Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction as Slipstream

This essay introduces the special issue on Southeast Asian speculative fiction. It situates the contribution of this special issue within the turn to questions of coloniality/postcoloniality within sf studies and also situates the work of speculative fiction authors within the larger framework of Asian literary studies. Arguing that the distinctive fiction of Southeast Asia has been neglected due to a focus on sf from East Asia or from South Asia, the introduction explains how the term Southeast Asian encompasses a wide diversity of cultures, languages and countries. The essay proposes slipstream as a term that best captures the qualities of Southeast Asian sf, a term that connotes the fluidity of the region and the multiplicity of the aesthetic strategies visible in its fictions, and a term that conveys how Southeast Asian sf both flows into the wider field of global sf and at the same time “gives the slip” to genre tropes rooted in European colonial imaginations.