The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt

The World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Non-Aristotelian logic, refers to the capacity for, and practice of, using intuitive, inductive reasoning (compare fuzzy logic), rather than reflexive, or conditioned, deductive reasoning – in contrast to Aristotelian logic which is usually characterized by deductive logic and an analytic inductive method in the study of natural philosophy and metaphysics.

Fear must derive from the very colloids of a substance. A flower closing its petal for the night was showing feat of the dark, but it had no nervous system to transmit the impulse and no thalamus to receive and translate the electric message into an emotion. A human being was a physico-chemical structure whose awareness of life was derived from an intricate nervous system. After death, the body disintegrated; the personality survived as a series of distorted impulse-memories in other people’s nervous systems. As the years flew by, those memories would grow dimmer. At most, Gilbert Gosseyn would survive as a nerve impulse in other human beings for half a century; as an emulsion on a film negative for several score years; as an electronic pattern in a series of cathode-ray cells for perhaps two centuries. None of the potentialities diminished even fractionally the flow of perspiration form his body in that hot, almost airless room.

Shall start the sequel (The Players of Null-A) to see if things get a little obfuscated.

View all my reviews

Deus Irai by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny

Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A painter’s quest for a failed God - an irate God - in a post-apocalytic Earth ‘peopled’ by mutants – Incs (incompletes viz., phocomelics), Lizards (Sun-worshippers)

Two young males, tall and thin and horny blue-grey like ashes. The one who had spoken raised his hand in greeting. Six of seven fingers – and extra joints. They were nearly eight feet tall. No flesh – bones and hard angles and large, curious eyes, heavily lidded. There undoubtedly were internal changes, radically different metabolism and cell structure, ability to utilize hot salts, altered digestive system.

Bugs (who worshipped the VW Beetle)

…them and their multifaceted eyes, their gleaming shells – a weird conglomeration of unhuman parts. And to think that they bred their way out of mammals, he thought, and in such a few short years. Speeded up frantically by the radiation. We’re related to them and they stink. They offend the world. And surely they offend God.

Runners and other oddities and chimeras

The creatures were not over four feet high. Fat and round, covered with thick pelts … beady eyes, quivering noses – and great kangaroo legs.
Amazing, these swift evolutionary entelechies, cast forth from what they were essentially poisons. So many and so fast; so many immediate kinds. Nature, striving to overcome the filth of the war: the toxins.

Some mutants were mere teratomas

and some have a single eye in the centre of their head. Cyclopism, I believe it’s called. And with others, when they are born, their hide is cracked and dried and sprouting a heavy coat of dark, coarse fur that covers the baby. And then there was one where its fingers came out of its chest; it had no arms, just like you. And no legs. Just the fingers protruding from the ribcage. It lived almost a year, I understand.

And in addition I saw one time a human ostrich - that is, long spindly legs, a feathered body, then naked up to…

Let me tell you the best I’ve ever seen, in all the places I’ve ever been. It consists of an external brain which is carried in a bucket or jar, still functioning, with a dense Saran Wrap to protect it from the atmosphere and to keep the blood from draining off. And the owner had to constantly watch it, to see if it hadn’t been dealt a traumatic jolt. That one lived indefinitely, but his whole life was spent in …

PKD’s usual tropes are there – paranoia, hallucinations, religion, the German language (even an allusion to Beethoven’s IXth Symphony, the dichotomy of good and evil.

View all my reviews

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A difficult book to digest on the first reading.
The sanguinous and gory essence of the book and its title is validated by the following passages

The murdered lay in a great pool of their communal blood. It had set up into a sort of pudding crossed everywhere with the tracks of wolves or dogs and along the edges it had dried and cracked into a burgundy ceramic. Blood lay in dark tongues vestibule where the stones were cupped from the feet of the faithful and their father before them and it had threaded its way down into the steps and dripped from the stones among the dark red tracks of the scavengers.

…one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Galnton’s warhorse.

They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the colas where the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

Eww! But the vivid lyrical descriptions make the narrative a delight

Gold seekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like so heliotropic plague.

The advent of the riders bruited by scurvid curs that howled woundedly and slank among the crumbling walls.

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker…
Lightening shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns.

The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely any space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their number are no less.

Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urine-coloured sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature.

