The Beast with Nine Billion Feet

by Anil Menon

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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, India, Speculative Fiction

259 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 1998

About the 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

Reviews

[Cat Rambo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a terrific, engaging world, full of interesting science, sympathetic characters facing hard problems, and the occasional dose of philosophy. It's refreshing to read SF that engages class issues as well as using a backdrop that lies outside America. While it sometimes feels a little YA ish, that doesn't detract from it at all - simply makes it a book I'd feel completely comfortable giving to pre-teen readers.

I came across this as a result of discussion of international science fiction, and it was a great introduction to Indian science fiction that's got me adding others to my list. Easily one of the best things I've read this year.

[Khitkhite Buri]

Complied these unfinished notes/reviews to help me review this book, but it was a different place then.
x

I don’t even remember the last time I read a book that demanded a sequel (an IOU, a serial number, a kind of accountancy). Fictional anxieties etc. Like Adi, I wouldn’t quite know how to keep my nose clean. I read this in Pune quite accidentally, and the unfamiliar wilderness is the same city. Wrong decade but we might as well be in Nurth, which as V would tell you is a time.
(What do you sell if not time?)
It’s the same moo, the same offshore neo-colonial office in the middle of a residential area, same chowk and the same geography of chalk. I wish I could parkour to see it, rooftop ease, bodily comfort but those, as usual, are absent. There is however a man held machine called Glutton which cleans it up. Same corporations, same colour of a party, same ever-expanding Hinjewadi.
Menon’s futuristic elements are all implications about surface and shape-shifting and duplication. Lynx is just as exciting as the make-up on Tara’s face. Duplicity. And I like Tara, I do – she has the voice of naivety and she doesn’t grow (not yet). She’s the make-up, the language, the memory. What is the young-adultness of this book is also what is a little scary. It’s not about where Tara stands on transhumanism and eugenics and state-corporate collusions, it’s the smooth and easy way it becomes background.
I feel closer to Adi of course, to his desire to leave, his run, his who-am-I, his waiting for everything, his waiting to fuck it up. I understand his nightmare. I am afraid of his desire like I’m afraid of my own. It’s single-mindedness that attempts to house everything like a fracture. A what did I do and what does that make me.
And the number that is a god that is a leader of the masses? He’s whatever Tara/Adi make him to be. A Frankenstein even. A caricature.
Menon’s ‘Into the Night’ convinced me that he’s a virtuoso, and I love my strange metaphors and the funny volte-face. There’s no binary, no two points, even if it feels as if the points are drifting farther apart. No two truths. Merely what makes the binary hold. It’s about the morphology, the mirror, the modifying, the duplicating, the push and the pull.

[Deepti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is 4 and a half stars for me. Why is this awesome Indian author not better known?

A sci-fi set in 2040 AD that questions the morality of transhumanism and tries to present both perspectives.

Anil Menon is a lovely writer. His language is sublime and his intelligence shines through the novel. The young adult characters in this book and their confusions are well fleshed. The chapters flow well, the plot sufficiently tight and keeps you mostly guessing. It has some good science and beautiful philosophy flawlessly entwined in the narrative. What a delight.

Where this book falters for me, is in creating stronger and better explained motivations for Sivan and Vispala, and in concluding the YA but not YA book on a stronger and more effective note. The author fails badly on both counts. The author in trying to keep you guessing on what happens next, fails to make you identify with either Vispala or Sivan. This results in the ending being slightly hacked together unconvincingly. Also, after having devoted chapters and chapters to establish Adi, Tara, Francis and Ria, Anil missed bringing out the objections and strengths for transhumanism and the political context of the story. This also, made the ending too quick and abrupt. As much as I treasured and enjoyed my journey into this book, I wanted the destination to justify it, but didn't get it.

But, what a great read - amazing. I'm glad I had the fortune to read it. Looking forward to reading more of Anil Menon s works.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

The scifi elements are very incidental. The story doesn't really revolve around them: it's more about family and trust, about the characters and tensions present with kids of extremely powerful/influential people. Towards the end there's more confrontation of the moral questions involved in genetic manipulation, and sympathetic views are given from both sides, but... it doesn't really come together for me.

If genetic modification is your thing, this book won't be. It's pleasant, but not revolutionary about anything and shies away from any real issues in favor of showing family dynamics.

[Debojit Sengupta (indianfiction_review) · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is great promise in the premise, it leaps up with all its strength but just so slightly misses to score the basket. Set in a futuristic India, the universe building is done with excellence. It's not overly futuristic and retains things we cherish today, like "Vadapav". I was completely immersed in the lives of the characters and no where did the technology part of schemes get in the way of human connection. Careful consideration done right. The conflict at hand is pretty neatly explained. One of them wants to play god with genetics, the other does not. It's simple as it should be. The only problem is the way you reveal it and weave the story around it to get some thrill aspect in the story. You are never nibbling at your nails wondering what is going to happen next. But it's stylized though, I mean take Blade runner for example, it is not convoluted as such but the noir style is what makes it so great. Only thing is it's hard to achieve that in a novel unless the author is really aiming for that vision. I did feel like a splash dark comic style vibe towards the end though. It definitely will get a sequel.

