James Tam's dystopia, Man's Last Song, a finalist for the Proverse Prize, was published by Proverse in 2013.

~31 March 2016, novelist James Tam spoke at the University of Hong Kong Libraries' Book Club, to a full house of enthusiastic and engaged listeners who becamse lively questioners during the Q&A session which closed the event. Tam pointed out that whether one viewed his book as a dystopia or a utopia depended on one's point of view. From the point of view of humans, it is a dystopia. From the point of view of other species and the environment it could well be seen as a utopia.

*** If you would like to hear James speak to your group, organisation or class about his book and the ideas leading to his book, please contact proverse@netvigator.com and we will help you with the arrangements.

~James Tam was a welcome speaker at the Proverse Readers' Club, held at Dymocks Books and Cafe, Discovery Bay, Lantau, Hong Kong on Saturday, 20 February 2016. He spoke about his professional background as an environmental engineer, his method of writing, and his thoughts about the survival (or otherwise) of the human species.

An edited video of his session has been uploaded to youtube. To view it, copy and paste the following to your browser window: https://youtu.be/s6ADzb4GPR0

~TimeOut Hong Kong named James Tam's debut novel, "Man's Last Song", International Proverse Prize Finalist 2011, 'Book of the Fortnight'!

http://guo-du.blogspot.hk/2013/03/mans-last-song-event-diary.html

JAMES TAM was born in Hong Kong. He lived and studied in Canada in the 70s and returned to Hong Kong in the mid-80s to work as an environmental engineer. He started his own environmental engineering practice and additionally a software company. The latter won the premier IT Excellence Award and the HK Industry Award in 1996. In 2008, Tam realised his long-term plan to leave business before too late, and sat down to write. He now writes fiction and non-fiction, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese. His short stories and occasional poems have received honorary mentions in competitions and appeared in anthologies. 

Man's Last Song, Tam's first full-length novel, was a finalist for the International Proverse Prize 2011, and won a supplementary award. As a scientific realist often mistaken for a morbid cynic, he sees abundant evidence that 21st Century Homo Sapiens is a delusional and self-endangered species. Nevertheless, he remains irrationally optimistic, happily married, with two lovely daughters.

In MAN'S LAST SONG the human race faces imminent extinction. The year is 2090. The global population has shrunk to less than half a million; median age about sixty. After forty years of near-universal sterility, humanity is vanishing while the rest of the planet makes a healthy comeback. A few survivors in Hong Kong face the challenge of adjusting to life as post-modern savages, rediscovering instincts that have long been suppressed by civilisation. To these post-modern cavemen and cavewomen dwelling in the concrete remains of an empty metropolis, life has become a lonely journey of self-discovery in which they reassess also mankind. Their relationships with nature, each other, and themselves have fundamentally changed. The dilemma, pain and pleasure of love, friendship, compassion, ageing, and loneliness have been heightened by pragmatic dictates. The unknowable − God, Dao, death, even reality − has assumed new and shifting dimensions in man's dying world. How did Homo sapiens reach this dire situation? Looking back with hindsight borrowed from the future, readers may join characters in this book in finding today's world absurd, even suicidal. Others may hang on tenaciously to one thing that has not changed: hope.