How about giant towers that shoots lasers to anyone who dares escape the country
Neurospambots making everyone an extension of their companies Corporate culture already took care of that.
Enter the eerily prescient 'Instacast' story that predated the Stories of Instagram, Or literal social stratification where 'orang atas' lives on a higher plane separately from the 'Tanah' folks, These stories offer a creative, fresh take on Malaysian life and are fun to read, .