The secret revealed

Just back from the vacation. Finished The Manticore's Secret by Samit Basu. It's the second in the GameWorld trilogy, the first being The Simoqin Prophecies. Some disclaimers before I say anything more

1. I don't read much fantasy

2. Whatever fantasy I choosily, occasionally read I usually like

3. I don't like the terms science fiction and fantasy being clubbed together, viewed as one and the same genre, or works being described as SFF (science fiction/fantasy).

Overall I like the book in a way, because I think it's in a class of it's own. I'm tempted to say that the series was conjured up to bank on the success of the Potter books/LOTR movies, just like Five Point Someone led to a horde of such books. TMS does borrow from wildly dispersed sources, as the back cover blurb itself says, but it does it in a way which is enjoyable and unique. That again does not imply that it's just a goulash of borrowed ideas - but the borrowed ideas are cheekily and enjoyably parodied. Maybe the author could have made it a little less obvious by not having a 'Dark Tower' a la LOTR.

The idea of a "GameWorld" and the justification for the name is actually developed in this volume. Even though the first volume had the trilogy name on the spine but it failed to mention anything which would explain the reasoning behind the name. (Hm on second thoughts better check the first volume again in case I missed it).

The propensity of the author to take well known names from mythology/the current real world and use them reversed to name his characters/locations is such that you'll end up checking every unusual name against this theory even though most of them do not fit this. The gods-in-the-sky routine pops up every few pages towards the end. A little tiresome, that. And evidently the book is bolder in it's treatment of "racy" scenes as compared to Part One.

My favourite aspect, however, remains the alternate world, or should I say the alternate Indian subcontinent. I think that's why I've stuck to the books.

Currently reading The Legends of Pensam, a gift from my cousin. A beautiful book, that's all I can say right now.

Am off on a weeklong vacation tomorrow - going home, that's Guwahati, and also to drop off my sister there for her exams. The idea of no work for 7 days seems fabulous. Thinking of reading a lot - in fact that's what I do whenever I'm home. Taking along Samit Basu's The Manticore's Secret (second in the trilogy) and The Dreams our Stuff is made of. Will hunt around for some Assamese science fiction works I've been looking for, this time.

Stuff

The Complete Robot - Asimov
TWG UFO and Alien Encounters
Alien Contact - Timothy Good
Metamagical Themad - Douglas R. Hofstadter
What's become of screwloose - Ron Goulat
Isaac Asimov Presents - Antibodies
The Moon and the Face - Patricia McKillip
The Berkley Showcase - 2
Soulcatcher - Frank Herbert
Downbelow Station - C. J. Cherryh
Winter in Eden - Harry Harrison
The Green Brain - Frank Herbert
Nimisha's Ship - Anne Mc Caffrey
Cold Allies - Patricia Anthony
Pegasus in Space - Anne Mc Caffrey
Lucky Starr and the big sun of Mercury
Tales from the white hart - Clarke
Begone Godmen - Abraham Kovoor (I remember Gods, Demons and Spirits in school - so just picked this up)

Just a few

P.D. James - Children of Men
Eastern Love
A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett (One of those books which you buy because it feels so good to hold them in your hands)
Faces of the Future - The Lessons of Science Fiction - Brian Ash

Down the memory wormhole

When I think about it, my fascination with science fiction began as a fascination with space when I was a 7-8 year old kid. The earliest memories I have are of a scifi series called Space City Sigma, broadcast every Sunday morning back in those days (mid 80s) when the only TV channel you could get in India was Doordarshan. But I was lucky enough to have a dad who was posted in a remote place near the Indo-Bangladesh border (if you can call that lucky) and the Bangladesh tv signals were stronger than Delhi's. Needless to say, BTV was filled with Hollywood movies and tv series.
But I digress. I remember very little of SCS, because what really filled me with that oft-mentioned sense-of-wonder was another series called Indradhanush. Same channel, same day, but later (or was it earlier?) Briefly, it involved a boy who manages to build a computer from scrap and it actually turns out to be an alien intelligence from the Andromeda nebula. Juvenile stuff? Yes, and it was the kind of stuff which inspires, fills a young boy's mind with the vastness of the universe, makes him want to roam the cosmos in a ship of his own.

That boyhood desire of roaming in a ship of my own has still stayed with me - it manifests itself now with my obsession with space/flight simulations, where there is no predetermined objective or path, but you're free to fly around as you wish. Hm...that also explains my occasional dabbling with OpenGL. Self discovery can be revealing :).

A starship command deck, made out of matchboxes and face-cream boxes covered with white paper. The care I lavished upon it! Gluing and regluing, adding consoles, screens for tracing the starship's destination, pasting white paper over the parts where it would get dirty...

My dad had piles and piles of Reader's Digests, dating back from the 70's. Those used to be my staple diet. And there used to be really good articles on space exploration. Banal stuff about the solar system's planets' atmospheres can be of no interest to a 7 year old boy, but the sheer thrill of just reading about it was enough.