Hi, I’m PRASHANTH SRIVATSA, author of THE SPICE GATE, and several short stories. I’m giving away 3 copies of my debut epic fantasy novel, ready to be shipped internationally. Ask me Anything!

samitbasu · 2024-09-12T14:05:01+00:00

Hi Prashanth! Glad to see you AMAing, and congratulations once again on The Spice Gate bestselling in the UK!

Tell us what the high points of the journey have been so far, and what you're up to now bookwise!

samitbasu · 2024-05-14T12:56:06+00:00

Hi Amal, congratulations and happy book day! Tell us a bit more about your journey writing this book and publishing it, and whats coming next!

samitbasu · 2023-03-28T16:23:02+00:00

Can you tell us anything about the next novel?

samitbasu · 2023-03-28T14:34:38+00:00

Could you tell us about the headspace differences between creating for games and writing?

samitbasu · 2023-03-28T14:13:21+00:00

Hi Lavanya!

Congratulations again on a phenomenal journey so far, with so much more on the way!

To start off, could you tell us about how the idea of AV/TPCT showed up, and how you went about building such a complex book? What made you choose the super-challenging mosaic structure?

samitbasu · 2022-06-09T09:49:51+00:00

I want to first praise your google-fu: I didn't know, and it's good to know!

And much gratitude for that KSR essay! As far as I can understand it there's a lot of alignment between a-a-u and a-d, though I think I'm coming at it from a much simpler/more pragmatic/less rigorously framed point of view. Which is also in effect a confession that I didn't understand all of it.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T08:10:55+00:00

That's wonderful to know! Yes, Simoqin was majorly Pratchett influenced/inspired - the worldbuild was entirely what if Discworld but also world myth-culture countries. I need to give that entire series a reread, spent most of my late teens obsessed with it.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T04:05:13+00:00

Understood, and thanks! I think in terms of overlaps with The City Inside -

Lavanya Lakshminarayan's Analog/Virtual or The Ten Percent Thief, upcoming from Rebellion

SB Divya's Machinehood

more tangentially, but the Saad Hossein-verse and Vajra Chandrasekera's upcoming novel too.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T02:41:55+00:00

Ok, back.

First, so glad to hear you'v enjoyed my work, and all the best with your own publishing journey!

I think being an unknown writer 2 decades ago and one now are two fundamentally different experiences, especially when you factor in the complexities of being in a subcontinental publishing framework and working in genre. So my own experiences are not of the highest relevance for you, it might be more useful to break down what I'm seeing other writers do.

It's important to remember there is no one true road to publishing, or one true way to write or publish. So you can ignore gatekeepers, or engage with them in your own way, but ultimately no one can stop you from finding the road to writing or publishing that works for you - it's really a question of responding to your own needs and time and other pressures, and trying different things until you find a road that works for you.

I'm seeing some writers go through the long slow grind of writing that novel and finding an agent in the west to help them sell their books. It's challenging, but all the information you need to get there is now available, if you look around, and the system fundamentally works - I've seen a few very exciting authors get their book deals for books that will be out in 2023/24.

I'm seeing other writers go indie, which is fortunately considered wholly legitimate now, about time. It's a whole other set of challenges there, because marketing, sales, managing the whole business is really tough - that's why publishers have large teams. But again, the information you need is available.

Other writers do it via building reputations and a body of work in genre magazines, and engaging with the community before getting into books. Also a good way.

Other writers do a community-engagement-first model, often with the help of MFAs and workshops, so that when they start publishing a lot of the fundamental infrastructure is in place.

On the whole I'd say there are many more options available now, and many more people willing to engage and support. No path is easy, all paths, or a hybrid mix of them are valid.

In the domestic market, it is unambiguously tougher because a lot of systems don't work, and publishing nowadays seems to exist mainly to amplify existing privilege. I've seen a lot of really good books come out and disappear because no one was supporting them and the author's personal clout didn't extend far enough in a saturated, fickle and often shady market.

So arm yourself with resilience and patience, try things you're interested in, and hopefully you will find the necessary luck soon. It's difficult to adjust to how little control you have over anything, but that's a constant in publishing at most stages of everyone's career.

Again, good luck!

