Samit Basu talks about recent trends in Indian publishing, the many roadblocks to getting quality speculative fiction published, and upcoming projects after his superhero novel ‘Turbulence’.
Back in 2006, you did a project called ‘Trousers of Time: Possible Futures of Indian Speculative Fiction in English’. Seems like such a long time ago.How much has India’s speculative fiction scene changed since then?
I haven’t really been keeping track of Indian SF/fantasy – there’s just so much brilliant material out there in terms of books, comics, films, games, across genres and media, that I’m well behind on everything. But I don’t think anything major has happened. There’s been a lot of what I call Hindu fiction – reinterpretation of the myths with fantasy – novel covers. But this has always been around. There’s a ready, easy market for it in India. This is actually what has prevented our comic and animation creators from doing interesting original work – especially those who create for younger readers. If you look at the US, Christian fiction is a huge market too, but it doesn’t really blend into speculative fiction so much.
I suspect this is the way things are likely to go over the next few years, at least as far as the speculative fiction that sells to the Indian market, along with a few writers of Indian origin publishing in the western countries they live in, and appearing in international magazines and so on, but making zero impact on the Indian scene. There are a few already, mostly writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy. On the personal front, I got my first UK/US publishing deal with Turbulence, which was published in the UK this year, and is out the US next year.
India has such a rich tradition of the fantastic. How come speculative fiction hasn’t done as well in India?
It’s done well enough. And you know, I’m a bit tired of hearing about India’s rich tradition of the fantastic. Every country has its folklore, every family has a great story. The Western phenomenon of SF/fantasy owes its origin and popularity to the publishing structure there – Magazines that have been around for years, specialized publishers that publish only speculative fiction. We don’t have those here. So speculative fiction does as well or badly as say, literary fiction or non-fiction, in a publishing setup that has no specific shape, direction, or plan. The only books that do well in India,by which I mean selling in terms of lakhs instead of thousands, apart from textbooks, are things like yoga and cookbooks and self-help books, along with post-Chetan-Bhagat fiction.
Is the Indian collective mind more resistant to certain established–aka Western– speculative fiction tropes than others?
I wouldn’t single out speculative fiction tropes. The Indian collective mind is resistant to everything except Bollywood, cricket, and grumbling about things like scams and price rises and politicians. So naturally any kind of work which deals with new ideas would have a tough time finding a widespread market. This is not just about books – look at our film industry, our comics, and worst of all, animation and video games. I think things have improved to the extent that in the broadband era, there are a few thousand people who know what’s going in the world outside and are able to identify and support new and interesting work, so a few people can make a living in the so-called creative professions, doing what they like – I’ve managed for the last decade – but this is not a country that encourages any kind of new idea.
Speculative fiction is still largely a Western domain. What advice do you have for an aspiring speculative fiction writer growing up in India?
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to go. It would be the same advice I’d give to any writer – write the story you really want to, the story you enjoy writing, and don’t worry about anything else until you have to.
Why a superhero novel?
Three reasons. One, I can’t draw. Two, there are enough superhero graphic novels, and I didn’t think I could add anything new to that body of work. Three, I wanted to deal with a lot of ideas that didn’t necessary have strong visual components. It’s possible to use mostly text to move sections of a graphic novel forward, as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman have demonstrated on many occasions. But I thought a book would work better for this story. Judging from the reviews in the UK so far, it was a good decision – the superhero novel is a relatively rare thing, and the comics fans don’t seem to mind.
What’s the state of the ‘Turbulence’ film?
It’s stuck. Lots of big names are interested, but I have no idea when it’s all going to come together. It needs a big star to justify the budget the SFX would involve, so the script is sitting with a few of them now.
Any dream choice for director?
My dream director would be Joss Whedon or Christopher Nolan – I’d just love to see what they did with the material, regardless of whether the final film had anything to do with my book. In India, I have no idea – all the superhero movies so far have been completely terrible, so anyone else, I guess. Let’s see.
How’s ‘Resistance’ coming along?
It’s coming along. I had the plot completely ready, but the reviews in the UK have been so good that I decided to junk it and start again from scratch. Without spoilers, I can say that if Turbulence is the Superman book, Resistance is the Batman book — it deals largely with a world run by superheroes ten years after the events of Turbulence, a world that many people are obviously very unhappy about.
You recently tweeted about a third book in the Turbulence universe. It was tentatively titled ‘Flatulence’.
Calling the third book Flatulence was clearly a joke, and a means of ensuring I don’t plan this as a trilogy. If I do write more books in this world, they’ll all be standalone. But I have no idea whether I will or not, there’s a lot else to get done.
Do you have hidden up your sleeve, or are you secretly building towards another fantasy trilogy on the Gameworld scale?
Actually, I am. Probably on a larger scale. It’s a project for which I have publisher interest in the west, but it’ll take years to finish because it’s partly set in our history, and will involve a great deal of research. And there’s a lot of other stuff to get done before I even start plotting that – a couple of film scripts, a couple of comics. But first I have to get Resistance done.
