An Interview with the Author: Dave Chua

When you think of Singapore, a brilliant skyline filled with architectural wonders comes to mind. As dense and urban as it may be, though, natural parks celebrating diverse biodiversity dot the city, lush vines crawl up the sides of metallic ‘trees,’ and green rooftops display flourishing gardens.

And the city’s landscape is an endless inspiration for Dave Chua’s literary works. When Grist, an independent climate platform, advertised their Imagine 2200 climate fiction competition, he saw an opportunity to visualise a Singaporean future where hope has triumphed and the vestiges of climate change that remain are slowly fading.

His short story, Mousedeer Versus the Ghost Ships, took third place in the Grist 2025 competition.

In Mousedeer Versus the Ghost Ships, Ah Ma leads the crew of the Mousedeer as they take down a ghostly autotrawler, an ancient relic of destruction, offering a future where families band together to protect their environment.

“Growing up in Singapore, I was always concerned about environmental issues. I guess some aspects of nature always worked themselves into my writing,” he explains. Dave is no stranger to the dystopian sight of ocean waste washing up on the shore on his daily walk. “A lot of them wash up here from ships. I look at all this plastic floating around, thinking, ‘They’ll probably be here on Earth longer than I am.”

In Mousedeer and the Ghost Ships, giant, automated metal ships threaten a recovering ocean. “The first part of inspiration was from this novel, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor, where he had fishing ships that were also AI-controlled but had a migrant worker crew working inside the ships,” Dave explains.

“In a way, these mechanical automatons represent our current destruction of the environment that will affect us decades, maybe even centuries, from now.” Dave adds that the “harvesting” element of these sinister ships came from observing the reckless fin-harvesting practices done by many Asian countries.

Combatting these ghost ships is the crew of the Mousedeer, led by incorrigible and fierce Ah Ma, who is also the narrator’s grandmother. The short story follows the battle between a crew consisting of a sassy dolphin, the crystalised spirit of the narrator’s grandfather, and an eloquent seaweed expert against the derelict trawlers.

Ah Ma, the granny-warrior, moves the story forward, her wisdom and fearlessness inspiring those around her. “At this age, I'm interested in older characters that don't find their way in fiction much,” Dave says.” I have a very strong Mom. I have very strong-willed grandparents who look after me. I always admire them and thought, ‘Why not feature them?’”

Dave finds the wisdom of the older generation crucial for the younger generations, even if it’s sometimes flawed. “They're not always perfect to deal with, but they do have a lot to teach us, and not all of them are as responsible for the damage that Earth is going through. You know, some of them really want to help.”

Among his busy schedule, Dave finds the time to volunteer in a tour programme called My Community, designed to guide people around historic sites of Singapore. He’s marvelled at the energy he witnesses from working with elderly patrons of Singapore. “There’s so much energy, drive and passion. I wanted to capture some of that in Ah Ma, and many other characters I write about.”

“I started writing as a hobby about 30 years ago. I am more of a writer than an environmentalist,” he says. His love of writing even won him the Singapore Literature Prize Commendation Award in 1997 when he wrote a novel called Gone Case–a coming-of-age story based in Singapore. “I wrote about what would happen if all the flats here became uninhabited. And then I pictured animals taking over all these empty houses and such. So that's always been at the back of my mind, but I would say not as much until this story for Grist.”

In Mousedeer Versus the Ghost Ships, Dave included ingenious natural solutions for his characters, such as kelp science and dolphin intelligence. As cold and depraved as humanity's ghost ships are, the crew of Mousedeer is diverse, unrelenting, and most of all, grounded in the elder steward’s wisdom that he cherishes.

“There is hope if we just try to work with nature and what we have and try to repair some of the damage we've done. Animals do return. Kelp and seagrass give a lot of opportunity to stop the CO2 in our environment,” Dave urges. He believes that the stories we tell have the power to show others the options to act rather than trap ourselves in doom and gloom.

Everywhere on this planet, we experience climate change differently; We all face ghost ships, and it’s easy to be frozen in fear.

But just like Ah Ma, we can all band together, young and old, to fight for our future.