Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines

The Philippines, a biodiversity hotspot for 70 to 80 percent of the Earth’s animal and plant species, is the world’s third worst contributor to oceanic plastic pollution. The country’s electricity rates are among the most expensive in Southeast Asia, owing to a heavy reliance on dirty and privatized energy sources. Sea level rise around the archipelago exceeds the global average. And yearly, seasons become extreme, increasing risks to sectors such as agriculture, which accounts for over a quarter of the country’s total employment.Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines is the first collection of its kind in the country. It is also the most forward in proposing a political voice to narrate the ecological crisis. Edited by Paolo Enrico Melendez and Kristine Ong Muslim and illustrated by Adam David, this anthology of 17 short stories is designed to represent a ‘reformed’ literature that speaks the bendable language of the present and the future. Here is the slump and sprawl of civilization’s consumption. Here is mutiny against individuality, against the spectacle and conceit of nationhood. Here, chroniclers of doom and demolished mythologies take on anthropogenic climate change.Read original stories by Tilde Acuña, John Bengan, F Jordan Carnice, Erika M. Carreon, Adam David, Daryll Delgado, Roma Estrada, Mo Francisco, Christine V. Lao, Maryanne Moll, Joseph Nacino, Jude Ortega, Rae Rival, Sandra Nicole Roldan, Chiles Samaniego, Lakan Umali, and Eliza Victoria. Because our stories about this world, as well as how and where we tell them, reveal a lot about ourselves and our manifold degrees of complicity. And whatever changes we want to make during our paltry, fleeting existences begin with understanding what we have done.[Adam David’s cover art for Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines reorients what the human eye would naturally perceive as familiar—and convenient. The isolated Philippine map is an accurate truncation based on a sea-level rise of 100 meters. It is slanted sideways to signify two things: a radical precession of the Earth both following and resulting in extreme climate change, and the imagined perception of plant-like intelligent life-forms whose directional ‘gaze’ corresponds not to the conventional North, but to the East: a literal “orient-ation” of the prevailing political dynamic favoring the occident.]