What will our future look like? In their new universe, filmmaker Anand Gandhi and game designer Zain Memon are asking questions pertinent to the planet, AI and humans themselves
While each instalment in the universe will be a standalone story, the characters will recur throughout the universe. Pics courtesy/Department of Lore
It’s safe to assume that we all agree the world has gone to shit. War, hunger, climate disasters, or the threat of AI manipulation: take your pick. When reality is so far gone, where would we even begin to look for a fix — in philosophy? Mythology? Or fantasy, perhaps sci-fi? For National Award-winning filmmaker Anand Gandhi (Ship of Theseus, Tumbbad) and celebrated game designer Zain Memon (Shasn, Azadi), it will take all three to imagine a better world.
“How is it that we have the ability to grow food in space, but haven’t been able to feed the one billion human beings on Earth?”
“In this world driven by algorithms and AI, how do we tell truth and lies apart?”
“How do we create a society that’s more peaceful, more equitable?”
These aren’t just the big questions of life on Earth, but the central themes in a brand new narrative universe that Gandhi and Memon have created in an ambitious new storytelling project that will span multiple media — books, films, board games, toys, video games, graphic novels, and animated series. “The questions are so vast that it could almost sound naive to be framing them like that. But storytellers have to be children and ask questions that scholars fail to answer, and then attempt answering them themselves,” says Gandhi.
Character Dangsa
The ambitious, multi-million-dollar magnum opus will take 15 years more to bring to fruition in totality. “Four years ago we began answering the question — what can we do to create the most positive impact through story?” he recalls. But they’re not the only one betting big on it; “We’d like to express our gratitude to our investing partner, Raju Chakori, who has taken a bet on what is the craziest civilisational narrative project undertaken in probably decades,” adds Gandhi.
The first instalment in the universe is a novel, Maya: Seed Takes Root, set to launch for pre-order on Kickstarter on August 19. This book is the first in a trilogy; there are to be a total of seven different series of books, each following an independent arc. In this first release, we get our first glimpse of “Maya”, a biological network of sentient trees on the planet Neh. The network of trees serves as the living Internet that stores the dreams of each citizen. The ruling class harvest this data to see billions of possible futures and “nudge” their paths.
Character Manushya
Fantastical as the world sounds, the premise doesn’t sound too far off from our own world. “We’re witnessing the greatest experiment in narrative control in human history. Maya is a response to that. This universe is a toolkit for immunity against digital manipulation; it asks the questions we’re too distracted to ask, exploring how minds are shaped, choices are nudged, and futures are manufactured invisibly,” Gandhi tells us on a video call from Goa, where he and Memon are adding feverish last-minute touches before the grand launch in Mumbai next week.
“Even before modern science established that plants have life and sentience, ancient wisdom has held this to be true for thousands of years. Now we know that trees run entire economies underground through micro-fungal networks where they communicate and share resources like a stock market,” says the auteur, “So for us, there was no better metaphor than sentient trees having the capacity for profound calculations, and data collection and processing. It’s also a way for us to bridge the two worlds of modern science and ancient philosophy.”
Zain Memon and Anand Gandhi
Memon adds, “We also wanted to build a science fiction world different from the ones we grew up on, which were very focused on physics and space travel. If there were a planet just like ours, but it had evolved slightly differently, what technologies would it have? What flora and fauna, what species would it have?”
The process of world-building was so detailed that it took the duo four years to get to this point, where the first book is now complete and the first live-action film based on it is already in the works. “We’ve worked with evolutionary biologists and geologists to imagine how this world might look and behave. We’ve worked with artistes who have worked on some of the biggest works of entertainment, such as Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes. The Maya universe has been built in collaboration with some of the best artists, scientists and creators from around the world,” says Memon.
Fans of the fantasy genre might note certain similarities with James Cameron’s Avatar. “There is little in common between the Maya trees and the Tree of Souls in Avatar, other than the fact that both are trees,” says Gandhi. “They both play very different roles in both worlds. The Maya trees have a planet-wide underground root network that connects all Maya trees to each other, which allows them to induce vivid hallucinations in anyone who tethers to them. Central to most facets of life of Neh, the Maya trees play a complex narrative role, one which will reveal itself slowly.”
With such intensive lore involved, the studio (Department of Lore) will also release another book to explain the Maya canon. “It’ll be 400 pages of just worldbuilding,” says Memon, “We will provide this to creators around the world and invite them to make their own stories, games, and films within the universe.”
The creative duo envisions the Maya universe as a sandbox of ideas that they’re inviting other creators to play in as well. “One really cool idea that we feel very proud of is that this is going to be a new kind of IP system in itself,” says Gandhi, pointing out that while western lore is IP-protected, in India, we have a long tradition of ‘open-source’ story-telling. He invokes Kabir poetry as an example. “Not all poetry attributed to Kabir was originally written to him. But as my grandmother says, Kabir is a vichar dhara, not a vyakti [Kabir is a philosophy, not a person],.”
“With Maya,” Memon adds , “Department of Lore owns the IP. But we are working on small experiments with how we can, as a studio, invite other creators to play within the sandbox. We are also working on licensing all the assets that we have created. Imagine if you had the ability to go on the Star Wars or Game of Thrones website today and use the virtual sets, costumes and props — worth millions and millions of dollars. What stories would you tell?”
What’s next?
Following the launch of the novel, Maya: Seed Takes Root, the studio will next launch two table-top board games, followed by a graphic novel, then the sequel to the first book. “This is just the coming year; we will have a release lined up every three months,” says Zain Memon.
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