Having grown up in Singapore my whole life, I have often wondered about the various permutations it could take, the limits of its possibilities, and what the boundaries of home could look like.

Maybe that’s why I have always been drawn to speculative fiction, finding the fantasy within my familiar reality, and creating a touch of the impossible within the possible. That was the
premise upon which I set my next novel, a young adult urban fantasy a là Warcross by Marie Li and The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken.

About the Project

This is A World Apart in a nutshell:

Time is running out for Sylvia to find a cure for the magical congenital disease that is slowly but surely turning her into glass. When she learns that her father has joined a crew that traverses parallel universes to search for a cure, she joins them in the hopes of finding her father and the cure in the glass dimension.

But dimension-crossing comes with its own set of perils. Soon, Sylvia is embroiled in the crew’s dealings with underground fight clubs that run on illegal magic drugs. Sylvia’s only ally
is Wes, a boy searching for his estranged brother who has gone on his own revenge mission to infiltrate Krant, a drug ring masquerading as a pharma company.

When Sylvia is captured as a test subject for Krant’s experiments, more questions about her origins and abilities arise. Meanwhile, Wes joins a secret organisation that is also trying to take down Krant and he learns about Krant’s mission to develop drugs that will facilitate inter-dimensional human trafficking.

With drug lords and the authorities on their heels, Sylvia and Wes must navigate the treacherous web of lies, spies, and enemies while braving the extremities of the glass dimension, ultimately to decide what they’re willing to sacrifice in their pursuit of the truth: their lives or the ones they love.

Told in dual points of view, the story takes place in a reimagined parallel universe version of Singapore, where underground fight clubs fuelled by magic drugs lie beneath a gleaming city.

The Foreign Within the Familiar

In a way, the Norwich residency drove home this concept of finding the fantastical within the familiar of a city. It made me think deeper about the things in my city that I have come to normalise, and imagine new realities that subvert its polished, gleaming image. I wanted to peel back that façade and create a seedier version of the city, where laws and regulations are vastly different, more malleable if one wielded the right amount of power or had the right contacts.

Hence an excerpt from Wes’s perspective goes: The Fourth District remained exactly the way we left it—a frigid, chaotic urban district lined with red brick buildings and glass skyscrapers shimmering in the sunlight. This dimension had fooled me on my first visit here. Nothing was what it appeared to be. Beneath that slick, gleaming surface was a seedy underbelly festering with poverty and crime, run by warring gangs and drug lords. Beneath the skin they wore was not flesh and blood. People here did not bleed—they shattered. And beneath that careful order was chaos ready to erupt at any moment.

Another from Sylvia’s perspective goes:

This place was both familiar and foreign, reminding me of home but also of how far away from it I was. There was a strange blue hue that made even the ugliest back alley look
dreamlike, shimmering under the sunlight. Everything was sharp and cold, angles and edges. Even the roads snaking through the city lay stark as ink. In the distance, gleaming skyscrapers made of glass and steel stood as architectural wonders, spiralling up to the sky and piercing through the clouds. This neighbourhood we were in, however, was a lot less polished, with half-abandoned edifices and crumbling old brick buildings.

In this parallel version of Singapore (one of infinite out there), one can thus find their doppelgangers living different lives. Privacy laws are much laxer, leading to rampant identity theft and fraud, and especially geo-tagging, a prevalent feature that drives the story alongside the underground fight clubs. This is reflected in the following excerpt, which highlights how easily one can be tracked in the glass dimension.

Mrs Amita seemed to know that I was planning to sneak out of the apartment despite Markus’s warning. “Before you go running around here like a headless chicken, there are some things you should know,” she said, pulling out her phone.

I stared down at the table, suitably chastised.

“There are very few places you can go in this dimension without being detected. This city does not take kindly to trespassers, and we’ve had clients disappear in the middle of their trip here because they got caught. We don’t know what happened to them, but suffice to say they never made it back with us.”

She pulled up an app on her phone, where two moving red pins—Markus and Wes—hovered around a place called Wolf’s Head a few streets down from us, while Greg’s pin rover around an industrial building in an adjacent neighbourhood.

“The crew members are all geotagged, so we can cover one another. We don’t usually tag our clients, but—”

“I’ve been geotagged.”

The look on Mrs Amita’s face told me she already knew that.

“Does that mean anyone can track anyone down here?” I asked.

She nodded. “On a public app, as long as you’re a registered citizen, your real-time whereabouts can be easily tracked by the government and anyone who has the necessary access. But we don’t belong here, so we don’t show up on the maps.” She flashed me a meaningful look. “But as I’ve shown you, there are other ways to geotag people, be it in a private group like ours or on a public app.”

Whatever the privacy laws here were, I was glad they didn’t apply back home. At least I didn’t show up on the map, involuntarily trackable. Sylvia is therefore a Dorothy sort of character thrown into the strange world of Oz, but as she is embroiled deeper in this new world, she learns more about her mother, who was from the glass dimension and had a few secrets of her own.

Mirror Image

The idea of doppelgangers is another way I chose to explore the known and the reimagined. What will our counterparts look like in various versions of our world? How would they be shaped by a vastly different environment, and how will their fates pan out? This is explored sporadically in the novel.

For instance, in this snippet:

Markus was on high alert. He had spotted his doppelganger around this area a couple of
times, and we had once come close to being exposed. I didn’t have to worry about my
doppelganger. He was a straight-laced student on track towards medical school. He wouldn’t show up in this district, where the streets were unofficially ruled by underground syndicates and crime went unreported.

A World Apart is intended as part of a duology, as there remains a lot more of this world and its characters to explore. It touches on themes of family, self-discovery, and alternate worlds, secrets and shifting loyalties. While it is a high-stakes, high-octane story, it is the characters that drive this series. Our main characters, Sylvia and Wes, grow closer as they each uncover the secrets their parents had kept from them, and how that would affect their fates in the glass dimension.

Conclusion

In all, this urban fantasy novel is my first foray into the genre, and writing it has stretched me as a writer by making me examine my reality and the familiarity of the city I have known all my life, as well as consider the ramifications of a different legal, commercial, and sociocultural system on the individual.

The residency has given me the space to roam in this world and potentially develop this novel into a series. While I’m no stranger to writing a series, each new story presents a challenge in craft, skill, and stamina, and I’m definitely looking forward to writing the sequel to this one!

Joyce Chua is the author of Lambs for Dinner (Straits Times Press, 2013), the Children of the Desert trilogy (Penguin Random House SEA, 2021), Until Morning, and No Room in Neverland (Penguin Random House SEA, 2023). She graduated from the National University of Singapore with a degree in English and is now a personal finance editor by day and author by night. She has spoken at various events including the Singapore Writers Festival and Asian Festival of Children’s Content. Her articles have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Her World, The Straits Times, and more. When not writing, she can be found on Instagram, TikTok and Threads at @joycechuawrites.