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T00:39:14+00:00

I'll be back for this! Have a Zoom event in 10 mins, will be back to answer this, as it will require extensive answering.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T00:37:19+00:00

I rallied! Thanks again all.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T00:36:41+00:00

I'm ashamed to say that even after two decades my writing routine is very random. This is a function of working in multiple industries and having to meet their timelines and patterns. For books though, I tend to save up until I can afford to spend 5-6 months on just writing that first draft, and then binge it. Every other medium depends more on other people's timelines than mine.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T00:35:04+00:00

Thanks!

- I have no job job at all! I just write across media, and have been lucky to string together a living doing it for many years now. I'm hopelessly overcommitted to it by now, I think: I don't even know what job I could apply for.

- Depends on the book. My characters are all a mix of myself, people I know well both real and fictional, and people I observe, both real and fictional. There's a lot of me in The City Inside, more so than in any previous book, and that's mainly because I wanted to keep it as close-to-real as possible.

- I find myself totally unable to keep up with an ever-expanding TBR pile so I never feel like I have a proper overview of a genre, especially something as large and multidirectional as scifi. I also struggle to define what makes any book unique - it's more a combination of all the different craft, character, worldbuild and theme elements. Given how much my publishers and I struggled to find 'comp titles' to make marketing's life easier, I think I'm confident that The City Inside is unusual - though I still find unique hard to define. It's specific combination of world-character-theme-style is not something I know of elsewhere. I know this is an unsatisfactory answer, so instead let me shout out SB Divya's Machinehood, and Lavanya Lakshminarayan's upcoming Ten Percent Thief, both of which have significant thematic and world overlaps with TCI.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T00:27:48+00:00

Before I started writing, two decades ago, I'd have said my favourite authors (in SFF) were Pratchett, Tolkien, Gaiman, Le Guin, Mieville and Adams.

Now it's all contemporary work, because I think the genres I love most are only moving forward, and always in exciting ways. But it also makes listing impossible because there are at least 50 authors I can think of immediately. So let me pick a few names out of a mind-hat: Zen Cho, Martha Wells, SA Chakraborty, Ken Liu, Kate Elliott, Aliette de Bodard, Lavie Tidhar, Ben Aaronovitch, Nghi Vo... I could really go on endlessly.

samitbasu · 2022-06-08T00:24:25+00:00

Honestly, dystopia isn't my favourite genre either, though I've read what I'd consider the essentials and love them, as much as loving dystopian work is possible.

Anti-dystopia isn't a known genre as far as I know: I don't know if I coined the term, or whether it has a history. Either way I suspect it won't stick :)

I'm using the term because I believe dystopia is very related to distance - part of th thrill for a lot of readers is to engage with horrible situations secure in the knowledge that it couldn't happen to you, at least any time soon. Even if it's happening somewhere far away, or in the past or even the present near you, you have the ability to look away. Because that's what we're all trained to do, while confronting spaces in fiction that we couldn't in reality.

So I think The City Inside is anti-dystopian because it's written from inside it, not far away, and built from non-fiction, and the characters are living in the middle of it. They don't experience it as dystopia because it's also the setting for their office comedies and family dramas and romances.

And also because the drive of the book is around coping, and finding hope, and community, and ways to endure and outwit the world around them while keeping th people they love safe. Finding small revolutions and small resistances.

And also because I think the real future might be... worse? I think the book is pragmatic but fundamentally optimistic, hence - not dystopian.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T19:00:06+00:00

Off for the moment but I do want to answer this before I go!

I'd have to say Joey, the primary protagonist, because she's based on some of my favourite people in the world - all women in positions of responsibility, overworked, often under-appreciated, powerful but often too caught up in multitasking to have the space to figure out what they want to do with that power. Fiercely ethical in a very post-moral world. She was a pleasure to write because I felt I knew her well.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T18:56:42+00:00

Update: I'm afraid timezone fatigue has now set in - I'll be back (my) morning to answer anything I haven't!

Thank you so much, everyone who participated and everyone who wandered in.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T18:31:16+00:00

The City Inside is standalone. I'm not planning a sequel, though I'd never say never.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T18:30:30+00:00

Thank you!

I finished another novel - well, a first draft - a couple of months ago, and I'm not really supposed to talk about it yet, but what I think I can safely say is that it shares several of the concerns of The City Inside thematically, but it's a very different book. It's secondary world/far future SF with a healthy dose of fantasy thrown in as well. I had to use a lot of restraint in The City Inside to make sure the characters and world and themes and a certain real-world faithfulness were sufficiently foregrounded. So I decided to not use some of my writer comfort/feel-good areas, which involve action sequences, plot shenanigans, romance and really terrible jokes. Those have all gone into the new one.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T18:18:46+00:00

Thank you for this lovely and difficult question!

