Cyberpunk Malaysia

Cyberpunk as you've never seen it before… Science fiction is all about outrageous ideas. Nice Malay girls breaking the rules. Censorship. Brain drain. Moral policing. Migrant exploitation. All the stuff of fiction, obviously. But these 14 short stories take it one step further. The nice Malay girls are cyborgs. The spambots are people. The brains have drained into cyberspace, and the censorship is inside your head. Welcome to Cyberpunk: Malaysia. (Contents in this ebook are exactly the same as the print version, just with a different cover.) Line-Up: Underneath Her Tudung / Angeline Woon Codes / Anna Tan Personal / Sharmilla Ganesan Attack of The Spambots / Terence Toh ONE HUNDRED YEARS: Machine / Rafil Elyas What the Andromaid Reads at Night / Ted Mahsun KAKAK / William Tham Wai Liang The Wall That Wasn’t a Wall / Kris Williamson The Twins / Adiwijaya Iskandar October 11 / Chin Ai-May Undercover in Tanah Firdaus / Tina Isaacs Unusual Suspects / Tariq Kamal The White Mask / Zedeck Siew Extracts from DMZINE #13 (January 2115) / Foo Sek Han (Buku Fixi) (Fixi Novo)

This book comprises a collection of essays that address a significant gap in the study of Malaysian Literature in English by exploring selected local and diasporic writings produced in the new postcolonial millennium, including works by established, emerging, and new writers. The literary developments in this new millennium have been substantial and are reflected in the production of new voices, viewpoints, themes, trends, styles, and forms. By articulating these changing postcolonial perspectives and conditions, the chapters in this volume can inform and enrich the study of nation, society, and culture in a globalized and hyperreal age. Tapping into the difference, diversity, and hybridity of 21st-century historicized and glocalized multicultural Malaysia, the millennium writings explore the changing identities and relations and their social, cultural, and political dimensions through the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. By examining new, different, or changing ideas, forms, themes, and representations, this book considers the vital ways the millennium voices and viewpoints can potentially help us critically rethink and resituate postcolonial studies on Malaysia as they spotlight challenges and new directions in the field. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and scholars in the field of Malaysian writing in English, Southeast Asian literature, Asian literature, diaspora, and literary studies. The chapters in the book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

In this companion, an international range of contributors examine the cultural formation of cyberpunk from micro-level analyses of example texts to macro-level debates of movements, providing readers with snapshots of cyberpunk culture and also cyberpunk as culture. With technology seamlessly integrated into our lives and our selves, and social systems veering towards globalization and corporatization, cyberpunk has become a ubiquitous cultural formation that dominates our twenty-first century techno-digital landscapes. The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary science fiction form to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television, and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, as the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, and empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking, as much as differentiating, our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world. With original entries that engage cyberpunk’s diverse ‘angles’ and its proliferation in our life worlds, this critical reference will be of significant interest to humanities students and scholars of media, cultural studies, literature, and beyond.

This book brings together fourteen articles by prominent critics of Malaysian Anglophone literature from five different countries: Australia, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US. It investigates the thematic and stylistic trends in the literary products of selected writers of the tradition in the genres of drama, fiction, and poetry, from its beginnings to the present, focusing mainly on the postcolonial themes of ethnicity, gender, diaspora, and nationalism, which are central to the creativity and imagination of these writers. The book explores the works of not just the established writers of the tradition but also those who have received little critical attention to date but who are equally gifted, such as Adibah Amin, Edward Dorall, Rehaman Rashid, and Huzir Suleiman. The chapters collectively address the challenges and achievements of writers in the English language in a country where English is widely used in daily life and yet marginalised in the creative domain to elevate the status of writings in the national language, i.e., Bahasa Malaysia. The book will demonstrate that in spite of such recurrent neglect of the medium, Malaysia has produced a number of outstanding writers in the language, who are comparable in creativity and craftsmanship to writers of other Anglophone traditions. The book will be of interest to readers and researchers of Malaysian literature, postcolonial literatures, minority literatures, gender studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

