Count on Me, Singapore

Twenty-first century Singaporean sf offers heterogenous criticisms of meritocracy, a governing principle that has been enshrined in the city-state since independence. The alternative histories, counterfactual presents, and futures they propose speak to an estrangement from the contemporary moment and a need to imagine other possible pathways. Narratives such as Clara Chow’s “Welcome, 265 Aggregate Scorers!,” Victor Fernando R. Ocampo’s “i m d 1 in 10” and “As If We Could Dream Forever,” and ila’s “Mother Techno” offer nuanced perspectives of the meritocratic discourse that scrutinize the calculating and objectifying rationality at the heart of a system grounded in the arbitration of an individual’s worth to society. This mode of reasoning is amplified in a technocratic state that valorizes the potential of scientific rationality, technology, and technical tools. While acknowledging the fact that systemic, numerical approaches have brought tremendous gains to society, contemporary Singaporean sf articulates concerns over the indiscriminate imposition of quantitative measures in the parsing of human experience. They depict societies in which people are subjected to rigid and hierarchical social systems that assess their merit and rank them by way of competitive standardized testing and social credit systems. Giving form to a skepticism that conceives of “number” as part of a larger apparatus of social control, these narratives resist the growing domination of the quantitative by asserting the values of the qualitative against the potential tyranny of quantified experience.