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By Laura Drinan
Hometown Weekly Reporter
When was the last time you read a novel about technology that was funny and engaging, appropriate for the whole family, and written by a local author? Perhaps never, or at least not for a very long time.
If you’re in need of a new read, Prateek Goorha’s “Henry Pash and the Botzec Revolution” checks all of those boxes.
The Dover resident’s debut novel was published at the end of October and offers readers a refreshing, short, and silly story with which to escape.
You might wonder, though, how Goorha, a social scientist by trade, came to write funny fiction – especially when his biggest literary inspiration is Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
“My other constant hero has been P.G. Wodehouse. The treasure of humorous writing he left behind comfortably makes him the Dostoevsky of comedy, in my estimation,” said Goorha. While Goorha admits there will never be another Wodehouse, the English author became an inspiration to him as he wrote “Henry Pash and the Botzec Revolution,” a story about how a rejected patent ends up changing a world in which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into society.
“I never set out to write a humorous novel when I began it, but it just turned out that way. The story tickled me right from the beginning,” Goorha said. “I really like the main character, and had trouble letting go of him when I finished the novel! He is an unwitting genius and somewhat of a recluse; you could call him a lovable loser of a sort, I suppose.
“I have never had more fun putting [together] sentence after sentence and assembling page after page as I did in writing this book,” the Dover author continued. “It felt like I was in on a ridiculous gag the whole way through. I would keep laughing as I wrote, and my wife just thought I was losing it! You know the feeling when someone tells you a joke and you are fighting back the urge to laugh because you want to let the guy finish? It was much like that for me.”
Although Goorha has only dabbled in fiction before, his work writing non-fiction has helped refine his writing skills. Now dedicating a full-time schedule to writing, he aims to bring more of his interests in technology and innovation to the shelves in the form of fiction.
“It’s a short novel that anyone can read over a day or two,” he said, “and it is my hope that the reader has a good time as they do.”
Prateek Goorha’s “Henry Pash and the Botzec Revolution,” published by Olympia Publishers, is available on Amazon, among other outlets.
