MANILA, Philippines—It is the future. A scientist named Jack is sent to a desert planet, where a tyrannical government enslaves its criminals in special lamination suits. While Jack works to help restore the vegetation on the planet, he meets Eve, a beautiful laminated woman, or “LaMB,” who, he soon discovers, holds a great secret.

This is the award-winning storyline of “The Laminated Woman,” the original sci-fi script of Filipino writer Carmelo S.J. Juinio. Carmelo rocked this year’s Animax Awards by topping over 3,000 contestants from all over South East Asia.

Carmelo’s script, described as “So frickin’ out-of-this-world awesome!” by Animax Vice President Gregory Ho, will be produced into an original Animax feature called “LaMB” and shown all over the world.

So excited is Animax about this production that it will be promoting “LaMB” extensively through interactive new media, from mobile and web episodes to manga publications.

Super recently caught up with Carmelo, a self-confessed “dropout copy editor with another newspaper” and supporter of Outer Space Settlement, and picked his brains about his acclaimed sci-fi baby.

What inspired you to come up with the story?

The Animax contest was the main inspiration. The potpourri of ideas that went into the story, however, came from various sources. I think the controlling idea was to write technologically consistent science fiction rather than to craft rigorous science fiction of the hard or even mundane variety.

For example, if you create a universe where people can hop from star to star using warp drives (Star Trek or Star Wars), you should also make the main characters immortal or at least free from the wrinkles of old age. Why? Because immortality, at least up to the lifetime of the known universe, is easier to achieve than faster-than-light travel. But people still die of old age and disease in Star Wars.

In “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith”, Anakin Skywalker, deformed from his battle with Obi Wan, is “repaired” using ugly-looking cybernetics rather than genetic engineering. Which leads me to wonder, is there some sort of quasi-religious ban on cosmetic technology in Stars Wars?

So I decided to write a story where the monsters are beautiful, since I believe beauty, even if it’s merely skin deep, is one of the persistent goals of all non-military (that is, civilian) technology.

Have you had any experience in creative writing or scriptwriting?

Aside from classroom skits I might have written in grade school, I’ve had zero experience writing scripts. The script I wrote for the Animax contest was partly an attempt to learn how to write scripts using free software on my Debian GNU/Linux system. The Animax contest was a chance for me to hone my TeX coding skills.

Were the characters inspired by anyone in real life?

Jack is my best friend, a goofball of a geek. Eve is the girl of his dreams, unreachable even if she’s sitting right beside him. The characters of LaMB are inspired by real life in the sense that the situations they find themselves in have real-life equivalents. Remove the sci-fi coating, and what do we have?

Imagine two people working in an office in Manila, Singapore or Bangkok. They meet everyday, but their meetings are at most restricted to the occasional nod or an embarrassed aversion of the eyes. Jack in LaMB is at least an upgrade. He gets to engage Eve in one-way conversation, something the real Jack has miserably failed to do.

Is Jack an overseas contract worker? Perhaps in the strange physics of the heart, light years feel no more distant than the thousands of kilometers to New York or Dubai.

Are you a big anime fan?

I love sci-fi anime, especially of the hard or semi-hard variety. Basically, what I’m looking for is technological plausibility. Ideally, the anime should not fabricate universes beyond the physics of Albert Einstein. I don’t believe in warp drives.

Cowboy Bebop makes use of warp drives. But warp drives aren’t essential in Cowboy Bebop, which features a bounty hunter scouring the solar system for bounty heads. This could well be achieved by slower-than-light space flight, since the solar system is mere light hours long. With an advanced spacecraft traveling at less than 10 percent the speed of light, a trip to Jupiter would be like a trip across the Wild West during the time of Jules Verne, who wrote “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

I also like Solty Rei, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, the Ghost in the Shell series, and Sol Bianca, which does feature a ship with a warp drive. Most recently I watched Jyu Oh Sei (literally, “Beast King Planet”), which is set in a jungle planet. Dragonball and Dragonball Z remain guilty pleasures.

How do you think Filipinos could compete on a global scale with creative endeavors? In what way can we encourage more young people to pursue creative careers in writing, art or film?

Enough of romantic dramas and “Asian” horror! I believe our focus should be producing content that serves the dual purpose of entertaining and inspiring children to pursue careers in technology.

So you believe there is connection between pop culture and society’s technological advancement?

While I don’t have the hard data to back this up, I believe Buck Rogers and Astro Boy are partly responsible for the continued technological advance of the US and Japan. Buck Rogers, Star Trek and Star Wars inspired generations of children in English-speaking countries to become astronauts or rocket engineers.

Those that failed to realize those youthful dreams of reaching for the stars turned to other technological fields, from outer space to, say, cyberspace. It’s not surprising that some of pioneers of the computer revolution are among the leading investors in the new space economy, tech tycoons like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Paypal founder Elon Musk.

It’s just as easy to make a connection between Japan’s superiority in robotics and the engineers who as children watched Astroboy, Mazinger Z and Gundam. We need pop culture icons like these.

Whatever its supposed faults might be, last year’s “Resiklo” is a step, maybe even a giant leap, in the right direction. With minimal CGI, a spin-off drama series set in the Resiklo underground (before the final confrontation) would be a welcome change from the usual slew of princess dramas on prime-time TV.