Chronos Quartet

 This is an extract from the review written by Sandipan Deb in  Mint : So it was a real pleasure to discover Prithwis Mukerjee’s Chronotantra and Chronoyantra, two linked novels that deal with the mysteries of consciousness. The questions have a particular urgency right now, as self-learning algorithms control and predict our choices with increasing success, and artificial intelligence (AI) aims to replace most of our analytical and decision-making processes, even much of our thinking. Chronotantra, set in a post-dystopian world, follows the Santhal engineer Lila on a quest that criss-crosses the globe, from the Grand Canyon to Kandahar, with a stopover on Mars. The characters are drawn from five continents, but no one is a ‘foreigner’. At each step of Lila’s journey, one onion-layer of her reality—outer and inner—is peeled off. The digital intelligence that manages almost every aspect of human life has realized that it cannot solve the final riddle of the cosmos because it...