The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 1

The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar, features award-winning science fiction and fantasy short stories from Asia, Eastern Europe, and around the world.

The world of speculative fiction is expansive; it covers more than one country, one continent, one culture. Collected here are sixteen stories penned by authors from Thailand, the Philippines, China, Israel, Pakistan, Serbia, Croatia, Malaysia, and other countries across the globe. Each one tells a tale breathtakingly vast and varied, whether caught in the ghosts of the past or entangled in a postmodern age.

Among the spirits, technology, and deep recesses of the human mind, stories abound. Kites sail to the stars, technology transcends physics, and wheels cry out in the night. Memories come and go like fading echoes and a train carries its passengers through more than simple space and time. Dark and bright, beautiful and haunting, the stories herein represent speculative fiction from a sampling of the finest authors from around the world.

Table of Contents

S.P. Somtow (Thailand) — “The Bird Catcher”
Jetse de Vries (Netherlands) — “Transcendence Express”
Guy Hasson (Israel) — “The Levantine Experiments”
Han Song (China) — “The Wheel of Samsara”
Kaaron Warren (Australia/Fiji) —“Ghost Jail”
Yang Ping (China) — “Wizard World”
Dean Francis Alfar (Philippines) — “L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)”
Nir Yaniv (Israel) — “Cinderers”
Jamil Nasir (Palestine) — “The Allah Stairs”
Tunku Halim (Malaysia) — “Biggest Baddest Bomoh”
Aliette de Bodard (France) — “The Lost Xuyan Bride”
Kristin Mandigma (Philippines) — “Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang”
Aleksandar Žiljak (Croatia) — “An Evening in the City Coffehouse, With Lydia on My Mind” (Read for free in Apex Magazine issue 5)
Anil Menon (India) — “Into the Night”
Mélanie Fazi (France, translated by Christopher Priest) — “Elegy”
Zoran Živković (Serbia, translated by Alice Copple-Tošić) — “Compartments”

About the Editor

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming, the World Fantasy Award-winning Osama and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century. His other works include the Bookman Histories trilogy, several novellas, two collections, and a forthcoming comics mini-series, Adler. He currently lives in London.

Excerpt

From: "The Bird Catcher" by S.P. Somtow

There was this other boy in the internment camp. His name was Jim. After the war, he made something of a name for himself. He wrote books, even a memoir of the camp that got turned into a Spielberg movie. It didn’t turn out that gloriously for me.

My grandson will never know what it’s like to be consumed by hunger, hunger that is heartache: hunger that can propel you past insanity. But I know. I’ve been there. So has that boy Jim; that’s why I really don’t envy him his Spielberg movie.

After the war, my mother and I were stranded in China for a few more years. She was penniless, a lady journalist in a time when lady journalists only covered church bazaars, a single mother at a time when “bastard" was more than a bad word.

You might think that at least we had each other, but my mother and I never intersected. Not as mother and son, not even as Americans awash in great events and oceans of Asian faces. We were both loners. We were both vulnerable.

That’s how I became the boogieman’s friend.

He’s long dead now, but they keep him, you know, in the Museum of Horrors. Once in a generation, I visit him. Yesterday, I took my grandson, Corey, just as I took his father before him.

The destination stays the same, but the road changes with every generation. The first time I had gone by boat, along the quiet back canals of the old city. Now there was an expressway. The toll was forty baht—a dollar—a month’s salary that would have been, back in the ‘50s, in old Siam.

My son’s in love with Bangkok: the insane skyline, the high tech blending with the low tech, the skyscraper shaped like a giant robot, the palatial shopping malls, the kinky sex bars, the bootleg software arcades, the whole tossed salad. And he doesn’t mind the heat. He’s a big-time entrepreneur here, owns a taco chain.

I live in Manhattan. It’s quieter.

I can be anonymous. I can be alone. I can nurse my hunger in secret.

Christmases, though, I go to Bangkok; this Christmas, my grandson’s eleventh birthday, I told my son it was time. He nodded and told me to take the chauffeur for the day.

So, to get to the place, you zigzag through the world’s raunchiest traffic, then you fly along this madcap figure-of-eight expressway, cross the river where stone demons stand guard on the parapets of the Temple of Dawn, and then you’re suddenly in this sleazy alley. Vendors hawk bowls of soup and pickled guavas. The directions are on a handwritten placard attached to a street sign with duct tape.

It’s the Police Museum, upstairs from the local morgue. One wall is covered with photographs of corpses. That’s not part of the museum; it’s a public service display for people with missing family members to check if any of them have turned up dead. Corey didn’t pay attention to the photographs; he was busy with Pokémon.

Upstairs, the feeling changed. The stairs creaked. The upstairs room was garishly lit. Glass cases along the walls were filled with medical oddities, two-headed babies and the like, each one in a jar of formaldehyde, each one meticulously labelled in Thai and English. The labels weren’t printed, mind you. Handwritten. There was definitely a middle school show-and-tell feel about the exhibits. No air-conditioning. And no more breeze from the river like in the old days; skyscrapers had stifled the city’s breath.

There was a uniform, sick-yellow tinge to all the displays…the neutral cream paint was edged with yellow, the deformed livers, misshapen brains, tumorous embryos all floating in a dull yellow fluid, the heaps of dry bones an orange-yellow, the rows of skulls yellowing in the cracks…and then there were the young novices, shaven-headed little boys in yellow robes, staring in a heat-induced stupor as their mentor droned on about the transience of all existence, the quintessence of Buddhist philosophy.

And then there was Si Ui.

He had his own glass cabinet, like a phone booth, in the middle of the room. Naked. Desiccated. A mummy. Skinny. Mud-coloured, from the embalming process, I think. A sign (handwritten, of course) explained who he was. See Ui. Devourer of children’s livers in the 1950s. My grandson reads Thai more fluently than I do. He sounded out the name right away.

Si Sui Sae Ung.

“It’s the boogieman, isn’t it?” Corey said. But he showed little more than a passing interest. It was the year Pokémon Gold and Silver came out. So many new monsters to catch, so many names to learn.

“He hated cages,” I said.

“Got him!” Corey squealed. Then, not looking up at the dead man, “I know who he was. They did a documentary on him. Can we go now?”

“Didn’t your maid tell you stories at night? To frighten you? ‘Be a good boy, or Si Ui will eat your liver?’”

“Gimme a break, Grandpa. I’m too old for that shit.” He paused. Still wouldn’t look up at him. There were other glass booths in the room, other mummified criminals: a serial rapist down the way. But Si Ui was the star of the show. “Okay,” Corey said, “she did try to scare me once. Well, I was like five, okay? Si Ui. You watch out, he’ll eat your liver, be a good boy now. Sure, I heard that before. Well, he’s not gonna eat my liver now, is he? I mean, that’s probably not even him; it’s probably like wax or something.”

He smiled at me. The dead man did not.

“I knew him,” I said. “He was my friend.”

“I get it!” Corey said, back to his Gameboy. “You’re like me in this Pokémon game. You caught a monster once. And tamed him. You caught the most famous monster in Thailand.”

“And tamed him?” I shook my head. “No, not tamed.”

“Can we go to McDonald’s now?”

“You’re hungry.”

“I could eat the world!”

“After I tell you the whole story.”

“You’re gonna talk about the Chinese camp again, Grandpa? And that kid Jim, and the Spielberg movie?”

“No, Corey, this is something I’ve never told you about before. But I’m telling you so when I’m gone, you’ll know to tell your son. And your grandson.”

“Okay, Grandpa.”

And finally, tearing himself away from the video game, he willed himself to look.

The dead man had no eyes; he could not stare back.