This is another book of Filipino SFF sent to me by the lovely Charles. I’ve come across Alfar’s work before – in Year’s Best collections, I think – but didn’t know he had a collection like this; it came out last year.

I was really intrigued to read in Alfar’s collection about the way the stories were arranged, and how that reflects the title. The moon corresponds to ideas of love and longing; the sun to resolve and desire; and strange stars suggest “the familiar rendered peculiar.”

I’m not the sort of person who can read a collection and point to all the ways subtle themes or stylistic choices play out; it’s not how I read, or think. For me one thing I noted across this collection is just how varied the stories are, in tone and narrator and place and pace. It’s something that made it highly enjoyable – I didn’t get bored, I didn’t go into the next story expecting and getting the same thing each time. There are a few things that keep cropping up – stories set in the Philippines, or riffing off Filipino ideas or history, for instance (and I’m sure there’s more of that than I managed to see). But some stories are pretty science fictional; others are on the horror side – although none got to the point where I had to stop reading, so that was a positive from my perspective; and others are more traditionally fantastical. First person and third person narration; gender diversity in narrator and focus; tonal jumps from comedic to vicious to nostalgic.

Some of my favourites:

• “Ohkti”: seems straightforward enough – living on the moon is rubbish, being brought up by your big sister is also rubbish. And then – oh the twists. Alfar conveys the emotions sympathetically but also almost clinically – which doesn’t make sense but I can’t explain it any better.
• “East of the Sun”: this is one of the vicious ones. Alfar is doing playful things with narration and reader expectations, and making that explicit, and I loved it.
• “A Field Guide to the Roads of Manila”: I’m a sucker for artificial things gaining awareness and interacting with humans.
• All of the stories in the Stars section. These really got to me; really packed an emotional punch.

How easy is it to get this outside of the Philippines? Don’t know, but I hope it can be found.