Category: Sci-fi

  • Consider Phlebas 

    I listened to Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks on Audible. It is the first book in the Culture series. I picked up the book on Audible soon after listening to this podcast episode of People by WTF between Nikhil Kamath and Elon Musk (Episode 16).

    I had heard about the Culture series from this blog post by Vitalik Buterin after first reading the book as a college-goer. He was looking for AI futures in which we would want to live in. Vitalik describes the book as follows:

    The Culture series features a far-future interstellar civilization primarily occupied by two kinds of actors: regular humans, and superintelligent AIs called Minds.

    This description of the series did not get me to read the book, though. This was in 2023.

    Musk talks about how energy will replace money as the ultimate currency. He says:

    Energy is the real, is the true currency. This is why I said Bitcoin is based on energy. You can’t legislate energy. You can’t just pass a law and suddenly have a lot of energy.

    He then pointed to Iain Bank’s Culture series as a good example of a depiction of a society that operates without money. I would discount the timeline he provides in the podcast but perhaps, not the direction. If the world were being built by engineers, this is the direction it would take.

    After I picked up the book on Audible, I listened to it on my drives to work.

    The title of the book is taken from a poem by T S Eliot, called The Waste Land (in Section 4), which is a brief description of a drowned merchant. The Waste Land, written in 1922, is a poem said to be about spiritual emptiness, disillusionment, and the breakdown of society after the First World War.

    The end of the story reminded me of the Malayalam movies of the 1980s, where heroes died at the end. Since, this book was written in 1987, I wasn’t surprised.

    I really liked the names of spaceships being longer than just a single or a couple of words. I liked how I guess the author struggled in the bribing scenarios in the book because of a lack of meaningful money. I found the clash between a religious humanity and an AI interesting. I look forward to reading the rest of the series. I may not read the next book in the series, though.

    I finished the book a few days into the New Year and I am happy to score this as the first book I completed in 2026. I need to make notes the next time when I hear something interesting.

  • Indofuturism

    Prateek Arora of BANG BANG MediaCorp, asked on X:

    Tweet from Prateek Arora: What does “Indofuturism” mean to you?

    I thought that since Indofuturism, seems inspired by Afrofuturism, I should look there for a definition. Wikipedia defines Afrofuturism as:

    Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afro-diasporic experiences.

    Wikipedia article in Afrofuturism

    I would define Indofuturism by replacing Afro with Indo:

    Indofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of the Indian diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the Indian diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Indo-diasporic experiences.

    It seems to make sense to me as a first draft of a definition. I have not even touched what this means to me yet.

    In the meantime, you can follow some of the Indofuturism content that Prateek shares on Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

  • Back to Return to Earth

    I wrote the last Chapter of Return to Earth on November 30, 2021. Return to Earth is a re-worked version of a novel that I was attempting to write for NaNoWriMo 2021.

    Through December, 2021, I was busy with delivering work related projects before the end of the calendar year.

    In January 2022, I was following up with a distraction. A short story idea that I had hoped to write and publish by end of January 2022. The short story consumed me. I was not able to think of returning to the novel. It took a bout of COVID-19 for me to drop the idea of pursuing the short story and return to the novel.

    Another thing pushing the return to the novel, Return to Earth, was the kick-off of Cohort 2 of Long-form Writing which I had the honor of co-hosting with Hemant and Saurabh.

    I returned to writing the novel, Return to Earth, again yesterday (on February 8, 2021). This is a short but important chapter in the novel.

  • Writing a Novel

    November is celebrated as National Novel Writing Month in America. It’s called NaNoWriMo for short. Although it began as a US phenomenon, it has turned into a global movement. There is growing global participation each year of authors writing every day in the month of November. They hope to write about 50,000 words in the month of November. Consistent daily writing with global accountability.

    My tryst with NaNoWriMo began in 2012. I do not have any public record of this. I had emailed a bunch of people in 2012 asking if they would be my beta readers. There is no record of this novel on my private storage or on Google Drive. I seem to also not have informed these people about the status of this novel.

    In 2018, I started writing chapters of a science fiction novel. I had called it One in Malayalam – Onu. I had published the chapters on Medium. Although I call them Chapters, the number of words in each was very low. I don’t think the whole thing together would qualify as a short story. I was also not sure where the story was going after Chapter 8. Hence, I abandoned that effort.

    In 2019, I took to a physical notebook and started writing a nation-state fiction. The first book in the series was called William Horsborg – Life and Times. I wrote about 1200 words before I gave up on that. I will take this up again. It is a story I used to tell myself as I drew maps in a notebook as a 11 year old child. I have the stories in my head and they will not leave me in peace until I have told them.

    I gave 2020 a hard pass and did not attempt NaNoWriMo.

    In 2021, I had mixed feelings about writing a novel. I see-sawed between wanting to write and not wanting to write. An opportunity to write for about an hour a day opened up for me yesterday. I took the time to read the story I had written in 2018.

