Maps by John Sladek

Maps by John Sladek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Whimsical SF yarns, with a lot of allusions and cultural references that non-Americans would not comprehend. The author’s tribute to other SF masters – with an emphasis on Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick – is riveting. He also talks about Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke (an old favourite of mine). Towards the end, his self-deprecatory ‘confessional’ is both intriguing as well as hilarious

Mainly I write science fiction in self-defence. It’s one way of getting to grips with a peculiar world, a world that I find Astounding, Amazing and altogether a Weird Tale. I wonder how people unfamiliar with sf manage to find their way around in our world of Watergate and Jonestown, Khomeini and Haig, robot factories and vodka-cola, Manson and Moonies and the MX missile system. I deal with this stuff as I can, and if the end product looks like satire, look at the raw material.
Writing, it should go without saying, requires solitary confinement. The writer’s immediate surroundings must exclude forest fires, screams from mental wards, head-banging music, cries of ecstasy, the anguish of infants, jet aircraft taking off and so on. While any of these distractions can be turned to some writer’s advantage, the general prejudice is against them and in favour of quiet solitude. That is why noisy cities are clogged with writers, who avoid the quiet countryside as though anthrax stalked the land.
The usual SF uniform includes a baseball cap with a NASA emblem on it, a T-shirt depicting some comic book superhero and plenty of buttons with obscure slogans on them (“QUARKS!”). If I can’t get all this, I try to make do with a silver jump suit, red cape and fishbowl helmet – jet-propelled roller skates with silver wings on the side being an optional accessory.

Riotous, preachy, snarky, smug, contumacious, sanctimonious - all the flavours are there.

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One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B.

One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B. by C.P. Surendran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The tale of two dysfunctional youths going their different ways – one towards self-inflicted destruction as a love-lorn psychotic and the other becoming successful as a charlatan. Some irritating mistakes – St Georges is not in Kasauli, but Mussoorie; the Harley Davidson phut phuts and the attempted coup are anachronisms. Challenging temporal boundaries, Khushwant Singh, Arnab Goswami and others make their appearance in thinly disguised avatars.

Arjun rested the short quotation marks of his legs on a footstool. His writing pad had a glass of whiskey stuck in its hollow. He had a paunch, loose and re-arrangeable like a half-filled sack. On the carpet, next to his feet, a blue turban lay expectant of his bald head to roll into it at any moment. He looked up from his writing. He had sharp eyes that trapped the world in their black metal mesh.

There are some brilliant bits e.g., the Delhi summer

It’s a madman’s summer, breeding hostility. The white breathless light of the day is broken the burning yellow of the amaltas, the violet of the jacaranda, the white, red, and orange of the papery bougainvillea, the insane plants drawing blood from Delhi’s summer, shaking their brilliant sap in the face of the sun, trees that betray the killing season, flowering Judases, swaying like torches in the loo from the Rajasthan desert. Each gust is a hornet’s nest. The dust and sand sting your eyes, cake your throat, shred your skin. The sun is a delirium.

A thoroughly disorienting book, jumping between generations and countries.

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The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Frightfully prescient story about a near-future dystopian world succumbing to irreversible global warming, with a variant of Facebook (now ominously called Meta) and its Board of Directors replacing sovereign governments and ruling humanity in the form of a supranational entity. Levels of consumerism determine one’s social status, surrogacy is par for the course, children are sold for survival, economic disparity persists.

A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in and amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society...A dangerous force underlying both of these economic models, a mindless cycle of economic production and consumption that relied on co-opting the collective brain and brawn of the human species, thus annihilating the human soul.

A novel concept introduced is a chimera of software and genetic engineering that lodges in the brain, sequesters carbon and silicon and ‘constructs’ an organic chip that connects an individual to the internet.
The different temporal narrative streams are quote tiresome to read.

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Eurasian Coot

 

Black-crowned Night Heron and White-breasted Waterhen

 

Indian Pond-Heron

 

White-throated Kingfisher

 

Mugger Crocodile

 

Oriental Darter

 

Anhinga melanogaster

Magestic T-121

 

Birdwatching by Stephen Alter

Birdwatching by Stephen Alter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ornithology meets espionage, however, neither really succeeds in the narrative.
Each chapter is preceded by a brief description of a bird, found in the region the protagonist willy-nilly finds himself – I wish there were photos or illustrations to enhance the text.
Not to nit-pick, but some factual errors are irritating and not expected from a writer of such a stature

1. It is the red blood cell count and not platelet count that determines adaptation to high altitude flight in bar-headed geese. RBCs transport oxygen from the lungs to the muscles that power the flight over the Himalayas.
2. A Lt General and not a Maj General is a Corps Commander.
3. Saliva is certainly not salty.
4. An Indian Army officer named Afridi and that too posted in Military Intelligence? Defies credulity

The ornithologist turned reluctant spy becoming a crack shot with a Beretta, this too appeared far-fetched. There is a menage a trois that seems to have been resolved amicably. But the orgy of shooting ducks that I found abhorrent.

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