… all tattooed, branded, sutured, and the great puckered scars inaugurated God knows where by what barbarous surgeons across chests and abdomens like the tracks of gigantic millipedes, some deformed, fingers missing, eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles requiring inventory.

Each man scanned the terrain and movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires or vigilance and advanced upon the at landscape with a single resonance.

Philosophical existentialism that require repeated readings to comprehend

Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with she same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

… while someone asked the expriest if it were true that at one time there had been two moons in the sky and the expriest eyed the false moon above them and said that it may well have been so. But certainly the wise high God in his dismay at the proliferation of lunacy o this earth must have wetted a thumb and leaned down out of the abyss and pinched it hissing into extinction.

… The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Requires to be reread to be fully savoured.

View all my reviews

ओमप्रकाश वाल्मीकि कृत जूठन (प्रथम खंड)

जूठन: पहला खंड [Joothan] by Omprakash Valmiki
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

एक तथाकथित 'सुवर्ण' होने के नाते मेरा सिर शर्म से झुक जाता है। निम्नलिखित उद्धरण हिंदू धर्म की निंदनीय जाति-व्यवस्था तहत पाखंड का सार प्रस्तुत करता है

इसे जस्टिफाई करने के लिए अनेक धर्मशास्त्रों का सहारा वे जरूर लेते हैं। वे धर्मशास्त्र जो समता, स्वतंत्रता की हिमायत नहीं करते, बल्कि सामंती प्रवृत्तियों को स्थापित करते है।
तरह-तरह के मिथक रचे गए - वीरता के, आदर्शों के। कुल मिलाकर क्या परिणाम निकले?

पराजित, निराशा, निर्धनता, अज्ञानता, संकीर्णता, कूपमंडूकता, धार्मिक जड़ता, पुरोहितवाद के चंगुल में फंसा, कर्मकांड में उलझा समाज, जो टुकड़ों में बँटकर, कभी यूनानीओं से हारा, कभी शकों से। कभी हूणों से, कभी अफ़ग़ानों से, कभी मुगलों से, फ्रांसीसियों और अंग्रेज़ों से हारा, फिर भी अपनी वीरता और महानता के नाम पर कमजोर और असहायों को पीटते रहे। घर जलाते रहे। औरतों को अपमानित कर उनकी इज़्ज़त से खेलते रहे। आत्मश्लाघा में डूबकर सच्चाई से मुँह मोड़ लेना, इतिहास से सबक न लेना, आखिर किस राष्ट्र के निर्माण के कल्पना है?

वर्ण संस्था व ब्राह्मणवाद का कितना कठोर और कटु अभियोग है । अफ़सोस! हम भारत में इस उलझन, इस दुष्ट जाल, इस दलदल, इस जाति-पांति के चक्रव्यूह से कब बाहर निकलेंगे?

मात्र India का नाम भारत करने से कुछ मूल सामाजिक परिवर्तन नहीं आने वाला है। सम्भवतः सार्वभौमिक शिक्षा से ही इसका समाधान होने की सम्भावना है।

View all my reviews

ध्रुव भट्ट कृत अतरापी (The Outsider)

Atarapi by Dhruv Bhatt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An inspiring yet poignant allegorical tale in the grand tradition of 101 Panchtantra Stories. There is a passing reference to The Mahabharata although the canine bloodline seems to be inverted. Here the son (सारमेय) apparently has an affair with his mother (सरमा); was there a cryptic message in that? I could not decipher the enigma. Here are some extracts

पृथ्वी अनादिकाल से तय किये अपने मार्ग पर घूमती रही। अनादिकाल से धड़कते परम चैतन्य ने अनुभव किया कि इस आसीम ब्रह्माण्ड के कोने में एक पिल्ला अपने स्वभाव के विरुद्ध, एक चित्त होकर पाषाणवत स्थिर बैठ गया।
वातावरण में ठण्ड बढ़ गयी। भोर की नीरव शांति में अचानक कहीं से कोई अनजाना, सूक्ष्म अपानदान जैसा, अश्रव्य स्वर सुनाई दिया।

सामने ही ऊंचे पत्थरों पर से प्रपात के तरह बाह रहा झरना, किनारे पर खड़े वृक्षों के पत्तों को चमकाती हुई चांदनी, झरने के कलकल आवाज़, अचानक ही नव सर्जित किसी नए जगत को देखकर सरमा आश्चर्यचकित होकर देखती रही।

