Book Review: City of Others by Jared Poon

Magic and bureaucracy in a supernatural Singapore

It seems like I enjoy a subgenre of urban fantasy that I am starting to think of as “books that involve the bureaucratization of magic,” where main characters working for government agencies try to tame the magical world with procedures, paperwork, and protocols. Examples might include Charlie Stross’s The Laundry Files, parts of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and now, it seems, Jared Poon’s new DEUS series beginning with City of Others.

Our narrator is Ben, who works in middle management at DEUS, the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders, part of the Ministry of Community, that oversees the “Others”: people with magic or connections to the supernatural.

The book is set in a Singapore where magic is everywhere, but most people don’t notice it due to what the ministry refers to as “Deviant Occurrences Blind Eye Syndrome” (DOBES). But most of the Others just all it the “DKP effect,” for “Don’t kaypoh” (kaypoh is Singaporean slang for ‘busybody’).

Ben’s team of government bureaucrats works to help Others fit into the overall fabric of Singaporean society. The team features a psychic, a spell-slinging bomoh (Malay shaman), a half-jinn intern, and Ben, who is a “Gardener” with access to a large well of internal magic. The team is eventually joined by a ghost cat who can rescue objects from the immediate past, as well as by Ben’s boyfriend, Adam.

Ben and his team face a dual threat: first, a world-ending attack from an endlessly ravenous shoal of creatures swimming in from a parallel but connected dimension; second, the possibility that their boss, Rebecca, may catch them performing an exorcism without a risk management plan and filing for official clearances.

There's just something I find charming about the juxtaposition of civil servants and bureaucracy with snake gods and other supernatural magic. For example, at one point, when Ben is trying to figure out what's going wrong in a residential neighbourhood, he tells himself, "OAR—Observe. Analyze. Respond. That was the DEUS framework for field observations around deviant phenomena. There was even a very nice set of slides, featuring clip-art people rowing a kayak together, that showed how the OAR framework could help us navigate complex situations.” As he considers what he can remember from the slides, he ends up submerged and frozen in a parallel universe for a few moments.

The OAR framework helps Ben navigate the situation, but his reference to it (and other government protocols) makes the magic seem possible to tame, which perhaps helps the reader feel like it could be real. Rather than forcing the reader into a magical realm, it brings the magic into our mundane realm with its informational PowerPoints and mnemonics to remember protocols.

Further, just as even mundane employees sometimes face top-down policies that make their lives difficult, Ben must deal with the DEUS’s past policies, which focused more on controlling and policing the Others rather than helping them. In the past, DEUS even violently shut down locations where Others gathered, calling them “unhygienic” and “lawless." Due to this legacy, many powerful Others do not trust DEUS, and Ben must work to prove that the agency has changed.

The book is peppered with pop culture references, with a light and humorous tone.  For example, Ben quotes both Aladdin and Star Wars at his boyfriend and, at one point, in the midst of the battle against the shoal, his team needs to stop everything to participate in the Ministry of Community Sports Day to demonstrate their team spirit for their boss. But the book also has a deeper core, where characters cope with past grief and mistakes while learning to grow and work together. Ben begins the book unable to ask for help and feeling emotionally estranged from his father. By the end, he comes to better understand how his father shows care, and also learns to ask for help when he needs it.

I enjoyed that this book was set in Singapore. We get to hear about different forms of magical beings based in Asian folklore, such as the manananggal, a mythical creature from Filipino folklore, and Semar, a Javanese demigod. Poon also integrates aspects of Singaporean history into the book, such as in the fact that the category of “Other” for magical creatures comes from a post-colonial era racial classification that the Singaporean government used as an administrative tool. People were asked to self-identify as “Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other.” This puts all the magic users together with racialized others: “We, of course, were in the last category, which included jiangshi [undead corpse creatures from Chinese folklore], diviners, and elves right alongside Eurasians, Filipinos, Arabs—all the ones who had to tick a special box and fill something in when they entered the National Service.”

City of Others is clearly the first in a series where we spend a lot of the book meeting new characters and being introduced to the larger context of magical Singapore. The city has several powerful factions of Others that vie for influence, and there’s even a shadowy private organization trying to build technology with magic taken from Others. Because we’re being introduced to so many new characters and settings, the narrative can feel a bit like it’s dragging at times. But it was an amusing first book, and I’ll be curious about how Poon continues to build out this world.

Highlights:

• Fun, magical Singapore
• Bureaucratization of magic
• Queer characters
• Ghost cat

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. Definitely enjoyable, but you’ll notice that it’s setting up for a longer series.