    Although, I started writing it in the month of November, I am not counting it as an entry for NaNoWriMo 2021. But, I would like to acknowledge the part that NaNoWriMo played in remembering about writing the novel.

    I am calling the novel, Return to Earth, tentatively. It is not a final title and it may change. Once each chapter is over, I will share it here and on my About page. I finished writing about 1000 words of the first chapter today morning.

  • Chapter 1 Tritiya

    Ayn was sitting at the console today. She got a notification for a Longreads story on the beginning of the Quantum Computing on the Moon. She opened the notification to read the story.

    Quantum Computing came to the Moon with the Indian company, Pradnya Labs. Pradnya Labs was founded by Pradeep in 2020 after he quit his banking career. He started it for teaching Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to his peers. He found that more money was to be made by teaching others than the application of these skills in an industry that youngsters were getting into than someone who lacked experience in the field.

    Pradeep turned out to be a much better teacher than an employee or a worker in India’s software industry. Pradnya Labs then expanded into digital literacy drives for the elderly. This Pradnya Labs saw as Corporate Social Responsibility as the company grew big in Southern India and went public in 2024. However, students who left Pradeep came back to join him in India as teachers. Along with them came two important people – Shruti and Sriram.

    Shruti worked with Microsoft in the US and was working with its Quantum Computing division. Sriram came from Tesla and came from its famous Batteries Division. In a famous meeting held in a tea shop in Palakkad, they encouraged Pradeep to foray into Quantum Computing. First, they held classes for Quantum Computing core processes.

    Pradeep learnt that Quantum Computers would not sit in people’s hands like ordinary computers. These would be installed in the cloud and would communicate with people’s devices through broadband. From the profits that Pradnya Labs made up to 2025 and raising money from family and friends, Pradnya Labs founded it Quantum Computing Division with Shruti heading the same.

    In 2026, Pradnya Labs produced the first quantum computer, called Adi. Pradeep thought that putting these quantum computers in the sothern pole of Lunar craters would provide them with natural cooling. The Aitkens basin was identified. He spoke with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman, Pavan. Pavan was not sure if Pradeep had a working idea and hence called his colleague at the Indian Institute for Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, Mukunth for setting up a demonstration. Adi was setup with the quantum computer built at IIIT and was test run. Adi outperformed the IIIT-Q by 15 seconds.

    Pavan asked Pradeep how they hoped to communicate with the Moon? Pradeep said a relay satellite would be placed near the Moon and would re-send the signal to Earth. Although, Pavan was not fully convinced, he agreed to place one Adi on the Moon’s Aitkens basin.

    Meanwhile, Sriram was working away in a nearby lab in Hyderabad to build Tesla style battery packs within which the quantum computer could be carried to the Lunar South pole. He added a communications module. The body of the Adi-packs were tested in ISRO labs in Bengaluru. After they came through successfully, the first Adi-packs were launched to the Aitkens crater in 2025.

    Through 2026, ISRO, IIIT and Pradnya Labs tested the relay system and found that the speed that Adi got was lost in communication with Earth. Dwitiya was launched in December 2026. Developed in the Pradnya Q Labs in Coimbatore, Dwitiya was faster than IIIT-Q by 83 seconds. ISRO launched a Dwitiya pack to the Aitkens basin in 2027. Happy with the results, Pradnya Labs got orders for Dwitiyas themselves as well as for time for use on the Lunar Dwitiyas.

    Meanwhile Sriram got in touch with his former boss at Tesla and through him got Pradeep to talk to Elon Musk. Pradeep asked Musk for a redesign of their Starlink satellites to provide a way to receive data from the Moon and relay it to Earth. Working through 2027 and 2028, the Starlink 2.5 satellites were launched by SpaceX in 2029. These provided improved speed, better data crunching and faster applications. With the advent of this, many of the other service providers in India started gaining an equal footing.

    Pradnya Labs’ profits soared. In 2030, Isha Ambani of Jio approached Pradeep with a new idea. She wanted Jio to build satellites that would relay the information from the lunar Dwitiyas back to Earth. Pradeep shared that they were working on Tritiya. One Tritiya would launch next year. But, one demonstration at the Pradnya Labs Quantum Computer simulator meant she paid for the construction of three more Tritiyas exclusively for use of Jio. In addition, she also paid Exseed Space for the construction of 25 Jiosats that would relay the information for users in the Indian subcontinent.

    A total of five Tritiyas were launched to lunar surface at the Aitkens basin. Two were used for scientific data crunching for science institutions in India. Three were used by Jio. They said the three lunar data centers took care of half their data center needs on Earth.

    It was one of the Tritiya that had predicted that an asteroid was to hit Earth in 2040. Ayn was one of the few human beings that left on the spacecraft one year before impact was predicted. Today was the day when the asteroid would hit Earth.

  • Ghost inside Machines

    A seemingly recurring theme. There is an obscure link to this in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There is a direct reference to it in Issac Asimov’s “I, Robot”. There is also an anime flick called Ghost in the Shell, but I don’t know if it relates to this concept.