शांत समुद्र, पानी के काम होने पर भी लहरों को उछलने का स्वभाव छोड़ नहीं सका था। पृथ्वी से करोड़ों प्रकाशवर्ष दूर ब्रह्माण्ड के गर्भ में से उठते अनजान, लयबद्ध स्पंदनों का जैसे जवाब दे रहा हो, इस तरह से वह एक के बाद एक छोटी-छोटी मौजों को उछालकर रेतीले तट पर मंद, तालबद्ध ध्वनि करता हुआ, सफ़ेद रेट पर पड़ रही सुबह की कोमल धुप को भिगो रहा था।
विराट अर्धचंद्रकार में विस्तीर्ण किनारे के उत्तरी छोर पर चट्टानों पर से सागर पंछी कलरव करते उड़े। एक पत्थर लुढ़का और उसी पल दूधिया रंग का, लम्बे रोंएदार बालोंवाला, फुर्तीला सारमेय चट्टान पर आ खड़ा हुआ। जैसे इस पूरे दृश्य का अविभाज्य घातक हो, इस तरह वह स्थिर खड़ा रहा।

उसी क्षण प्रकृति अपनी परम मोहिनी के कल्पना साकार करना चाहती हो, इस तरह पश्चिमाक्ष के घने बादलों में से सूर्य ने झाँका। पूर्व दिशा में काले बादलों पर इंद्रधनुष रच गया। अगले ही पल समंदर पर से सागर पंछियों का जत्था उड़ा।
घनघोर बादलों की पृष्ठभूमि में, इंद्रधनुष के नीचे उड़ते जाते शुद्ध श्वेत सागर पंछिओं के पंक्ति, भीगी हुए धरती, गीली चमकती चट्टानें, उस पर खड़ा दूधिया रंग का रोबदार सारमेय। इन सबने मिलकर कदाचित देखने को को मिलता, ऐसा अप्रतिम दृश्य रच दिया।

तीव्रतम बनती शीत ऋतू की ठण्ड ने सूर्य की अनुपस्थिति में जैसे कहर बरपाया हो, ऐसा सन्नाटा छा गया। आकाश में उत्तर-दक्षिण तक फैली हुई आकाश गंगा, किसी सदस्रोता महानद जैसे नक्षत्र, तारों के वृन्द और वायुमंडल के बीच नभ पथ पर सरकते जा रहे थे। अगणित तारक रत्नों की स्वामिनी एक के बाद एक रत्न आकाश में बिछाती जा रही थी।
कोई महारानी अपने रत्न भण्डार के तमाम रहस्य खोल देना के बाद रत्नों के बिछौने पर बैठकर रत्नों के आभा ग्रहण कर रही हो, इस तरह दक्षिणाकाश को भर देती वृशिचक के अंततगत धनु निहारिकाओं में मन्दाकिनी परम तेज से झिलमिला उठी।

The breed of the dogs was indeterminate, the cover photo showed a Pointer in profile, the intelligence could be attributed to a Golden Retriever, although the while haired breed may have been a Samoyed.
The touching ending left me lachrymose.

View all my reviews

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the animated film The Lion King, Elton John sang the sublime words

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

Towards the end the MacInnes writes in this book

In order to create itself, life already has to exist. Cell theory is circular. Marine chemicals build a membrane that’s a prerequisite for synthesizing the chemicals needed to build a membrane. The end instigates a beginning. Cells produce the conditions essential for their own creation. Life is circular, atemporal. Every cell an instance of time travel.

The story starts off slow, promising a lot more later. The pace accelerates and the narrative gallops along breathlessly. But then it starts to meander and muddles along to a mystical end – proving the The Circle of Life – albeit on a cosmic scale – a symbiosis, a syzygy.

My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.

‘The cell is basically an ocean capsule. A preserved primordial capsule, holding the original marine environment inside. This is … this is beyond incredible, isn’t it? I mean, you could describe us both as people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean. I am not ready to get over this.’

There were a lot of new terms I learnt about in the book - one of them being the Cassini Oval

Human propensity of fiddling with natural processes leads to climate change and pollution

they weren’t just exhausted, they weren’t just emaciated to the expected degree. They were actually in the process of consuming and evacuating their own organs – they were eating themselves, attempted self-digestion, ouroboros syndrome.