Reference: Poon, Jared. City of Others [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

TV Review: Tomorrow and I

In the future, humanity is the same, but we find new ways to complicate our lives

The anthology miniseries Tomorrow and I, produced in Thailand and released last year on Netflix, explores near-future scenarios where personal identity, social mores and class divisions intersect with digital tools, biotechnology and climate change. Although the stories told in the four episodes have universal appeal, they are related to topics that are deeply important in today’s Thailand: the struggles that trans people still face in conservative families, the government’s hypocrisy that keeps sex workers out of the formal economy, the rapidly changing attitudes about the place of religion in the 21st century, the dangers of rising sea levels for a coastal country, and the slow distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

The first episode, Black Sheep, is a bittersweet tale of selfless love. The story is about a closeted trans man who has been so far resigned to a life of unhappiness. He finds a measure of satisfaction in his job as a doctor who does cutting-edge research on 3D printing of organs for transplantation. It turns out that growing living tissue into the desired shape works better in microgravity, so he’s been recruited for a space mission where his experiments have more promising chances. However, his return trip results in a fatal accident, and that’s when his husband sees an opportunity to use forbidden cloning technology to bring him back—this time in the right body.

We don’t learn about the protagonist’s gender dysphoria until after his death, when the cloning technology scans the memories from his brain. Most of the episode actually follows the husband, whom we see grieve for a while before he comes up with the cloning idea. There’s a very interesting scene where he argues with his in-laws about the process: they strongly oppose it for religious reasons, and he has no time for talk of the afterlife. The Buddhist doctrine that the material world is full of suffering takes a central place in the discussion.

This episode makes good use of the narrative rule that victories must have a painful cost. For our astronaut doctor, it’s the legal limbo of existing as a cloned person (not unlike the real-life legal limbo of trans people in Thailand, who still can’t change their ID to one that reflects their true gender). For the husband, it’s a prison sentence for stealing the head from the morgue, and after that, the separation from his spouse, who miraculously got his job back, but is now permanently stationed at a lunar research lab.

Pros: Great casting for the role of the astronaut doctor, with separate actors for the scenes before and after resurrection/transition.

Cons: The reveal of this character’s history of gender dysphoria is handled without much tact, almost crossing the line into sensationalism.

The second episode, Paradistopia, is a warped reflection of real life through a neon lens. The protagonist is a businesswoman who founds a sex robot factory with the dual goal of relaxing the tight social expectations regarding sex in Thailand and giving less arduous white-collar jobs to aging sex workers. The story of her rise to commercial success is interweaved with flashbacks of her childhood as the daughter of a sex worker, struggling to finish her studies and dreaming of leaving her slum behind. In the present, she’s returned to the same slum and transformed it into a proud red-light district where every desire is catered to with the latest robotic technology.

There are several scenes of talk shows discussing the planned launch of a robot brothel; cabinet members warn that men who get too used to consequence-free interaction with a machine may carry the same behavior to their real relationships, while our protagonist insists that Thailand needs to develop a more open attitude about the varieties of erotic desire. These scenes have the clear intent of inviting the viewer to side with the protagonist, but she’s not above playing dirty herself. She bribes several government officers to secure the legal permits for her robot brothel, and even orchestrates a false-flag smear capaign against herself to draw public sympathy.

The resolution of this episode is rather abrupt and inelegant, but it does pack an implied punch: just because the authorities aren’t ready for a world with robot sex doesn’t mean demand will magically vanish.

Pros: The fabulous retrofuturist aesthetic in every detail.

Cons: The cringeworthy attempts at humor.

The third episode, Buddha Data, is about the meeting between digital culture and ancient tradition. We follow a Buddhist monk who starts questioning his purpose when the whole country becomes obsessed with a new mobile app that adds gamification to acts of charity. The creator of the app resents the Buddhist priesthood for cheating his parents out of all their possessions in the form of offerings, and has given himself the mission to bring actual, material consequences to good deeds. Instead of accumulating merit for the next life, users of his app receive karma points they can exchange for discounts. It doesn’t take long for some people to perversely game the system and earn points for technically fulfilling the quests.

So our monk, who happens to have coding experience, teams up with a former colleague and launches his own spiritual progress app. While his competitor turns charity into a performance for selfish motives, this app guides the user through the steps of enlightenment with the help of wisdom extracted from the brains of veteran monks. All seems to go well for this project, until a scandal blows up and brusquely reminds the viewer that scanning a monk’s brain is no guarantee of holiness.

