About Heart & Brain by Ramana Rao MLV:
Kirkus Review
In five SF short stories, Indian author MLV depicts how various characters react when confronted with cosmic wonders and cosmological enigmas.
In the opening tale, “The Sphere,” the narrator, Chaitanya, who fancies himself “the world’s first AI psychologist,” induces neuroses into an artificial-intelligence entity to make it more controllable. However, his own dread of inheriting his father’s debilitating agoraphobia ultimately overwhelms him. In “The Random Factor,” a utopian future society’s complacent power structure faces a crisis when a woman named Pratima decides to conceive and give birth naturally, instead of by long-accepted biotechnological means. In “Survival,” a particle beam’s collision with Earth leaves all humanity susceptible to fatal sleep apnea, except for Mallika, an expectant mother in rural India. A somewhat similar premise begins “The Speck,” in which a distant object is observed and recorded solely by recently widowed astronomer Animisha, who’s recently had advanced surgery to correct her eyesight. The mystery deepens when she finds its fluctuations through time corresponding with milestones in her own life—usually painful ones. In “The Replay,” a demonstration of a variation on virtual reality, dubbed UR, for “ultimate reality,” is used by its orphaned Sikh developer in a revenge scheme. This worthy collection features stories that engagingly tackle themes of ethics, responsibility, and the subjugation of women. Overall, they have a deeply intellectual and science-struck quality of the sort that occurs when a distinctly scientific mind turns to fiction; it’s a dynamic that calls to mind Carl Sagan’s work in his bestselling novel Contact (1985). The book’s length is as efficient as a paperback from SF’s Golden Age, and its stories, featuring Indian characters and locales, intriguingly recall the fiction of Hugo Gernsback and Astounding Stories.
Stimulating, cerebral SF that finds fertile ground in its modern and future India setting.
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Author Bio:
I have been a teacher since 1984 and critical thinking and verbal teacher since 2000. While I was a bad student during my education, I have become a good student during my teaching profession, learning more from my students than from my colleague.
Though a published author in late 80s, I have become an academic author by writing a GMAT Sentence Correction book for Pearson India. Now, I am trying my hand in sci-fi and literary fiction. Heart & Brain is a book close to my heart because it explores the scientific side of emotion as well as emotional side of science.