Chest and throat issues are treatable, neurological ones less so. The problem is general, possibly intractable. Globally, articulation is delayed, in speech and in writing, infancy – defined as an enduring state of helplessness – prolonged.
Senility rises exponentially. In many ways it’s a crisis of language, words taking longer to emerge and disappearing quicker…this was a pathology developed by the species to protect itself, turning away form an increasingly insupportable reality into denial and hallucination. Vision is failing too – everything is, depending how you track it. Depth fields atrophy from lack of stimulation as life is lived increasingly indoors. Sometimes, from her twenty-third-storey apartment, visibility barely reaches 15 feet.

Boundaries of a nation’s territory are determined on a two-dimensional scale, but what determines the vertical limit of a country? It’s the arbitrarily defined Kármán Line

‘…Bush signs an executive order lowering the height of the country.’
‘The president can do that?’
‘Well he did…’

The power, as we attempt and fail to observe it, resists us like it is itself alive. Life is not necessarily carried in a body. And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures foe a period and exhibits a metabolic response? The alien may be a particular way of calibrating energy, not constituted in any one of the properties that delivers the power, but in the act of delivery itself. A state and not a body, a pattern not a form.

Engrossing but, at times, loses steam.

View all my reviews

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A stark indictment of Communism viz., the tyrannical and dictatorial state of Stalinist Russia. Dissidents – real or imaginary – army officers, intellectuals, artists, writers, anyone found in the wrong place at the wrong time (as was the case with the protagonist) were incarcerated and struggled for decades of perpetual hunger in the all-pervasive chilly conditions of Siberia

Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality; when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eye-wash.

Now we could take things easy. Everyone was delighted. As delighted as a hare when it finds it can still terrify a frog.

I started this year with Dan Simmons’ Olympos where the robotic LGM (little green men of Mars) are called zeks – slaves and here I come across the original meaning of the word

First he only drank the liquid, drank and drank. As it went down, filling his whole body with warmth, all his guts began to flutter inside him at their meeting with that skilly. Goo-ood! There it comes, that brief moment for which a zek lives.

The bread would do for tomorrow. The belly is a rascal. It doesn’t remember how well you treated it yesterday, it’ll cry out for more tomorrow.

The novella describes in vivid detail “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” and ends thus

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.
There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.
The three extra days were for leap years

Poignant!

View all my reviews

Fire Bird by Perumal Murugan translated by Janani Kannan

Fire Bird by Perumal Murugan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The lovely narrative belies what the title Fire Bird - aalanthaapatchi - seems to imply – that this is the story of a virago

She hates the very scent of a man. Like an aalanthaapatchi, a fire bird, she never let anyone come close to her even when she lived here. She flies in quest of human flesh, picking up the trace of a man or woman. If you are not careful, she will use her words to pierce your skin and feed on your flesh.

It is a story of a pioneering farming family, narrated with a bucolic touch, with a spiritual flavour that is in close touch with nature.

In response, the men yelled back, hit them, ran after them and caused a big commotion. To Muthu, it was like watching a murder of crows cawing and fighting amongst each other.

Sometimes only one bird sang. When that bird stopped, the next one started to sing. Sometimes the two sing together without a pause. She felt there was a meaning to all that and began to try to decipher their sounds.
The first gruff voice that was loud must be a male bird, she decided. The voice that was soft and subtle was a female’s. Every morning they would discuss their agenda for the day. ‘You go in this direction looking for food, I will go in the other direction. Before the heat rises, you must bring back a bug or worm or a piece of corn. We will meet up later. Shall we wager on who is going to bring more food? Until I return, you must remain in the nest. You can go after me, I will then take care of our things…’ That was what paati imagined their conversations to be like.

Beautifully translated, although I wish there was a glossary of the names of the trees, plants and the various food items... And is there really a bird by this name or just a descriptive term?

View all my reviews

आचार्य चतुरसेन कृत सोमनाथ

Somnath (सोमनाथ) by Acharya Chatursen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A time of fear and conspiracies, debauchery, internecine rivalry, foreign invasion, religious strife. Minor fiefdoms ruled by petty-minded individuals with delusions of grandeur, plagued by silly jealousies and perceived insults. Instead of putting up a united front to the invading hordes – they behaved traitorously and let the fanatical hordes conquer the country, loot the treasuries, rape, reave and desecrate temples.
The writing style is a bit hyped and needlessly detailed at times and goes into he realm of fantasy rather than remains faithful to historical accuracy. Nonetheless, quite engrossing.

