‘Asamayam’, the unique Malayalam science fiction by Habeeci has now its English version as ‘Tharar – In the Shadows of Time’, printed by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, an Amazon.com company. This science fiction invites the readers to share a rare experience of the fine blend of imagination and scientific possibilities.

“Dear readers, before you enter ‘Tharar – In the Shadows of Time’, please listen: you may not like what is ahead. It is a time in which you cannot claim your life as yours. Little by little you will see for yourself.”

The welcome address of this book thus warns the readers of the odd human predicament portrayed in it. The wonders of Gene therapy, the surprising applications of cryonics that repairs human body and blows life back to it, the super control of robots over everyone’s day to day affairs are all well depicted in this novel.

“By mastering secrets of the Genome, it is the execution of life that has become possible. A time when people can create other people in laboratories… Women no more need carry babies in their wombs. Such births are so rare they are almost unheard of. Children are created in laboratories. Human cloning has become a big industry.”

These words in the intro are sharp pointers towards a possible rather inevitable futuristic reality in which human life becomes just a geno-technical solution. Hopefully, we may not get an opportunity to experience this! The digital world of virtual reality easily takes its lead on the emotional world. Microchips rule the day. Man is more an organic robot, left to wonder about his own fate. The loneliness has no borders.

The characters in this novel “sometimes live in dreadful fear of getting lost out in the technological quantum jumps; but with little control over their vaulting ambitions”. Robin, the mischievous genetic off spring of cross way international construction company official Peter and Isabella; Kaniktar, the unfinished medical student who is a robotic expert; Peter’s associate Maya; friend Barbara and her brother Ishkal who is a paraplegic waiting for a transplant operation are the major characters. The roles of the humanoid robot Java and the silicon micro insect ‘Robocandi’ in the development of the story are very special. ‘Belief’, this great empire of machines where crucial experiments in cryonics are being carried out is the key center of actions.

The author Habeeci alias Habeeb C. Rahman has travelled widely and has exposed himself to a variety of communities, social and cultural situations as a journalist. He has imaginatively mixed his experience with his insights in science, technology and culture to visualise a dynamic world moving faster and faster.

This has enabled the author to pen down the human existential anxieties in the challenging edge of electronic and genetic revolutions that rage around him, controlling him imperceptibly more and more with his own yearnings less and less easy to penetrate or predict, rendering himself liable to shiver about the fatal blows.

-A.P.N