Ted Mahsun

Martin Vopenka's novel, though given the label of science fiction, reads more like a magical realist escapade through philosophy, sprinkled with liberal doses of space-time theories. The result is a novel that reads more like Milan Kundera rather than something more traditionally placed in the realm of science fiction. The Fifth Dimension starts out promisingly. A Czech man, Jakub, who built a successful career in construction after the fall of Communism suddenly finds himself broke after his business prospects vanish one by one. Desperate, he answers a mysterious ad from an equally mysterious organization that promises him US$200,000 if he takes part in an experiment that involves spending a year in solitude out in the mountains of Argentina. He takes with him only one book, Black Holes & Time Warps by Kip Thorne , and so spends his time lost not only in loneliness and paranoia but also in multidimensional physics theories. Unfortunately, the plot takes too long ...

It's very rare for a book to grab my attention on the first page, then proceeds to drag me through a fast-paced, action packed SF romp. Adam Rakunas's Windswept sweeps you through a plot involving labor unions, edge-of-space boondocks, space elevators, and sugarcane byproducts, which of course, includes rum. Lots of rum. Padma Mehta is a union recruiter grappling on the edge of sanity who only wants to fulfill her recruitment quota so she can retire and buy her own rum distillery. When an opportunity presents itself so that Padma can finally fill her quota, she takes it despite her better judgment. But instead of the forty people she expected to quit their labor contracts, only five of them come tumbling down the space elevator and one of them happens to be dead. What happens next is a series of increasingly insurmountable problems for Padma to overcome. Besides the breakneck speed of the prose, I found the witty banter and the often hilarious situations entertaining,...

Southeast Asia is a region rich with legends and myths which hasn't been explored enough by writers, even those residing here. But this is probably partly because we don't have that many venues in which to share these stories. It goes without saying then that The SEA Is Ours, a steampunk anthology featuring writers from all over Southeast Asia, is a timely anthology that fills the need to showcase stories from authors we don't normally hear from. The two editors, Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng, have made great choices in selecting the stories that went into this anthology. There were only a couple of stories that didn't really grab my attention, but that's par for the course for any collection of stories. It's rare that I find myself liking all the stories in an anthology. The ones that did really stood out for me were Timothy Dimacali's On The Consequence of Sound , which, rightly, is the opening story and features humongous giant whale catfish sweeping...

My review of Haruki Murakami's Wind/Pinball was published in the Sunday Star on 16 August 2015 and appeared on the Star2.com website on 18 August 2015 . Author: Haruki Murakami Translator (Japanese-English): Ted Goossen Publisher: Alfred A Knopf Finally, famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami has deemed it fit for English-speakers to read the two novellas he wrote in the late 1970s that launched his career. Wind/Pinball is a collection of two novellas: Hear The Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 . Murakami is on record for saying that he’s embarrassed by these novellas because, by his reckoning, they were his early books and are not that good. He’s even mentioned in interviews that he had had no plans for them to be released outside of Japan. English translations did exist, though. Published by Kodansha and translated by Alfred Birnbaum, the rarities were only ever intended to be used in English language classes in Japan. Print runs were limited and English-reading ...

It's always wonderful when you discover a wonderful new author. But this author I've found is hardly new and he is hardly obscure, having won three Hugo awards as well as a Nebula. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the SFWA. No, far from obscure, Clifford D. Simak is one of the masters of science fiction who wrote and published his stories during the hallowed Golden Era of SF. And the book that I've discovered by him is the fantastic, far-reaching and truly epic novel, City . Like many SF novels of that period, City is a novel that is patched together with previously published unconnected short stories, very similar to what Bradbury did with The Martian Chronicles and what Asimov did with I, Robot . What makes City unique--I'd go so far as to say fascinating --are the interstitial "notes" that tie the stories together into one continuous narrative. And these notes are often equally as intriguing as the stories they introduce. But I'm ge...

