It’s been some time since I’ve read some local fiction so when I saw this collection of short stories at the library, I was intrigued. I had a good experience with Track Faults and Other Glitches so the idea of more Singaporean short stories that play on the fantastical sounded good.

Lion City is a short story collection by Ng Yi-Sheng, experimenting with different forms and topics. There are sixteen stories in this book so instead of going through them one by one, I thought I’d just talk about the ones I liked the most and least.

Under my favourites, there is:

• Lion City: The titular story, this explores a story where all the animals in the zoo are robots. It’s short but there’s an interesting twist that makes an impact.
• A Day at Terminal Aleph: Changi Airport, being a world-class airport, is now a hub for gods as they make their way. This story was surprisingly brutal but believable.
• The Boy, the Swordfish, the Bleeding Island: This story uses the famous tale of the swordfish/origins of Bukit Merah and launches it into an AU-history tale. Pretty entertaining and I liked the way it was written as a pseudo-nonfiction account.
• No Other City: What if Singapore disappeared and no one else but the Singaporeans who were left remembered the country? Sort of like the rapture but just for Singapore. It’s a pretty interesting what-if story that explores the idea of identity and belonging.

Stories that I wasn’t enthusiastic/ambivalent about:

• Fishing Village: Interesting concept but too short for it to make an impact on me. By the time I grasped what was going on, the story ended.
• Hub: I liked the concept and the narrative style (basically a guy either monologuing or having a conversation but without any quotation marks) but again, I feel like the length let the story down. It was basically set up + denouement with nothing in between, which I think made the story lose the poignancy it could have had.
• Suburbia: Again, I liked the concept of a story being told through redacted military documents but towards the end the form felt pointless because you didn’t need to read between the lines, you just needed to omit all the negatives. The obvious story + the dry style made it feel like I was reading a synopsis of a story rather than figuring out a puzzle or reading a story. I would have enjoyed it more if the reader had to work a bit harder to tease out what was going on (perhaps it’s because this is one document instead of several?) rather than just turning everything on its head (i.e. if it’s a denial then it happened). It’s a pity because the “fiction as nonfiction” concept worked well as a historical narrative in The Boy, The Swordfish, the Bleeding Island.
• Little Red Dot: Descriptions of aliens but to be honest I did not understand this story. I feel like it’s making fun of certain Singaporean traits but it also felt rather scattershot in its approach.
• Garden: I loved the Choose Your Adventure concept, and if I’m not wrong, the disruptive time jumps are intentional, but many of the times there was only one option which means you end up flipping pages back and forth rather than choosing your adventure. Is that a commentary on the lack of choice? Maybe but I just ended up reading through the pages after a while because there will be time skips even if you followed the whole thing.

Overall, this was a mixed bag of short stories for me. I’m glad I read it, because I really enjoyed the four stories I mentioned plus I liked how inventive the stories were overall. That said, while reading the book, I also had this strong sense that a lot of the stories would be stronger if they were given a bit more space (such as Hub, Fishing Village, and maybe Garden as well).