fiction - The Chronikler

Living robots and the meaning of life

The advent of ‘living robots’, or biobots, not only poses grave risks for which we must be prepared but also raises profound questions about the future and what it means to be human.

The unlikely demonisation of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie made a very unlikely target for the fury of conservative Muslims, which is why the opportunistic fatwa issued by a Khomeini in serious decline took the novelist and the world by surprise.

FICTION: Escaping terror firma, Part 4 – Drowning in a sea of dashed dreams

“I fully expect to be escorted off the ship and onwards towards oblivion, first in a prison cell in Israel and then in the prison of Gaza… But then…”

FICTION: Escaping terror firma, Part 3 – Shipwrecked delusions

My body is seized by an overwhelming fit of shivering of epileptic proportions… “Don’t move,” a male voice commands, rather unreasonably, from amid the nervous crowd of weapons.

FICTION: Escaping terror firma, Part 2 – Breaking out of the fish bowl

We live in a fish bowl. It would be more likely for a pink elephant to fall out of the sky than for me to get Faris alone somewhere. But the pink elephant somehow managed to land right next to me.

FICTION: Escaping terror firma, Part 1: Hell from the heavens

Poetry and song talk of soaring free as a bird, but the heavens are where hell resides. People talk of taking wing, but, me, I’d rather take fin, be free as a fish.