Portalpettai: New Minibook Release
A big January howdy and belated Happy Pongal!
A few updates on what Blaft has been / will soon be up to:
New Minibook Release: Portalpettai by Avakkai and Chukka
Portalpettai is an illustrated minibook about an interdimensional portal which opens at a women's college in Uthiramerur, Tamil Nadu. It's narrated by a former lecturer at the college who has been transformed into a floating jellyfish-like creature with a see-through head.
It's a portrait of a diverse South Indian community and its resilience in the face of an alien life force intrusion. It also touches on the subjects of non-baryonic matter, old Tamil film music, and the arcane secrets of mushrooms.
Like other Blaft minibooks and monographs, this title will NOT be available in most stores or on Amazon. Buy it on our site or at a Blaft event!
Covers Revealed for New Math Books Series
We have two books on mathematics due out later this year. They're aimed at Class XI-XII students OR adults who want a refresher.
To be released in April 2019:
Math Problems with Dinosaurs
Over 100 challenging math problems!
Practice your high school math skills while making deductions from real paleontological data!
Learn about stegosaur thagomizers, supersonic sauropod tails, ichthyosaur eyeball bones, dino-eating mammals, paleozoic sea bugs, dinosaur poop, and global mass extinctions… all while you brush up on your algebra, trig, and geometry!
Design a dinosaur zoo!
Draw a cladogram!
Calculate the impact force of an ankylosaur tail!
AND MUCH MORE!
Great for people who
• Love dinosaurs and love math
• Love dinosaurs and hate math (but need to practice)
• Love math and don’t know enough about titanosaur osteoderms
• Are frequent time travelers
Due out in July 2019:
Math Problems with Dinosaurs
Over 100 challenging math problems!
Practice your high school math skills while learning to protect yourself against zombies, vampires, cosmic fungi, rampaging kaiju, penanggalans, aswangs, pishtacos, and other diabolical creatures from every corner of the globe!
Master the science of snake venom, demon-raising candles, alien parasites, and necrophagous insects… all while you brush up on your algebra, trig, and geometry!
Graph the mass increase of a people-eating blob from outer space!
Model the periodic fluctuations of a haunted house’s cold spot!
Calculate how much tranquilizer you need to keep a zombie sedated!
AND MUCH MORE!
Great for people who
• Love horror and love math
• Love horror and hate math (but need to practice)
• Love math and don’t know enough about ghosts and monsters
• Interact frequently with the undead
Parental Advisory: While some of these math problems are campy and silly, others have a moderate amount of gore -- and a few of them actually kind of scared us while we were writing them. Proceed with caution!
Talking Science Fiction with Tamilmagan and S. B. Divya
On January 4 we had a small event at Higginbotham's Writers Cafe featuring the Chennai-based writer Tamilmagan (whose science fiction novel Operation Nova was included in The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction Vol. 3) in conversation with California-based writer S. B. Divya, author of Runtime and numerous other science fiction short stories, and Blaft co-founder Rashmi Ruth Devadasan.
Topics ranged from aliens-as-the-other to the threat posed to humanity by AI to the contemporary boom in science fiction translation into English. It was fun, and we hope we get to do more of this sort of thing. (Unfortunately my pictures came out horribly blurry. We're hoping for better ones in an upcoming newspaper writeup.)
Upcoming Events: Creative Mornings
Blaft co-founders Rashmi and Rakesh will be speaking on January 27th at Creative Mornings at Club Crest at Phoenix Market City. You have to register, but it's free and they serve you breakfast! The theme of the event is "The Surreal", and we've been asked to talk about surrealist elements in some of the books we publish, ways in which surrealism is suffused through modern Indian culture, why large gastropods wear radioactive toe rings and tend to dissolve when you spit at them, and things like that. We are super confident that we will think of some really, really intelligent things to say.
Upcoming Events: Besant Nagar Carnival
We'll have a stall there on January 26-27! Come say hi and pick up some books!