[An Owomoyela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the best things I read in 2012. Taking place in a future India where biotechnology is contested and the father of the main characters is known by some as a hero and by others as a criminal, it explores family ties, friendship and loyalty, moral issues inherent in science and biotechnology, and self-determination, and does so with astounding grace, insight, and illumination. It's not a book where answers are easy or absolute, or where everything works out perfectly in the end. And it's a strong, complex book because of it.

[KHLOARIS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teenagers do their own thing in a future India filled with generically modified pet parrots, foreign-exchange students, and annoying parents who think its totally cool to hang with their kids in their college dorm. The story wanders all over the place but it all starts when a group of friends meet an uppity shopkeeper who needs to see ID before selling a friggin’ lobster. But that’s okay, because in this world there’s a new kind of jellyfish you can put on your face that’ll change the way you look, its easier than Photoshop. The plot involves the shocking discovery that your best friend is missing their bellybutton. Turns out they’re from Nurth, a remote arctic outpost breeding an experimental generation of transhumans in a lab. One of the benefits to being transhuman is you can remove your own nose and leave it behind in the other room when its time to take out the trash. Another benefit is total immunity from that well-known disease we commonly refer to as “aging”. This genetic disease threatens every living human, all 9 billion.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s actually almost pleasant to read a book that’s just not very good because it’s not very good, without some additional factor- disappointment, ideological madness, ubiquity. Upon googling the book a little more, it appears that it is meant to be a “young adult” novel. What does that even mean considering how many grown-ass adults read “YA”? But it makes sense. The protagonists are two kids growing up in Pune, India in 2040, and the prose is indeed simple enough for middle schoolers to get through probably (not that that isn’t true for plenty of adult novels, or that there aren’t smart middle schoolers, etc etc conceptual problems). Googling late informed me of the YA nature of this book, and googling (but apparently not enough) got me into it- specifically, googling “Indian science fiction.” I’m curious about scifi from outside the usual Anglo-American context, and reading the great Liu Cixin whetted my appetite further. This book came up.

Tara and Aditya are two kids growing up in future-Pune, thirteen and sixteen respectively. Their dad is a brilliant geneticist who had to go on the run because he supported a sort of free-software regime for genetic modification. Truth be told the future isn’t all that different. There’s more gene modification but nothing that freaky- smart parrots, designer kids. Virtual reality is pretty big. India is still recognizably India, Tara wonders if she should gene-modify her dark skin. She meets some creepy twins who don’t have belly-buttons and their sinister mom. She befriends the twins despite their creepiness. Meanwhile, Aditya is a gene-hacker but gets in various kinds of low-grade trouble. The dad comes back. The creepy mom wants to do in the dad, somehow, or get him involved in her bad patented-gene schemes.

None of this coheres very well. Menon can’t quite nail where to set up his looming threats for best effect, like an earnest but incompetent haunted house manager. I’d say it “keeps you guessing” except it’s hard to be bothered. It also seems to be setting up for a sequel, but it’s been eleven years so who knows if it’s coming? And he doesn’t even tell you what the beast with nine billion feet is. I give it an extra half star because of my inability to judge YA but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a great example of that, either. **’

[Dragoș · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting little mundane science fiction parable that awkwardly straddles the line between Young Adult novel and philosophical diatribe. The beast with nine billion feet is a profoundly south asian glance at an edge-of-transhuman future. Despite being written from two young viewpoints that practically beg for a young adult audience the book raises some important questions about the rights of man to meddle with genetics as well as the implications of such meddling at both a personal and societal level. The prose is elegantly naive and dashed with teenager incertitudes and parkour and the alternating viewpoints of the two main characters manage to present a well rounded and believable 'five minutes in the future' world.
My only problem with the Beast with Nine billion feet would be the very thing that initially drew me into buying it: its unapologetic 'Indian-ness'. I'm a big fan of south-Asian culture but the overall tone and language of the book marked it as an overall domestic market aimed title, that is, a future parable that would be easy for a native Indian to picture. For a foreigner the short descriptions and summary explanations of several storybuilding elements taken for granted by a native can leave a reader unfamiliar with Indian intricacies with less than the whole picture. In any case this was more of an observation rather than an annoyance on my part.
An engaging, at times a bit challenging read, the Beast is a story of biotech, language and the bounds of what it means to be human and, indeed, alive. Very much recommended.

[Meghna Jayanth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a piece of assured, thought-provoking science fiction - dealing with transhumanism, intellectual property, bioethics and the tangle of science, culture and politics from a particularly Indian perspective. It's a philosophical treatise wrapped inside a story of familial relationships, and coming-of-age. The story is focalised through the eyes of two very different young siblings, Adi and Tara - they're both excellently drawn, interesting, understandable. While at times it feels as though Menon plays their youth for ignorance to further dramatic irony, this isn't a YA book - though it's accessible to a younger audience. The Beast With Nine Billion Feet is at times strikingly lyrical, but those moments feel earned by Menon's grasp of slang and dialogue. It feels richly grounded in place, and there's a particular Indian English cadence to his words that is deeply compelling - to me, familiar rather than alien, helping the reader to slip further into his technologically advanced fever-dream of future India.

[Laya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of those books that packed so much in that I was a little overwhelmed. But I still loved it. I read it because it won an award from the Octavia Butler Society. I'd like to find more sci fi and fantasy told from an Indian perspective and referencing Indian culture.