Pros: The dialogue scenes between the monk and his robot sidekick.

Cons: The plot relies on too many convenient contrivances.

The fourth episode, Octopus Girl, is the show’s pièce de résistance, although the budget was clearly spent more in set design and casting than in scriptwriting. We’re introduced to two adorable schoolgirls who live in a slum during a worldwide three-year-long rain caused by a collapsed climate cycle. Most people have become accustomed to the perpetual rain, and some animals have begun showing impressive adaptations, but tropical diseases are out of control. The United Nations have developed a vaccine prepared with octopus genes; the only side effect is that your face grows little tentacles. In Thailand, the comically inept Prime Minister makes a big show of banning the vaccine from the country while proposing instead to enclose flooded towns under glass domes.

Meanwhile, our girls sneak into a TV singing contest and steal the nation’s hearts by bringing attention to the way the government neglects poor neighborhoods. The scenes in their slum have a cute slice-of-life vibe that is only hurt by the tonal mismatch of a sense of humor more appropriate for an audience of children (which is hard to believe, given this is the same series that had an episode about sex robots). But the biggest tonal whiplash is the episode’s ending, which just wipes off all the goodwill the episode has laboriously tried to earn.

Pros: Excellent set design.

Cons: Very strange humor, needlessly mean ending.

Taken as a whole, Tomorrow and I is pessimistic about the potential of technology. Even when people seem to achieve their goals with the help of advanced genetics or robotics or informatics, the situation invariably turns more adverse and the achievement becomes unusable or unenjoyable. However, this doesn’t mean that the stories take a nihilistic stance about the human search for happiness. This is no Black Mirror. What these stories are saying is that, while technology makes our faults more notorious and therefore more consequential, that doesn’t negate the sincerity of our efforts. Fundamentally good people find themselves in defective systems that don’t allow for neat, clean solutions.

The nuances of this humanist stance are hindered by the show’s painfully simplistic and obvious dialogues. I must admit that I watched with English subtitles and can’t understand Thai, but to the extent that each plot can be followed, what is gained with great visual effects is lost with lackluster scripts, by which I mean that the characters’ reactions can get too melodramatic, or too predictable, or too hackneyed. One can believe that the future will be hard to navigate, but not that we will lack the capacity to describe it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [Book]: The Weight of our Sky by Hanna Alkaf

A well-crafted delight for YA fans seeking horizon-broadening historical fare

Cover Art by Guy Shields

As a historical YA set in Malaysia with only the lightest of speculative elements, The Weight of our Sky is a bit out-of-lane for this blog, but the author overlaps with a lot of the Twitter writing people that I follow, and this debut has been on my radar for quite some time. I've spent some time in Southeast Asia and am familiar with a fair bit of the region's 20th century history, but I knew little about Malaysia and the complex historical relationships between its ethnic groups. The Weight of our Sky focuses on once incident in particular: the riots set off on 13 May 1969 in Kuala Lumpur, in which hundreds of people (with wildly diverging "official" and "unofficial" death tolls) were killed in sectarian violence largely between Chinese and Malay populations in the city. This is an event that clearly still looms large among Malaysian communities and I think it's particularly important for a book like this for me to note that what follows is an outgroup review and only likely to be insightful to those, like me, coming from an outsider perspective with limited understanding of the specific cultural context. For a more ownvoices take, I recommend The Quiet Pond for a perspective from the Malaysian diaspora.

The protagonist of The Weight of our Sky is a Melati, a young Malay Muslim woman who, since the untimely death of her father, has been suffering from what she feels is possession by a malevolent djinn: trapped by compulsions and by obsessive thoughts about the death of her mother (symptoms which are recognisable to a modern audience as OCD), she is already struggling when the events of May 13 begin.  Caught in the cinema where she and her friend have been watching a film, Melati narrowly escapes the first round of violence, and is taken in by an older Chinese woman, Auntie Bee, who looks after her in the days following the riots. Despite being from ethnic groups on different side of the conflict, Melati connects with most members of the family and integrates into the small community they build while trying to survive the now-lawless city. Still desperate to get back to her mother, however, she convinces the family's younger son, who is volunteering with the Red Cross, to take her out on his trips - and soon learns how dangerous the streets still are and how much courage and willpower it will take to survive, and help others, in the circumstances.