View all my reviews

Olympos by Dan Simmons

Olympos by Dan Simmons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A rambunctious, bawdy, hilarious humdinger of a yarn peopled by characters from The Tempest, Homer’s The Iliad, sentient autonomous robots (some of whom are painfully literary - spouting Marcel Proust, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Shakespeare, Lord Byron and others), nebulous post-humans, recombinant humans – all interacting with each other on multiple worlds – some of those worlds being in an alternate reality. It all ends with an epic deɪəs ɛks ˈmækɪnə - the ultimate deux ex machina.
After ‘sparrow-fart’ from Ilium, with some further novel abuses, the author attains new levels of scatological creativity

Priam’s son, that shit-eating pig-dog, Paris.

An ignoble giant like that ant-pizzle Achilles

Kingdom of the dead where your brother Paris now floats like a forgotten fart.

Deiphobus has been waiting his turn in line to boink the posy doxy since the week Paris dragged her bumpy ass here – gods curse the day – so he’s probably well into the rites of Dionysos, if not of marriage, even as we speak, sister.

“Well, Theano is worm meat. Dead as Prince Paris’s pizzle,” said Helen.

That popinjay. That pair of spangled leotards with a dick.

You will magus. You are but a shadow of a rumour of a hint of a noosphere – a personification of a centreless, soulless pulse of useless information, senseless mumbles from a race long fallen into dotage and decay, a cyber-sewn fart in the wind. You will fall and so shall your useless bio-whore, Ariel.

You whoremongering gill-slitted motherfucking sonofabitching asshole-licking freakshit murderous gape-mouthed goddammned fucking…

“You’re a friend of that dog-fucker Achilles, “snarls Menelaus, “You’re a lackey of my enemy, Hector, whose doom is sealed this day.”

“I’ll kill you now if you don’t, you pig’s arse. And draw your bowels out slow in the killing.”

“Penthesilea?” says the black-garbed goddess, still chuckling. “That brainless, blond, big-boobed lesbian tart? Why on a million Earths would you want to bring that musclebound bimbo back to life, son of Peleus?”

Lord of Flies? Lord of Horse Dung? God of Faeces.

…that dickless worm Peleus.

“Fight,” said Achilles. “You old pigfucker.”

This Demogorgon is as crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat.

Harman’s people must be the dullest subspecies of homo sapiens ever to receive a patent

There is a lot of explicit and kinky sex - after the staid The Hyperion Omnibus. The breathless action (the dyspnoea resulting from the actions on both the battlefield as well on the bed!) is interspersed with some stylish writing: alliteration

“And rather beautiful in a bumpy, bulgy, black, bulbous, sinister sort of way.”
… “That’s an awful lot of alliteration from an anxious astronaut.”

Much to murky metaphor for a mere measly man.

I’ll never believe that the bumbling buggering bad-breathed cripple could do something like this.

Abstruse and poetic bits

Books were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

With characters from diverse timelines and manifold universes interacting in myriad ways, there is bound to be anachronistic confusion

“Who’s Homer?” asks Odysseus, pausing in midair at the irised door to the astrogation bubble.
“No one you’d know,” says Hockenberry, drinking more wine.

“No, this is a hardline. That Demogorgon is a lot of things, but not J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Who?”
“Never mind, son of Peleus…”

“Fine. But we still have to talk. We only have a minute or two before this kangaroo court commences.”
“What is a kangaroo?” Achilles is growing tired of this mini-god’s double-talk.

…just as in the old TV broadcast series from the lost era - Star Truck.”
“Trek,” corrected General Beh bin Adee.

“It’s a case of ‘Beam me up Scooty.’”
“Scotty,” corrected Retrograde Sinopessen.

