Cyberpunk: Malaysia

by

330 pages

English language

Published March 2, 2015 by Buku Fixi.

ISBN:
9789670750873
Goodreads:
25720957

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3 stars (1 review)

1 edition

Interesting capsule of stories

3 stars

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 …