Casting his spell
The Hindu : 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 nowwound 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.Writtenbetween the ages of 21and 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…More
