It is 2040 A.D. The place is Pune, India. The future is here and now. Liquid computers. Flawless skin. Emotional cars. Illusion pods. It's a world full of tough questions and infinite possibilities. Why are Tara's new friends, Francis and Ria, so freaked out by the night sky? Is their strange and beautiful mother, Mandira, friend or foe? Where is their father? Is he a terrorist or genius? And what, exactly, is the beast with nine billion feet? As Tara and Aditya soon find out, there are no simple answers. They find themselves on very different tracks, caught up in a deadly game—a struggle for power and control, a fight for the genetic code to life itself. In the 'here and now' of Anil Menon's brilliant and disturbing debut novel, the future itself is at stake.
Author
Anil Menon is a leading Indian writer of speculative fiction, as well as a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Syracuse University, who has authored research papers and edited books on Evolutionary Algorithms; his research addressed the mathematical foundations of replicator systems, majorization, and reconstruction of probabilistic databases, in collaboration with Professors Kishan Mehrotra, Chilukuri Mohan, and Sanjay Ranka. After working for several years as a computer scientist, he has directed his creative energies towards fiction. His short stories and reviews have appeared in the anthology series Exotic Gothic, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Chiaroscuro, Sybil's Garage, Apex Digest and other magazines. In 2009, Zubaan Books, India's leading feminist press, published his debut young adult novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet. It was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone Crossword Book Award and 2010 Parallax prize. In 2009, in conjunction with Vandana Singh and Suchitra Mathur, he helped organize India's first in-residence, three-week speculative fiction workshop at IIT-Kanpur. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil\_Menon