The book wastes no time getting into its historical events, and the opening chapters provide all the necessary information to understand Melati's society and the immediate trigger to the riots. It does so while placing significantly more weight on Melati's personal history, and particularly the symptoms and progression of her illness. Melati's battles with OCD, including her self-talk and her constant rationalising and bargaining with herself over compulsive behaviour, are front and centre of every chapter, and its all-encompassing nature gives her character a broadly relateable and satisfying arc without overstating her agency in a complicated political situation. It also allows Melati to be somewhat distracted about the underlying factors of the riots and for characters to be able to explain these to her, making them more accessible to modern readers, particularly those who may not have a background on the ongoing tensions between communities in Malaysia. By not dwelling on the immediate political triggers and relying on their explanatory power, Alkaf's story manages to drive home the overwhelming senselessness of the ethnic tensions that are driving people to violence, while gently exploring some of the social factors that have made the communities' lives harder through the eyes of a painfully fallible young protagonist.

The treatment of Melati's OCD, particularly in this time and place, could have easily been a story by itself without the historical trauma, and it's treated in a way which feels very real. Melati makes sense of her suffering by assuming is that that there is a djinn in her head who needs constant appeasement through rituals in order to ensure her mother stays alive (or to at least stop the thoughts about her death; the book is deliberately vague and illogical, just as mental illnesses themselves are). The use of this device is explained in the author foreword, but even without the particular cultural touchstones, Melati's internal dialogue makes an unpleasant kind of sense to anyone who has dealt with intrusive thoughts or negative self-talk, and we can only watch in sympathy as she is paralysed with her compulsive behaviours at the worst possible times, or locks herself into vicious cycles where every tiny failure or trauma contributes to a confirmatory bias in which she is the sole person responsible for the fate of her loved ones.

For most of the book, the threat of violence is constant but with the exception of an early incident the individuals who are actually committing the violence remain in the background. Instead we see people who are trying to do their best in bad situations, who have been assaulted offscreen and are now trying to survive, or who condone the racial hatred behind the riots but aren't actually going out and perpetuating it. There's what feels like a deliberate disjointedness between the attitudes of people Melati actually spends time with, no matter how difficult or racist, and the senselessness of the rioting and death that's taken over her city; it drives home the extent to which the causal factors behind the riot - or any incident of this type - just don't justify violence in any rational sense. It's perhaps a little convenient that the one character who is being set up to play an active role in the fighting is then talked down at the very last minute, avoiding the very complex human spin that would put on the tentative reconciliation and collective grief the book ends with. On the whole, though, I think the narrative makes the right choices when it comes to showing how the violence takes hold, steering away from any too-easy explanations or straightforward villains to hang the blame on in favour of presenting a difficult political situation in a way that fits the narrative.

The cultural aspects of the story also feel well told, and I could imagine this level of nuance towards an existing culture and historical moment from anything but an own voices story. My particular favourites were the older women in the story: Auntie Bee and Mak Siti- are fantastic characters, imbued with all the cultural gravitas and expectations of being obeyed that an older "Auntie" has in the cultural context. There's a particularly magnificent scene where, on finding her way back to her home, Mak Siti tells Melati off for not coming home on the night of the riot because the fish she'd cooked had gone to waste. It's a statement so ridiculous that even Melati has to work out whether she means it, but the narrative simultaneously makes it clear that Melati needs to take her Auntie's worries seriously, no matter how banal and unreasonable they appear, while also understanding and caring about the emotion and worry that provoked the statement in the first place. Of course, the Aunties are just a small part of an ensemble that encompasses Chinese, Malay and Indians, young and old, military and civilian, and there's generally impressive character work on display making the individuals and small communities Melati comes into contact with feel real, even when their role in the plot is small (and again, sometimes a little too convenient).

I'm hesitant to call any book "required reading", and Alkaf herself notes that there are plenty of reasons not to read the book given its subject matter and potential trigger points. However, Alkaf doesn't treat her subject matter in a gratuitous or deliberately shock-inducing way, and if you're prepared for a difficult read, The Weight of our Sky is accessible a a book dealing with a traumatic historical event is likely to get. That it's a book about an event in 1969 Malaysia with limited visibility on a global stage, published in English for an international audience, makes it something I'd recommend to any non-Malaysian reader seeking to broaden their horizons and engage with events outside the limited slice of history that so often informs our perspectives.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Balances two enormous issues - the riots and Melati's OCD - with skill and sensitivity

Penalties: -1 Plot occasionally verges on the too-convenient

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference:  Alkaf, Hanna. The Weight of Our Sky [Salaam Reads, 2019].