The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun – Mini Review

Book: The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun
Author: Anil Menon
Year: 2022
Bookhad Rating: ❤️❤️❤️❤️

As a firm believer in the idea that people come to books when they are ready for them, I’ve serendipitously finished reading Anil’s book, even though I bought it in 2022 when it was published. 

I don’t think I would have been able to appreciate this collection of speculative fiction short stories back in 2022 when my knowledge of speculative / science fiction was rudimentary at best, and I had not yet spent enough time inside a software-making ecosystem that also claims to be “innovative” and “experimenting with AI to change the world.”

Hogwash. 

This is a collection of stories so intelligent and so imaginative that it demands you to be a certain kind of reader to savour it. I reiterate — it demands you to be a reader, as Anil calls the catch-all term for “anyone who engages aesthetically with an artistic work. This book readers, moviegoers, or someone watching a play are all ‘Readers’.” It does not talk down to you, it does not play small to your own imagination, and it certainly doesn’t cut corners to tell stunning short stories, which is the toughest form to write. 

I loved how every single story pushed the reaches of my brain both intellectually and imaginatively. This collection is not a feast to the mind, but an ode to it. Every story, in its coy manner, begs the question of how the human mind perceives and believes. While Anil has broken boundaries of how technology could change the world, he has maintained the ethos that stories about people will always be stories about people. 

In one of the stories only after you are 50% in, are you made aware that these humans are enhanced by tech but still the story remains about a South Indian family living in Sion. In another, a man wakes up next to his wife after dreaming about another woman and the story takes a wholly unexpected turn. My favourite is the one about the man who believes he is reborn and goes to visit his previous birth mother who also remembers him being her son. 

In a world starved with how we experience the human condition and how our minds have the capacity to trick us into believing anything given sufficient exposure, this collection reawakens in me the love of the written word. It reminds me that the book is a conversation between itself and the reader and you have to level up to have better conversations. It reminds me that being funny and clever and imaginative is a feat in itself and this is why we create art, this is why we read, and this is why we write.

Pick this up. You won’t regret it.

Bookhad
(10.11.2024)