Fantasy debut a love letter to civil service

Jared Poon has penned an urban fantasy which follows a bureaucrat engaging with supernatural inhabitants

- Shawn Hoo

Writer Jared Poon, a former civil servant, thinks civil service work is cool, sexy and magical. ST PHOTO: GIN TAY

(GIN TAY)

Former civil servant Jared Poon started out telling stories about Singapore's futures to fellow civil servants and politicians in policy papers he wrote at the Centre for Strategic Futures under the Prime Minister's Office.

Now, he has turned to writing a fantasy trilogy about a bureaucrat engaging with unlikely stakeholders – the supernatural inhabitants of Singapore.

"Civil service work is much sexier than people think. You're deciding the course of a nation, or some fragment of it and that's super cool," the 46-year-old tells The Sunday Times on the publication of his debut novel, City Of Others, by Orbit Books, in January.

In this bureaucratic urban fantasy, Benjamin Toh is a middle manager in the government's overworked but understaffed Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (Deus), tasked with managing "others" like undead ducklings, toyol, naga and pontianak, when a block of flats in Clementi disappears. To solve the mystery, he travels far beyond what his job scope demands, into the shadow markets and stars.