Cyberpunk: Malaysia

I picked this collection up as I'm a fan of editor Zen Cho's other writing, but the premise also hooked me in. The Cyberpunk genre has borrowed superficially from East Asian imagery and stereotype, so I was keen to see what Malaysian writers would do with it.

Although all the stories are in English, they're (as you'd expect) largely written for a Malaysian readership. For the rest of us to keep up then we need to understand a little basic Malay and/or have a willingness to look up words at times. I think there were some more subtle geographical/cultural references that flew straight past me as well, as I've not spent much time in Malaysia.

There are interesting takes in these stories, but I didn't feel anything really stretched the boundaries of the genre. I did notice, but maybe shouldn't have been surprised, how many variations of techno-authoritarianism (both hard-line religious and hard-line secular) crop up over and over.

My favourite story, Kakak, was quite soulful and sad: an account of a fugitive android waiting to be smuggled to relative freedom in Indonesia. That one also had some great world-building glimpses of a pan-Southeast-Asian near future. Migrant worker themes like this pop up in a few stories, with the workers in question variously imagined as artificially intelligent robots or traditionally intelligent humans.

Its tonal opposite, Attack of the Spambots by Terence Toh is a hilarious story that I reckon would make a fantastic animated short.

This collection is almost a decade old now, and I want to go and see who is writing this kind of stuff in Malaysia these days. It'd be interesting to see how the themes and tropes might be different - for example there's a lot of gadget-based direct technological control in these stories, and I wonder if those anxieties might have morphed into extrapolations of more traditional surveillance and disinformation in the intervening years.

A recommended read, if any of this sounds interesting.