11 September,2026 09:05 AM IST | Mumbai | Nandini Varma
Kshar with a Sunpear
What led you to create the universe of Maya?
As the world grows more complex, complexity becomes more invisible. So does power. Data hegemony, wealth inequity, nonhuman sentience, and climate remain unsolved problems. We need stories that draw from the best avenues of knowledge at our disposal to shine a light on the invisible. This book (published by Authors Equity) about the Maya universe is our attempt to build a home for those stories, and for those who would tell them.
Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon
A living mythology rigorous enough to draw from the frontiers of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, complexity science, clio-dynamics, vast enough to be built with every creator who has blueprints for futures not yet built.
You borrow elements from science fiction and fantasy. What about these genres excites you?
We've always wanted to create an epic that brings together our love for ancient myths and their philosophical depth, high-fantasy and its magic systems, and hard sci-fi that pushes the known frontiers of science.
Tarkash's Palanquin. Illustrations Courtesy/Zain Memon, Anand Gandhi
Fantasy allows you to create new cosmologies, power structures, sets of laws governed by their own internal logic, and use that to reveal something true about the invented systems of our own world. The best sci-fi investigates what happens if current trajectories continue, or speculates where new trajectories might lead us. It helps us simulate various futures to help us make better informed decisions today.
Maya is an epic science fantasy universe. At first, it looks like fantasy, with trees that remember the dreams of an entire planet, but you will find hard sci-fi underneath. The trees communicate and store data using a mycelium root network. The evolutionary trajectory of each species has been fully mapped out in response to the planet's geology. In Maya, biology is the magic system.
What were the most challenging parts for you in building this world?
One of the fundamental challenges that shaped world-building was that nothing could be decided in isolation. Planet Neh was built from first principles. Physics shaped Geology, which shaped Evolution. This produced species whose biologies shaped their cognition - their languages, cultures, and politics. All this demanded a massive undertaking of over 200 scientists, architects, writers, designers, holding chains of causality together, while also shaping a world that was alien and inventive.
Maya: Seed Takes Root
The second challenge was epistemic. Surveillance, control, and cognitive capture cannot be reduced to a single villain. When a system rewards harm, someone arrives to do the harming. We wanted Neh's systems to be as alive and ruthless in the pursuit of their own logical incentives.
This universe will translate into a game, graphic novel, and a film. What components will be preserved through the mediums?
A few things are unlikely to change: The planet is 6.9 billion years old. The laws of Physics do not stray too far from those of Earth. Evil is never glorified; every civilisation is assumed to be sophisticated regardless of its level of technology or political order.
But we expect Maya to keep changing - across mediums, creators, and retellings. A lot of mythologies are canonical, which means that they are set in stone and hence, don't evolve with time.
The plurality of myth is one of its greatest strengths. Mythology equips us with the ability to produce contradictions, and even to embrace them. We hope that Maya becomes a playground for creators to share their own aspirations, insights, and arguments.
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