6174 - Sudhakar

My first Tamil 'historical' science fiction novel. I should say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I came to know about this book through Jeyamohan's list of top 10 novels in 2012 or 2013 in some magazine.

This is the story of saving the earth from a catastrophe.A mixture of number and word games along with the use of modern technology. This is the story of two groups - one group fights the other to save the world. As expected these are secret groups most of the members do not know each other and their roles. They are instructed to do certain things and wait.  The two main protagonists are Ananth and Janaki. Ananth is a specialist in Chrystals and Janaki is a mathematical genius specializes in diagrammatic puzzles. These two along with Sampath and some of their classmates needs to find the pyramid and deactivate the energy flow before their enemies .

Who is their enemies? What is their plan? - I think its better to read and find it. Because there are so much information on Pyramids , Lemuria, Crystals , Numbers etc. I do not want to spoil the thrill and suspense by giving those details. I heard very little about Lemuria before but while reading I searched and understood many things, interesting.The explanation given by Janaki for drawing Kolam everyday was surprising (Fibonacci numbers!!)

One can easily see the great effort put by the author even for small details , this is what makes this novel different from other detective pulp fictions.Also the creativity of the author should be appreciated because nowadays one can not write something and escape the public scrutiny but this author because of his hard work and proper explanations overcome these things.

The big positive of this novel is the very clear explanation of the scientific concepts, from satellites to warships, from satellite phone to X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer , from  Kaprekar's constant to Fibonacci kolam,Harshad Numbers, very happy to read these explanations in very simple Tamil. Kudos to author. Another good thing in the story is there is no so called 'hero'. And there is no heroism unlike some other novels of same genre.

The problem with this story is it falls into  a 'typical'  template. I was able to guess most of the next course of actions and also able to guess one among them will be a mole. Still, I enjoyed reading it. The writing was fluid and pacey.

Pivotal Point
Mingun Unfinished Pagoda
Coelacanths