Review | ‘Maya: Seed Takes Root’ has big ideas but is trapped in franchise dreams

The best novels don’t have any compunctions about being wasteful. They spend dozens of paragraphs, if not pages, on a momentary observation, a single thought or moment, or a place that captivated their characters, and likely their readers. People meander. It’s part of what makes them people, and that also goes for a novel animated by them. In fact, these passages — which unsurprisingly resist being faithfully transported to other media like film or television — are also often why people remember certain novels more fondly: they nurture a specific interiority, one that takes both words and minds to bring to life.

Maya: Seed Takes Root refuses to meander. The novel, the first in a three-part series by filmmaker Anand Gandhi (of Ship of Theseus and Tumbbad fame) and game developer Zain Memon, is set on the planet Neh, where it follows characters living as part of a vast biological network that predicts behaviours and organises the rituals of everyday life. Through their encounters with the limits and anomalies of this network, Maya explores surveillance, free will, consciousness, and agency with a heady mix of philosophy and science fiction.

As with all novels, the first symptom is the writing, which is conspicuously aphoristic. Lines like “If dreams inspire hope, nightmares inform vigilance” are peppered throughout the text. Of the three protagonists, Yachay is the anomaly, Kshar is predictability and control manifest, and Ayn represents the alternative path. Gandhi and Memon explore Maya’s concepts of choice through this trio, but it’s not at all messy. It’s fine for Yachay, Kshar, and Ayn to arrive at different ideas because of who they are, yet all three also seem conveniently able to utter polished philosophical propositions. At one point, it’s possible to sense the authors writing.

Catering to the franchise

When it doesn’t falter, Maya is quite enjoyable, with a breezy flow and a mythos that could prove generative for Indian readers looking for sophisticated fiction that’s also culturally familiar (albeit to one specific slice of the demographic). However, the cracks remind readers that Maya is part of a ‘trans-media’ franchise where a boardgame and a film — whose screenplay and the novel were written together — are in the works. Maya doesn’t make full use of the privileges of being a novel (the 13th chapter is the exception that makes the rule) and refuses to transcend the franchise’s needs, including the covert preference for writing plots that can work on a page as well as on a screen.

In 2007, author George R.R. Martin said screenwriters and producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss “can’t adapt a book that hasn’t been written”. The duo’s Game of Thrones show wrapped in eight seasons whereas Martin is still writing the underlying ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, which is an important reason why the show’s later seasons seemed contrived. The series got its unsettling allure from Martin allowing his characters to become unruly, to take him where he believes they’d rather go. Maya’s architecture is so rigid, however, that its characters seem preordained to answer to the plot, rather than the other way around.

Maya: Seed Takes Root

Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon

Westland

₹1,644 (ebook)

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in