A solar flare causes an accident on a routine mission around the Earth's orbit. This causes astronaut Travis Hill to take extreme measures by leaping out of the craft and into an escape pod, effectively becoming the first astronaut ever to jettison to safety from space and make a reentry back to Earth. This amazing starting sequence in the novel, Starfire by Paul Preuss, hooked me straight in and kept me turning the pages, wanting to know what would happen the thrilling moment next. Unfortunately, as action-packed as the opening was, the rest of Starfire left me wanting. Several years after Travis Hill's amazing escape from the solar flare accident and his daring descent back to Earth, he has been deemed unfit to go back to space. But when he hears about an asteroid that makes a near pass to Earth and is heading towards the Sun, he spies an opportunity to get back to space. With NASA launching the brand new spaceship, the titular Starfire, very soon, plans are made to...

You may remember (well, okay, you may not) that I bought a Kindle Touch almost two years ago . I was absolutely smitten with it. I loved the the e-ink screen, the touch capabilities, the ability to buy a book and immediately start reading it without ever having to leave the device. It was heaven for a book lover. But now it's time for me to say goodbye to my beloved Kindle Touch. It was a trusty companion these past couple of years and kept me company for many long work commutes. The e-ink screen was, and still is, a marvelous piece of tech. But time brings new advancements and now that I own an iPhone 6 Plus , I don't see the point of using a Kindle Touch to read books anymore. You see, paired with the Kindle app the iPhone 6 Plus is the perfect device for reading e-books (well, at least from Amazon). When I first bought a the Kindle Touch, people claimed that e-ink screens caused less strain for the eyes while reading when compared to LCD screens. While that may be tru...

Ah, the e-ink reader. For years I've been wanting to try one out but never knew anyone who owned one. Then when I actually bought one for myself, all sorts of people (including my best friend who never thought it pertinent to tell me he bought one) came out of the woodwork and told me how they were enjoying their own e-ink readers. In any case, for the longest time I was skeptical over the idea of reading e-books because reading them on a computer was uncomfortable both for my back and for my eyes and reading them on an e-reader was out of the question for me because they were being sold for outrageous prices. I had read about e-readers that used e-ink which used digital screens that were supposed to have the clarity and the sharpness of print on paper and how they were supposed to be comfortable to read on while having the benefits of being digital. But alas, e-ink e-readers were expensive and I didn't know anyone who owned one. So for the longest time I stayed away fro...

Goodbye, Goddess by Breanna Teintze is a beautiful and well-written collection of high fantasy short stories that I would not hesitate to recommend to my friends. I loved how even though the stories were self-contained, the world described in them seemed to be larger than it appeared and while the stories had a small element of "sensawunda" they really focused more on the characters rather than the fantastic. One of my favourite stories in this collection was about a rogue mage who is reluctantly asked by some villagers to investigate a recent murder. It's at once a fantasy story, a Western story, a whodunnit, rolled into one and even has a big showdown in the end. Brilliant! My other favourite story is about a village idiot who is asked to slay a dragon. The story is simple, but the loving care in which it is written and the humourous but logical way in which the dragon is ultimately vanquished makes this one memorable. That's not to say the other stories in...

Steampunk. Time travel. Dinosaurs. These three things make Robert Appleton's Prehistoric Clock a book after my heart. And does it capture it? Does the book provide a fun and engaging story along with its interesting premise? Yes. Yes it does. And thank goodness for that. When I read the synopsis, I so wanted to like the book, but I worried it wouldn't live up to its potential. Set in 1908, Prehistoric Clock is told from the perspectives of three main characters, Verity Champlain, an acting captain of an airship, Lord Garret Embrey, an aristocrat wrongly accused in a conspiratorial trial, and Cecil Reardon, the inventor who creates the time machine that drives the plot behind the novel. Though Reardon's scientific experiments are sponsored by a shady organisation called the Leviacrum (which we are given to suspect also controls the British empire), he secretly builds a time machine which he intends to use to go back in time to save his wife and son from dying s...

