We have had enough time machines in sci-fi; the time is for the real and the relatable. ‘Melodrama in the Multiverse’ by Gokul Nair is one of the latest entrants in speculative fiction, which not only soars the imagination to unimaginable heights but also, cleverly responds to the open-ended questions of our era. With innumerable epochs of evolution, time is concretized as something chronological in our collective consciousness. But what if time gets hazy and haphazard? The stories in the book subtly play with this possibility. The book offers an out of the ordinary jumble in a collection of short stories spanning the realms of science fiction, time travel, war drama, romance, and philosophy.

The stories explore the rise of artificial intelligence where the machines don’t actually take over, ramblings of a sentient blob of fungal macaroni, the peculiar story of a guy who discovers a room in his college hostel which exists in a timeline 24 hours ahead of his, evolutionary history unfolding across millennia as humanity forms a central hive mind, and much more. The author, Gokul Nair, is a twenty-four-year-old who is coping with a quarter-life crisis by getting published.

For his day job, he is a business analyst and developer but his passions span tech, photography, poetry, and fiction. The book has been published by one of the established publishing houses, Invincible Publishers. The reader would embrace the absurd while simultaneously looking for order in the chaos, as he turns each page in – Melodrama in the Multiverse.