JARED POON City of Others. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

Set in Singapore, Jared Poon’s first novel is fantasy fiction that asks whether our brains only register what we want to see around us.

Over the last few years there has been a proliferation of Asian authors drawing on their own cultures to make significant inroads into the fantasy genre, long associated with European traditions, such as Fonda Lee, Chloe Gong, Nghi Vo, Shelley Parker Chan and RF Kuang. Into this company comes debut author Jared Poon with City of Others, an urban fantasy set in Singapore and centred around a government agency that looks after the weird and uncanny.

The tone of the book is set firmly by Poon’s first sentence:

So there I was in the office, processing paperwork to register a batch of undead ducklings.

The narrator is public servant Ben Toh, a middle manager in the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (DEUS), who deals with this issue then has to move on to:

… a minor goddess Annapurna, who’d put her pride aside to ask for help with racist landlords, and a goblin family who couldn’t get their kids into any public schools but also couldn’t afford the exorbitant fees for a private school.

All the while, Ben also has to review the fifth draft of a briefing to his minister, organise his team for the department sports day and induct a new intern who also happens to be a jinn.

The streets of Singapore are full of different fantasy creatures but they are generally not bothered (or acknowledged) by the general populace as:

… our brains [are] protecting us from the horrors around us … They call it ‘the jumblies’, I heard, and here in Singapore, we call it the DKP effect. Don’t kaypoh, don’t be a busybody, and mind your own business.

The main plot starts when Ben is sent to investigate a strange event in which one floor of an apartment block completely disappears and then reappears. Ben soon learns through his potential boyfriend Adam that there is another layer of reality and it is dangerously breaking through into our own.  Ben and his team of misfits need to investigate why this is happening and how to stop it. In the process they discover more about the other powers at large in the city.

Each member of Ben’s team has different powers. Ben is a ‘Gardener’, which means that he has an internal forest that he can nurture and draw on to give himself an edge:

Gardening is internal magic, so it’s not particularly flashy. It is the skill to shape the elements and energies of your own soul, to cultivate what the Hasidic mystics call sephirot and the Taoists call qi. At the most fundamental level, it lets you conquer fear, grow virtues, and, through the nexus between the soul and the body, make yourself physically stronger, more resilient.

Unfortunately for Ben, this also makes him feel self-sufficient, and that he is the only one who should go into danger. His arc in this book is to learn to trust and draw on his team. Ben has a new boyfriend and is trying to manage the relationship with his father.  Poon uses Ben, who is a competent and dedicated government employee, to expose some of the secrets of the civil service:

It’s just how the civil service works. You never show your bosses anything unedited, impromptu, raw, because you never know what they might want to do with it. You put everything into passive voice and flattering frameworks and you polish until your reports are smooth as a pebble, as empty of human complications as the heart of a wyvern.

In this respect City of Others does for the civil service what Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series does for policing. Like that series, Poon uses this framing to give a fascinating view of the city of Singapore  through the lens of the strange and uncanny and the persistence of myth and legend: ‘History speaks. Stones remember. Buildings accrete memories and excrete ghosts.’

City of Others has all of the hallmarks of the start of a long-running series. Poon sets up an engaging main character with a quirky team in an environment rich with potential and establishes plenty of threads that can be pulled in future volumes. Given all this, more books set in this world will be welcome.

Jared Poon City of Others Orbit 2026 PB 384pp $24.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He was a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards for many years and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

You can buy City of Others from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: civil service, Jared | Poon, jinns, magic, middle management, Singapore, undead ducklings, urban fantasy