Reviews and Comments

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.

Some time in the 2000s I remember stumbling on a lengthy set of Reddit posts asking "what if a force of modern US Marines found themselves stranded in Ancient Rome?". Much of this book is that, but for the zombie apocalypse. If you enjoyed that Reddit series then you'll probably enjoy this in the same way.

At other points in this fictional "oral history" I found myself thinking fondly of the late Studs Terkel's engrossing (real) oral history book Hard Times. I noticed Studs was thanked in the Afterword (along with George Romero, obvs). Hard Times is a classic because it captures different overlapping experiences of the Great Depression in people's own words, recorded by the author with dignity and respect. I think Max Brooks aimed for a fictional form of this, but missed the heart and soul of it - overlapping accounts of the same experience told by real, ordinary, people. Most of the "interviewees" in this book are generals, war heroes, profiteers, etc - the "ordinary" people are mostly still military or paramilitary.

The book tries to bring a global perspective by including accounts from around the world, but I felt Brooks strained when writing about cultures he doesn't know well. He seemed to fall back on superficial stereotypes (the Japan bits especially, eesh). He appears most at home writing American frontline troops "Gettin' the job done despite those clowns sitting behind a desk in the government", etc, etc. Definitely still cliche, but at least you get the impression he's owning it.

The other limitation of criss-crossing accounts all over the world is that there's little room for character development. A shame, because there are bits of interesting world-building throughout World War Z that you could build a great story around. For example, the refugee floating settlement in the Pacific. This shows up for a half-dozen pages, but I would have happily read a whole story set there and describing the daily lives and experiences of inhabitants. Instead, the book quickly pivots to the next section...

(Maybe I'm taking a book about a global war against zombies too seriously here, but the book takes itself seriously as well so it seems fair.)

Reading this 18 years after it was published did provide one piece of interesting perspective. In the story, the US originally denied and downplayed the outbreak leading to confusion, misinformation, and mismanagement. This account probably came over provocative and edgy in 2006, but compared against the actual events of 2020 it seems understated if anything.

World War Z is not terrible, despite all my complaints I finished reading it. And I can certainly see that there are people who would really enjoy it.

(World War Z was this month's book at my book club.)

This book incorporates some chapters that were originally published elsewhere, and it is really a collection of essays around the common theme of music. There's a mix of personal theories of music and composition, discussions of the primacy of context in music, advice on more practical topics such as the music business or "How to create a Scene", and some biographical accounts of creative process. I enjoyed the biographical elements the most, although I felt some had probably been simplified and sanitised a little for the book - I know enough history of Talking Heads to guess that some of these sessions probably came together a bit less smoothly when everyone was "in the room"!

Some chapters have aged noticeably, but this provides something of a historical snapshot. For example, the chapter on the music business mentions multiple "new" distribution companies. A decade later only iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp are still distributing music. The other names such as ithinkmusic, Topspin, CDBaby, and eMusic either no longer exist, or exist in a different form.

This is a revised edition, and from what I can tell most of the major revisions were done by adding some paragraphs to the end of chapters. Updating a book in this way seems perfectly fine, but I probably would have preferred explicit labelling for the new content rather than the somewhat clunky transition at the end of some chapters. For example, the chapter on music distribution ends with a section on streaming that contradicts much of what came before it. At least that update seems prescient: if I understand the time line correctly then the original content is from 2009 and the updates were written 2012 or 2013, which pretty much covers the rise of streaming services.

Interesting references are sprinkled throughout the book. For example, I made a note to follow up about the Brazillian composer Tom Zé and his concept of music and dancing as "fabrication defects" in otherwise perfectly manufactured corporate workers.

If you're a David Byrne fan like myself, or you're interested in popular music, then I think you'll find something of interest here. Don't be afraid to skim through if a particular chapter doesn't grab you!