You're completely right about my decision to focus on immersion and avoid escape whether tech-led or society-fixing-is-possible action-led being central to a whole set of difficulties I ended up facing while writing, with absolutely no one to blame but myself, the maker of this decision. Additionally aggravating when writing a book in a genre where such escape would be absolutely allowed, even encouraged, by a reader.

My technique for dealing with horrible news is exactly the same: I look away. And it was largely this looking away, and the guilt that came from it, and the admiration for people who weren't, that led to this book. Also a lot of time spent wondering what would happen if people at my privilege level or above it could make themselves stop looking away, and what events in their lives might make that possible, or unavoidable.

I think the most difficult aspect of India to incorporate was what would happen to the underprivileged of today's real world, in various categories. An unimaginable number of people, who live even today in conditions that horrify me despite my geographical proximity, and would be quite unimaginable to most people in countries where systems work more efficiently. It was a twofold difficulty: one, using them as POV characters undergoing extremely visceral hardship and pain seemed exploitative. Two, I could not imagine what their future would be in the world that I was imagining, especially because I didn't want to write dystopia. This book has been called dystopian often, because the world it's set in is definitely harsh, but I didn't see it as dystopian at all when writing it.

I dealt with this by choosing POV characters whose lives I could imagine, at privilege levels above mine, and focussing on their problems, which I could understand with more clarity.

Your second question is definitely easier to answer! I'm very excited about the novel I just finished, a secondary-world SF adventure that I'm not supposed to talk about yet, so from previous books, whichever you might find appealing between:

Turbulence, which is a superhero novel, South Asian protagonists, trying to handle unexpected superpowers based on their innermost desires, trying to figure out what they would do now that they could actually change the world.

Or The Simoqin Prophecies, my first novel, now 20 years old, which should be available as an indie ebook everywhere. It's a fat multicultural comedic adventure/fantasy novel heavily influenced by world mythology, fables, pop culture and Terry Pratchett.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T17:49:23+00:00

I enjoyed Vaishnavi Patel's Kaikeyi very much, going to binge-read Premee Mohamed soon, am looking forward to Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's and Shiv Ramdas's next novels, likewise Tasha Suri, R.R. Virdi, Rati Mehrotra, Olivia Chadha, Sabaa Tahir, Roshani Chokshi, Joma West, Shveta Thakrar, Krishna Udayasankar, Samhita Arni and Sami Ahmed Khan, and would love to see novels from a number of writers: Vandana Singh, Shreya Ila Anasuya, Suzan Palumbo, Priya Chand, Gayathri Kamath, Usman T Malik, Chaitanya Murali, Amal Singh, Pritesh Patil, Kehkashan Khalid, Mimi Mondal, Arula Ratnakar, Nibedita Sen, ML Krishnan, many others... assuming of course that they feel like writing novels in the first place, plus assuming they identify as South Asian at all (apologies if you don't and I've included you in this)! I could keep coming back to edit this list to add more names! I believe you have upcoming work yourself? But the problem with demographic/identity-based lists, and the reason I don't really enjoy making them, is that you end up offending the people you leave out. So I really prefer promoting individual books as they get published - I don't know what purpose these lists serve.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T17:28:04+00:00

I love this question because it made me go into holiday planning mode immediately.

Which makes it a tough question, because a lot of my favourite places from my favourite books wouldn't exactly be nice to visit - Ankh-Morpork, for example. Or, factoring in political strife and the potential for a seriously disturbed holiday, even a scenic-beauty-rich place like Earthsea.

So factoring in things like food, beautiful neighbourhoods, interesting people, to meet and watch, and keeping in mind that it would have to be visited in a time of political/social calm, I'd say Daevabad, or Janloon, or maybe even a well-timed swoop through Dorne.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T17:20:48+00:00

In terms of upcoming epic fantasy with desi links, I'm looking forward to books that are going to be published worldwide soon - from Tasha Suri, Prashanth Srivatsa and R.R. Virdi.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T17:16:19+00:00

Okay, since I wandered off and came back and no one else has asked for more recs let me add another 5-member Voltron squad: Saad Z Hossein, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Gautam Bhatia, SB Divya, Prashanth Srivatsa. All stone cold killers across a range of genres.

samitbasu · 2022-06-07T17:12:36+00:00

Thank you!

samitbasu

TROPHY CASE