This collection interrogates the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered socio-economic practices at the level of the ‘everyday’. It brings feminist insights to bear on the emerging International Political Economy (IPE) debates about ‘the everyday’, showing how gender is key to understanding how political economy is enacted and performed at the local level, by non-elites, and via various cultural practices. Drawing on ‘everyday’ IPE and a longer-standing body of feminist scholarship that documents and theorizes the mutually constitutive nature of, on the one hand, global markets, and on the other, households, families, relations of social reproduction and gendered socio-economic practices, this collection charts the lived realities of people and communities across a wide range of sites and spaces of the global political economy. It considers how globalizing capitalism affects and is in turn affected by Argentine sex workers, Nepalese private security contractors, Canadian call centre workers, Southeast Asian domestic workers, workers and players in British bingo halls, working class households in the UK, and much more. It demonstrates, through detailed empirical research, that a gender lens is crucial for understanding how, and on what terms, individuals and households are becoming ever more enmeshed in capitalist social relations, and how they actively and creatively resist these processes. The chapters originally published as a special issue in Globalizations.

The Malaysian Writers Society presents a decade of quality short stories in The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010–2020. A wish for better weather has unexpected consequences. A pianist finds an unlikely audience in her next-door neighbour. A girl attempts Mount Kinabalu only to regret it. Curated by editors Zhui Ning Chang and JY Tan, The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010–2020 spans the speculative and realist to thrillers and drama. It explores the bold new directions of contemporary Malaysian writing and hints at the new heights of our future national literature. The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010–2020 includes: Hugo Award winner Zen Cho; 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Regional Winner Saras Manickam; Fixi Novo Contest winners Terence Toh and Chua Kok Yee; and USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw.

In the four decades or so since its invention, the internet has become pivotal to how many societies function, influencing how individual citizens interact with and respond to their governments. Within Southeast Asia, while most governments subscribe to the belief that new media technological advancement improves their nation’s socio-economic conditions, they also worry about its cultural and political effects. This book examines how this set of dynamics operates through its study of new media in contemporary Malaysian society. Using the social imaginary framework and adopting a socio-historical approach, the book explains the varied understandings of new media as a continuing process wherein individuals and their societies operate in tandem to create, negotiate and enact the meaning ascribed to concepts and ideas. In doing so, it also highlights the importance of non-users to national technological policies. Through its examination of the ideation and development of Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor mega project to-date and reference to the seminal socio-political events of 2007-2012 including the 2008 General Elections, Bersih and Hindraf rallies, this book provides a clear explanation for new media’s prominence in the multi-ethnic and majority Islamic society of Malaysia today. It is of interest to academics working in the field of Media and Internet Studies and Southeast Asian Politics.

Twenty-nine new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction. The second annual instalment to the 'rare and wonderful' (The Times) The Best of World SF Volume 1, this collection of twenty-nine stories, including eight original and exclusive additions, represents the state of the art in international science fiction. Navigating around the globe, The Best of World SF Volume 2 features writers from Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Greece, Grenada, India, Iraq, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, The Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Each story has been selected by World SF expert and award-winning author Lavie Tidhar. Taking us into space – Mars at first, then the stars – and then back to a strange, transformed Earth via AI, gods, aliens and the undead, the collection traces the ever-changing meaning of the genre from some of the most exciting voices writing today. This is not a retrospective of what science fiction around the world used to look like. This is a snapshot of what some of it looks like now. And it's never been more exciting. Reviews for The Best of World SF series: 'We need this anthology, and we need editors like Tidhar' The Times 'Just the start of a whole new game for speculative fiction authors around the world' LA Review of Books 'An excellent, lovingly curated collection' Financial Times 'This wonderful anthology should be a hit with any sci-fi fan' Publishers Weekly 'Tidhar gives a cheerful, fannish introduction to the stories, drawn from 26 countries on five continents, and encompassing a dizzying range of tones and approaches' The Times 'An outstanding assortment of international sci-fi shorts... a bold and powerful argument for non-Anglophone SF's potential to push the genre's boundaries.' Publishers Weekly Starred Review