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Casting his spell
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In conversation Author Samit Basu talks about about fantasy in India and his Game World trilogy
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PHOTO: ANU PUSHKARNA
close encounters Simoquin was Samit’s favourite as it was purely about writing
I had red eyes and new glasses,” declares Samit Basu. He spent most of the past decade creating the world of Kirin, Zivran and Maya, managing epic battles across different worlds, reining in gods, monsters and grotesque creatures.
The young author who burst onto the scene with his sci-fi/fantasy fiction, “The Simoqin Prophecies” in 2004, has now wound up the final part of The GameWorld Trilogy – “The Unwaba Revelations.”
With three novels published in the past four years, amidst a flutter of short stories, newspaper columns and comic strips, it is no surprise Basu’s work schedule has been “insane.” “My eyes have miraculously survived these years.”
“A lot of sleep has been lost in it,” says Basu of “The Unwaba Revelations”, which he calls the most “well-written” of the trilogy.
Written between the ages of 21 and 28, “The Simoqin Prophecies”, “The Manticore’s Secret” and “The Unwaba Revelations” have taken away chunks of Basu’s 20’s. Looking back, he says, the journey was fun.
“These books are largely about what I really wanted to do,” says Basu. Until he came along, the genre of Indian fantasy fiction had remained largely untouched. That threw up new challenges for the novice writer. “I think my writing was essentially a few years ahead of its time,” says Basu.
There were no parameters or guidelines when it came to placing and marketing this genre.
“It would have been nice not to be the guinea pig,” jokes Basu. But he adds in the same breath, fantasy fiction had the “charm of attempting interesting things.”
“When I started out, I did not know about the partitioning that happened in Indian writing in English. I read anything that came to me and was not aware that readers had this perception about what they read. In the beginning, I did not have a ‘wise plan’ as to what to write. I just wrote. I did not study English literature and was not aware of the social pyramid or hierarchy in literature,” he explains.
The trilogy is a splash of Basu’s influences — be it mythology, pop culture or Western fantasies. “In art, pop culture is taken incredibly seriously. When I read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as a child, it blew me away. But the genre is a young step in literary fiction in India.”
But his arrival has opened up the genre, specifically in the Indian context. “The year 2004 saw the big change when I came out with ‘The Simoqin Prophecies’”, he says, adding this was the year Chetan Bhagat’s book hit the stands too.
The later years saw many first-time writers adopting the Bhagat style of writing. Fantasy fiction, in contrast, has not flooded the market. This is because such novels are “much more extensive and time-consuming.”
However, with the trilogy behind him, Basu says “The Simoqin Prophecies” was the most fun. “It was purely about writing. I was not connecting it to publishing. With the first and “The Manticore’s Secret,” I let the characters go.” He unleashed scores of characters with weird names, penned new adventures, gave obscure creatures a mind of their own and watched how they behaved in peculiar situations. “The Unwaba Revelations” is about tying them up together and ending the saga.
Basu is not sure what his next book will be. But he says he wants to get out of the fantasy comfort zone and attempt new genres. While there are comic series and talks of a movie, Basu is busy penning an erotic short story.
P. ANIMA
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