Category: Fiction

  • Stories of your Life and Others

    Ted Chiang

    I’m a fan!
    One of the reasons I like science fiction as a genre is because of its ability to broaden thinking horizons. This is speculative fiction at its best! Each of the eight stories is different yet wonderful in their own right, because they explore realms not just with imagination but with humaneness.

    What makes it even more fascinating is that unlike the usual hits in the genre, none of the stories are set in the future. In fact one is based on the Tower of Babel, another is more aligned to steampunk and the others seem more an alternate present than an alternate future. What is common among all these though is that the reader doesn’t really feel the temporal shift. Somehow the author normalises it in the first page itself! (more…)

  • This was a Man

    Jeffrey Archer

    I wasn’t really very happy with “Cometh the Hour” because I felt the author was stretching the series. I was afraid whether that would mean that the series would end with a whimper. Thankfully it didn’t. This was a fitting finale to The Clifton Chronicles.

    I think it’s only when you see the series as a whole do you understand the kind of changes that have happened in the world through the lifetime of Harry Clifton. In that sense, it is a great lens to see the changing nature of society – its behavior, consumption, worldview and so on. While the author has done his best to show a changing order and system of the world, the bias to an old world charm is obvious. Perhaps an indication of how he’d have liked it to be. (more…)

  • The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

    Rachel Joyce

    The book that I read just prior to this one was “Who’s in charge? Free Will & the Science of the Brain”. The author of that book summed it all up in the end when he said that beyond the machinations of the body and the brain that science has, or has the potential to explain fully, there lies an abstraction that we call mind or consciousness. The recognition of that is what makes us human. When Harold Fry went out to post a letter and unwittingly begins an absolutely unplanned walk from one end of the country to another, I thought the coincidence was fantastic.

    With no preparation – maps, travel gear, phone, or even proper shoes – Harold decides to walk to save a life. The life of a friend he feels he has wronged. The book itself is not just the interesting details of Harold’s travels and how various people and circumstances shape it, or his character and how it evolved our time, or even the events of his life that have led to the why and how of this journey. It is also about his wife Maureen, her perspective of the events that transpired in her life and their impact on her relationship with Harold.  (more…)

  • A Working Theory of Love

    Scott Hutchins

    As a character in the book asks, “What is love?” He proceeds to provide at least three alternatives to his own question – a biochemical emergent property of evolution? A social construct? Or just acquisition and deal making involving assets two people have?

    In ‘A Working Theory of Love’, Scott Hutchins takes a stab at it through its characters in ways real and artificial. At the centre of it all is Neill Bassett, a resident of San Francisco in his mid-thirties, working at Amiante Systems with two others to build an artificial intelligence that will pass the Turing test. He is not a programmer/technologist – his essential connection with the project is that the machine’s “character” has been built using his father’s personality as manifested through the journals he (the father) had kept. He serves as the interlocutor for the machine as its creators try to make it a sentient, ‘lifelike’ phenomenon.  (more…)

  • Dark Matter

    Blake Crouch

    (only broad level spoilers)
    Of all the known and unknown phenomena in science, the multiverse theory is probably one that lends itself most easily to fiction. And yet, this is the first time I am encountering it. Largely, a pleasant experience.
    From a science perspective, I like how the author connects it to the brain and consciousness. Seems to lend it more credibility and therefore make it more believable. It isn’t really elaborated on, but I found it good enough for the purpose of the book. A 100 pages away from the end, I wondered how the author could possibly finish it without sacrificing logic. But he did find a way, even if it leaves things a little open ended.
    (more…)