Review: Turbulence by Samit Basu, reviewed by Anil Menon (Author Week #4)

Turbulence by Samit Basu Reviewed by Anil Menon The opening scene in Turbulence captures perfectly what reading Samit Basu’s work is like. Determined to give his son Vir Singh his first taste of flight, fighter-pilot Balwant Singh dangles and swings his three-year old from the uppermost tier of the Eiffel Tower. To read Basu is...

Locus Roundtable interviews Anil Menon and Vandana Singh

This week's Locus Roundtable includes an interview with Anil Menon and Vandana Singh held during ReaderCon.

Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

Anil Menon has announced the cover for the forthcoming Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana, edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh. The anthology will be published by Zubaan Books in India. Here's the cover, and the list of contributors! Contributors: Molshree Ambastha Kalyug Amended Neelanjana Banerjee Exile Priya Sarukkai Chabria Fragments from...

Guy Hasson’s Secret Thoughts, Reviewed by Anil Menon (Author Week #2)

Guy Hasson: Secret Thoughts Review by Anil Menon   Since intimacy and secrecy  are all but inseparable, it’s no surprise that Guy Hasson’s “Secret Thoughts,” a collection of three novellas, is also a triad if stories about intimacy. The novellas consider intimacy in three distinct contexts: the living past, the Other, and the possible future....

Review: Housuke Nojiri’s Rocket Girls, and The Last Planet (Haikasoru Week)

Housuke Nojiri: Rocket Girls (tr. Joseph Reeder) Housuke Nojiri: The Last Planet (tr. Alexander O. Smith) Review by Anil Menon   Given Japanese pop culture’s fascination with schoolgirls and science fiction’s fascination with outer space, it is all but inevitable that Japanese SF would try to merge the two subgenres into one: schoolgirls in space....

Review: Ekaterina Sedia’s The House of Discard Dreams

Anil Menon takes on our guest author Ekaterina Sedia's latest novel, The House of Discarded Dreams. Review: The House of Discarded Dreams by Anil Menon In Ekaterina Sedia’s novel, there is a striking passage where the heroine Vimbai invokes the Rafflesia, an endoparasitic plant with flowers that “looked like slabs of meat and stank of...

Anil Menon’s The Beast with Nine Billion Feet now available for Kindle

Anil Menon's YA science fiction novel, The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, set in a wonderful futuristic India, is now available as an e-book on Amazon. About the book: Set in Pune, India in the year 2040 AD, this novel, by one of India's best new speculative fiction writers, explores growing up in a world...

Tuesday Fiction: “Eustace Albert” by Anil Menon

Sorry for the slight delay in posting - without further ado, here is this week's story, by Indian writer Anil Menon! Eustace Albert By Anil Menon The boy’s name was Eustace Albert. But that wasn’t the problem. His troubles were of his own making, and his mother summed it up neatly. “Eustace,” said Mrs. Albert,...

Original Content: World-Building in a Hot Climate, by Anil Menon

World Building in A Hot Climate Anil Menon I came across Paramjit Kumar’s Scourge From the Sky (1964) many years ago, on my way home from school, in one of Mumbai’s then-myriad footpath bookstores. The slim cloth-bound octavo volume, modestly self-labeled the  “Greatest Science Fiction of the Century,” was about an interstellar adventure complete with...