I finished a lot of the foregrounding of the book at the end of January this year. So, parts of the book had to be re-written.
But over 2019, a lot of the things I predicted would happen over the next decade started happening in advance. So I did about three years of research and I started writing, and then I realized that just focusing on a world 10 years from now would be a book in itself. My plan was actually to do a much longer, multi-part book spanning the next 50 years or so about all the disasters heading our way. Which makes me curious, when did you start writing the book? You contextualize the novel with the upheavals of the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). In a phone interview, Basu, who is based in Delhi, talks about the difficulty of writing a near-future novel, and the reason he minimized sci-fi tropes to tell this particular story. Set in an India just a decade from now, Chosen Spirits is about a world where technology and religious bigotry combine with near-total corporate control over the lives and bodies of citizens. It’s less speculative fiction and more caustic investigation of the times we live in.
Basu is a popular writer of science fiction and fantasy books like the Gameworld Trilogy and Turbulence, as well as the Netflix film House Arrest, but his new novel is very different. Publishing your book in the middle of a pandemic lockdown may not be ideal, but given the subject matter of Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (Simon & Schuster India, Rs499), it seems quite apt.
0 kommentar(er)
