By News18

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India, September 27, 2025: Sustainability and AI product leader Dr. Nripanka Das debuts as novelist Rowan Blackwood; his thriller The Babel Paradox heads to the Frankfurt Book Fair – a rare tech-to-literature pivot with global stakes. In the fluorescent hush of an office long past quitting time, the screen flashed a subject line that made him stand still: Frankfurter Buchmesse – Selection Confirmation. The air-conditioning thrummed. Somewhere, a coffee machine clicked. Dr. Nripanka Das – better known in energy-tech circles for taming data streams and carbon ledgers opened the email and read it twice, then once more for its edges. A quiet “okay” escaped him. He closed the laptop, reached for a notepad with draft scene beats in a spare engineer’s hand and underlined a single word: Real.
Days later, a first box of author’s copies landed with the soft thud of freighted possibility. Matte cover, clean serif type, a title that feels like a warning and a puzzle: The Babel Paradox: Language, Conspiracy, and the End of Reality. He lifted one volume, turned it spine-out the way inventory managers do, then let the pages riffle like cards. The paper had a faint linen bite. The ink carried that just-printed scent – chemistry, cotton, intent.
For a figure widely associated with carbon markets, digital MRVand the difficult plumbing of industrial decarbonization, the sight bordered on subversive: an engineer of systems publishing a literary thriller under the pen name Rowan Blackwood, now headed to the world’s largest book fair. Frankfurt, October 15–19, 2025 – where rights are traded, translations seeded, and a debut can find its passport.
From Labs to Literature Dr. Nripanka Das is a sustainability and AI product leader whose public work lives at the intersection of emissions data, verification techand energy innovation. His debut novel, The Babel Paradox, appears under the author name Rowan Blackwood and has been selected for presentation at the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair. The moment matters: a technologist crossing into literary fiction at the industry’s most prestigious marketplace, where the future of a book – its editions, territories, and readerships, is negotiated face to face.
If the lab bench and the writer’s desk share a temperament, Das embodies it: constraint, iteration, verification. In product reviews, he is known for refusing fuzzy terms – show the runbook, show the baseline. That same discipline turned inward when sentences, not sensors, became the substrate. “Engineering taught me habits I couldn’t unlearn,” he says. “I version-control scenes. I test dialogue against the system it belongs to. If a character lies, I ask what it costs the network.” The result is prose that moves like a model under load – stress-tested, then streamlined.
The path from carbon registries and data pipelines to pages concerned with power and speech looks shorter up close. Markets and languages are both rule-bound, socially negotiated and ripe for misuse. In The Babel Paradox, the audit trail becomes narrative tension; the checksum becomes a clue; the governance meeting, a battleground where words decide material outcomes.
The Book at a Glance The Babel Paradox hunts the fracture line where language ceases to be neutral and becomes a weaponized protocol. The novel threads high-stakes intrigue through hidden systems – surveillance architectures, academic rivalries, shadowed research and asks whether a society that outsources meaning to machines can still tell truth from consensus. It is less about secret societies than about visible institutions acting in secret ways, less code-cracking than contract-reading. Characters grapple with the price of precisionand the risks of claritywhen clarity threatens power.
Why Frankfurt, Why Now Frankfurter Buchmesse is the industry’s engine room – an international rights marketplace where scouts, editors and agents compress years of emails into five intense days. For a debut, selection signals professional intent: visibility before the global trade, proximity to translation conversations and a chance to position the work in a taxonomy beyond national borders. Frankfurt’s scale matters because it disciplines hype. You have a book, or you don’t. You have a pitch that survives a hallway test, or you do not. For The Babel Paradox, the fair offers exactly the ecosystem it interrogates – languages colliding, meanings negotiated, reality minted from contracts and conversation.
“Frankfurt is where stories either acquire second lives or prove they only had one,” Das says. “I wanted the book tested where no one owes me politeness.” Private Passion, Public Debut Colleagues knew him as a rigorous builder of products; fewer knew about the stack of marked-up drafts that followed him city to city. “It was always there,” he says, “but it stayed in the margins because the workday took the center column.” The center has shifted. Publishing under Rowan Blackwood allowed a firewall at first – new name, new channel, the necessary freedom to fail in public without dragging a résumé behind it. The firewall didn’t last long; the announcement leaked through Instagram posts and whisper networks, and then Frankfurt made secrecy moot.
He describes the pivot not as reinvention but as extension. “If sustainability work is about accountability for claims,” he says, “then fiction is an extreme sport of claims. Every sentence asserts a reality. You have to earn it.” Industry Angle: Where Systems Meet Stories There is a small but telling pattern of technologists writing fiction that refuses to excuse the infrastructures we live inside. The Babel Paradox sits in that lineage, but with an unusual precision about governance – the way policies, standards, and datasets harden into social facts. A sustainability and AI practitioner writing literary fiction carries a particular charge in 2025, a year dense with climate reporting requirements and public debates about algorithmic authority. The book does not speechify; it builds a world where the line between signal and noise is a design choice, then forces its characters to live with that choice.
Frankfurt, with its translation ecosystem, intensifies this effect. Language as theme meets language as logistics. The novel’s preoccupation with meaning across domains – legal, technical, colloquial- becomes a practical question of how idioms travel, which metaphors survive, and where a story must recompile for another culture’s operating system.
The Stakes of Precision Das’s day job taught him that numbers can be honest and still be wrong if they summarize the wrong thing. The novel takes that lesson to the level of plot. A text can be lyrical and still mislead; a dataset can be enormous and still be trivial. What matters is the schema – what you count as real. In The Babel Paradox, characters collide over schemas: academic definitions, state narratives, corporate euphemisms. The book’s suspense rarely comes from a gun in the drawer. It comes from the clause you didn’t read.
“Language isn’t a mirror; it’s an actuator,” he says. “It moves systems and people.” What Readers Will Recognize Audiences who come for conspiracy will find craft: clean lines, controlled heat. Readers from the worlds of policy, tech, or markets will recognize the granular decisions – names of committees, behaviors inside conferences, the way careers hinge on phrasing. But the novel keeps its promises as fiction first. It knows that stakes only matter when they land on a human scale: two people in a quiet office bargaining with a truth neither wants to say out loud.
If his carbon work measures what the world emits, his fiction measures what the world permits and with The Babel Paradox stepping onto Frankfurt’s floor, Dr. Nripanka Das matches engineering precision to literary intent, drafting a future where meaning has to meet spec.
(Disclaimer: The above press release comes to you under an arrangement with NRDPL and PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.). PTI PWR