…it has a bigger diameter than Pluto.”
“Pluto?” says Achilles.
“It’s a fucking planet, you stupid hick preliterate,” growls Hephaestus

The essence of SF is pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo and mystical gobbledegook

The Strominger-Vafa-Susskind-Sen sensors are giving us BPS rates showing increasing disparity between the Brane’s minimum mass and its charge, sent Orphu
BPS? Sent Mahnmut. He knew the mass-charge disparity had to be bad, but wasn’t sure why.
Bogomol’nyi, Prasard, Sommerfield sent Orphu in his oh-what-a moron-but-I-like-you-anyway voice. The Calabi-Yau space near you there is undergoing a space-tearing conifold transition.

Thetis conspired to dip you in the probability flames of the pure quantum celestial fire. You are a quantum freak unique unto the universe, bastard son of Thetis and Zeus… That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.

The gods have begun using physical bombs to penetrate the force shield in recent week, the single-molecule bomb casings quantum-phasing through the moravecs’ shield.

…old style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometres in diameter. They used these Z-DNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX-DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibres, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of naonelectric organic memory storage clusters.

Yabba Dabba Doo! Metaphysical abracadabra and verbose legerdemain can either send the reader into side-splitting hilarity or turn him/her/it (if the reader is an AI) into a blubbering imbecile. The chicanery goes on

“Do we have some sort of Calabi-Yau intermemBrane tourist Brain here?”

…when you represent human consciousness as the standing wavefront phenomenon it really is, factor in terabytes of qubit quantum data on the wavefront basis for physical reality itself, apply the proper relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness-reality wave functions, you quickly see how the post-humans opened Brane Holes to new universes and then teleported there themselves.

“What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability staters?” asked Orphu. “How does the human mind work except as a sort of a interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?”

The confrontation of Achilles with Nyx is droll and farcical

Night – Nyx – is fifteen tall, wrapped in a roiling, vaporous cloud, dressed in what seems like multiple layers of diaphanous black cloth, strips hanging down in scores of lengths, with either a black headdress that includes a veil over a face or perhaps a face that looks like a moulded black veil. Impossibly, her black eyes are perfectly visible through the black veil and vaporous clouds. Before averting his face, Achilles saw that she was incredibly large-breasted, as if she could suckle all the world to darkness.

Achilles decides it is time he spoke. “I need to see Zeus, Goddess.”
The dark wraith turns more in his direction. It is as if she is floating, not standing, and the large and huge-breasted form swivels without friction…
“You need to see the Lord of Thunder, the God of All Gods, the Pelasgian Zeus, Lord of Ten Thousand Temples and Dodona’s Shrine, Father of All Gods and Men, Zeus the Ultimate King Who Marshals the Storm Clouds and Who Gives All Commands?”
“Yeah,” says Achilles.
“What about?” asks Nyx.

It’s Aphrodite’s pheromone perfume,” says Hephaestus, still on his knees.
Night quits laughing. “Which type?”
“Number nine,” grumbles Hephaestus. “Puck’s potion. The type with the self-duplicating naonmachines in the bloodstream constantly reproducing more dependency molecules and depriving the brain of endorphins and serotonin if the victim doesn’t act on his infatuation. There is no antidote.”

“Crippled God of Fire, busy artificer to the more noble gods, what do you see when you look upon this mortal man?”
“A fucking fool,” grunts Hephaestus.
“I see a quantum singularity,” says the goddess Nyx. “A black hole of probability. A myriad of equations all with the same single three-point solution. Why is that, Artificer?”
The god of fire grunts again. “His mother, Thetis of the seaweed-tangled breasts, held this arrogant mortal in the celestial quantum fire when he was a pup, little more than a larva. The probability of his death day, hour, minute, and method is one hundred percent, and because it cannot be changed, it seems to give Achilles a sort of invulnerability to all other attacks and injury.”

I couldn’t figure out the conundrum behind the names of the post-literate humans with the suffix ‘man’ – viz.,

Laman, Siman, Reman, Raman, Dorman, Kaman, Caman, Stoman, Boman, Beman, Noman (Odysseus) and Harman and Daeman (the main pratagonists)

I sincerely wish there is a sequel… and that eventually turns into the Ilium Cantos…

View all my reviews

Termite Fry by Zai Whitaker

Termite Fry by Zai Whitaker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A bildungsroman, essentially the story of two siblings that gives a glimpse into the lives of Irular tribals. Their livelihood comes under threat from urbanisation and other 'development' projects. Simply told, no violence or gratuitous sex - suitable for kids around 10-12 years.

View all my reviews