This short story Kindle e-book started out as a generic hard-boiled detective novel with a broad asking a shamus to investigate her apparently lecherous husband. But then the broad dies, and the story turns into something altogether different. Shipp writes gritty dialogue worthy of the hard-boiled genre. In fact, I downloaded the story on the basis of the dialogue on the first page alone. The story is pretty weird and throws curve balls at the reader a lot of times. I kept wondering what the heck was going on, and I didn't see the ending coming. Probably because I had no idea where the story was going most of the time! I did not know anything about the story beforehand and I downloaded it on the basis of reading the first page. I didn't know it was a bizarro story, but if I did, that would have probably spoiled half the fun. On the whole, I enjoyed reading this--I love bizarro--and am now interested in checking out the author's other work. Attic Clowns looks int...

Bookaholics who tend to stay up late at night reading but have a partner who shares the room must surely understand the all-too-common dilemma of having to switch off the lights so your partner can sleep, but dammit you're just about to get to the good part in your novel but you don't want to get out of bed and continue reading in the living room. The solution would of course be to get a nice book light, one that illuminates enough for you to enjoy your reading, but not pervasive enough to bother your pesky non-reading partner. I've been married quite a while now. So it goes without saying I've been wanting a really good book light for some time. Getting a book light had become more crucial after little Sophie was born. I wanted to read in bed but neither the wife nor the baby would shut up and go to sleep when the lights were on. I scoured the internet for a solution and discovered the LightWedge , a really nifty device that, like it's name suggests, is shape...

You don't really expect a fast-paced action thriller to take place in the sleepy antipodean nation of New Zealand, and yet John Ling , a Malaysian-born Kiwi, has made it work. In The Blasphemer, a Muslim author named Abraham Khan has written a very controversial book very much akin to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses . But Khan is no Rushdie. I won't tell you why (spoilers!) but even the author himself claims the main inspiration for the character is the feminist writer, Taslima Nasrin, who is a far cry from Salman Rushdie. It goes without saying that Khan is then targeted by extremists. Enter Maya Raines, who is assigned by the New Zealand police to protect Khan and his wife, Belinda Freeman, after a failed suicide attack almost kills them both. John Ling then goes on to weave a fast-placed story that includes drugs, thrall-like Somalis, two hired assassins (with the names Devlin and Emmerich; see if you can catch the reference ) and a mysterious man with an aim to ...

And has nice things to say about it as well : I’ve recently read a bit of bizarro and have to say even the one with freshly birthed wolves being shot out of a bears mouth isn’t as strange as this book. It’s stupid but funny. I was like wtf! while reading it. This book is weird, wacky and funny.  Thanks, Jessica! This is exactly the kind of reaction I was going for with the story and was glad to see it worked. That makes me feel glad.

A review I wrote ages ago finally got published in The Star . Well, that review had a crazy journey from my keyboard to print, but I shall not dwell on the matter. This review was published in The Star on 28 August 2009 . Marathon chronicles Review by TED MAHSUN What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Author: Haruki Murakami Publisher: Harvill Secker, 180 pages PEOPLE don’t usually associate running marathons with writing novels. Not Haruki Murakami. For this award-winning Japanese author, the act of training and eventually taking part in a marathon is no different from the arduous task of writing a novel. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is Murakami’s attempt to coagulate and combine his thoughts on these two seemingly unrelated activities into one book. As a result, this book ends up being a memoir as much as it is about running and writing. The book is divided into chapters that are essentially journal entries, chronicling Murakami’s progress as he ...

This review was published in The Star on 28th December 2008 . Unusual Whodunnit Review by TED MAHSUN Instead of following along in the steps of a detective unravelling a crime, we’re given a different perspective in this simply-told but cracking good mystery. SIX SUSPECTS By Vikas Swarup Publisher: DoubleDay, 472 pages ISBN: 978-0385608169 VIKAS Swarup’s latest book, Six Suspects , looks conventional at a glance: a notorious mob tycoon, Vicky Rai, is murdered in his own house during a party, and there are six suspects. Sounds like a straightforward whodunnit, right? Not quite. Unlike most crime novels, this novel does not employ a sleuth; well, not it in the conventional sense, anyway. But then, Swarup is not your conventional novelist, either: he is a diplomat, currently posted in Pretoria as India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa. His debut novel, Q & A , was also unusual in that its protagonist is a slum dweller who wins the jackpot on the Who Wants...