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Maya #1
Seed Takes Root
“Just before a seller knocks at your door, you begin craving their honeymeal. Days before your neighbor is dragged away in the night, you begin to distrust them.”
—Sheshan
The Divya Trials have been announced. Billions will compete. One will ascend to godhood. In every future predicted by the Maya network, the outcome is certain: The son of a god will win.
Kshar disagrees.
He has rehearsed the scion’s assassination a hundred times in Maya’s simulations. In seventeen minutes, a single fruit will begin a cascade that ends in a riot.
The plan is perfect. Every move predicted. Every breath choreographed.
Except one.
Yachay. Nineteen years old. Maker of riddles.
His grandfather has staked their lives on him winning the trials. But Yachay seeks what he has been kept away from. Maya. He doesn’t know:
When you gaze into Maya, Maya gazes back into you.
—Sheshan
The Divya Trials have been announced. Billions will compete. One will ascend to godhood. In every future predicted by the Maya network, the outcome is certain: The son of a god will win.
Kshar disagrees.
He has rehearsed the scion’s assassination a hundred times in Maya’s simulations. In seventeen minutes, a single fruit will begin a cascade that ends in a riot.
The plan is perfect. Every move predicted. Every breath choreographed.
Except one.
Yachay. Nineteen years old. Maker of riddles.
His grandfather has staked their lives on him winning the trials. But Yachay seeks what he has been kept away from. Maya. He doesn’t know:
When you gaze into Maya, Maya gazes back into you.
- GenresFantasyScience Fiction
396 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2025
About the author
Anand Gandhi
1 book93 followersAnand Gandhi is a polymath filmmaker and public intellectual credited with ushering India’s new wave of cinema. He has created culture-shaping projects across media.
His debut feature Ship of Theseus won India's National Award for Best Film (the country's highest honor, often likened to the Academy Award for Best Picture) and was hailed by the UK Critics' Circle as "life-changing," collecting major prizes at festivals including Transilvania, Tokyo, and BFI London. His mythological horror epic Tumbbad, now regarded as a contemporary classic, opened Venice Critics' Week, and won Filmfare and Sitges awards. As producer, he championed groundbreaking works such as An Insignificant Man, recognized by IDFA and Doc Impact Hi-5 for its measurable civic influence, and Disney+'s sci-fi comedy series OK Computer, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Gandhi has consistently pioneered emerging narrative forms: from VR journalism (ElseVR) to award-winning board games. His empathetic short-form storytelling has won multiple Cannes Lions and Spikes Asia awards. His intellectual contributions have been recognized with the Contribution to Jain Philosophy Prize by Mumbai University. He has co-created the speculative architecture pedagogy at CEPT University.
As both practitioner and thought leader, Gandhi stands as a defining influence in contemporary Indian storytelling.
His debut feature Ship of Theseus won India's National Award for Best Film (the country's highest honor, often likened to the Academy Award for Best Picture) and was hailed by the UK Critics' Circle as "life-changing," collecting major prizes at festivals including Transilvania, Tokyo, and BFI London. His mythological horror epic Tumbbad, now regarded as a contemporary classic, opened Venice Critics' Week, and won Filmfare and Sitges awards. As producer, he championed groundbreaking works such as An Insignificant Man, recognized by IDFA and Doc Impact Hi-5 for its measurable civic influence, and Disney+'s sci-fi comedy series OK Computer, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Gandhi has consistently pioneered emerging narrative forms: from VR journalism (ElseVR) to award-winning board games. His empathetic short-form storytelling has won multiple Cannes Lions and Spikes Asia awards. His intellectual contributions have been recognized with the Contribution to Jain Philosophy Prize by Mumbai University. He has co-created the speculative architecture pedagogy at CEPT University.
As both practitioner and thought leader, Gandhi stands as a defining influence in contemporary Indian storytelling.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 2, 2026
I deeply enjoyed how this novel combines technofeudalism with epic fantasy, and how it creates its own science around predicting the future. My first read was a blaze through a wild, new world. My second read was about discovering all the layered ideas I'd missed. Not sure which was more fun.
March 25, 2026
A meticulously constructed world that I can't wait to dive further into! As suggested, the words through repetition, took a shape of their own. A second read will likely make me love it more! I will happily follow wherever Zain and Anand take us, both, within Maya and outside of it.
March 7, 2026
I picked up MAYA: Seed Takes Root partly because I’d been following the team since they launched SHASN. That project really stood out to me. A board game about ideology and political decision-making isn’t something you see often, and it made me curious about the people behind it. So when I heard Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon were working on a novel, I wanted to see how those ideas would translate into fiction.
The worldbuilding is dense and the book doesn’t hold your hand. There’s very little exposition, so you mostly learn about the world by observing how its systems work. It can feel a bit disorienting at first, but it rewards patience.
What stayed with me most were the ethical questions around the prediction and data-harvesting system at the center of the story. Modeling human behavior and nudging decisions doesn’t feel like distant sci-fi. It feels very close to how recommendation systems and surveillance tech already shape our lives.
I also appreciated that the book doesn’t rely on a clear villain. People in power believe they’re acting responsibly, and even those affected by the system participate in it. That makes the arguments in the story far more interesting.
It’s a dense read, but a rewarding one. Definitely the kind of book I’d want to revisit and discuss with someone after finishing.
The worldbuilding is dense and the book doesn’t hold your hand. There’s very little exposition, so you mostly learn about the world by observing how its systems work. It can feel a bit disorienting at first, but it rewards patience.
What stayed with me most were the ethical questions around the prediction and data-harvesting system at the center of the story. Modeling human behavior and nudging decisions doesn’t feel like distant sci-fi. It feels very close to how recommendation systems and surveillance tech already shape our lives.
I also appreciated that the book doesn’t rely on a clear villain. People in power believe they’re acting responsibly, and even those affected by the system participate in it. That makes the arguments in the story far more interesting.
It’s a dense read, but a rewarding one. Definitely the kind of book I’d want to revisit and discuss with someone after finishing.
March 2, 2026
If you've been paying any attention to how Open AI and Anthropic are going to shape our world, this novel is essential reading. I read this hoping to find the next epic series to follow after Dune and The Three-Body Problem. Maya promises just that, and so much more.
April 8, 2026
The best book I've read in a long time, and one of the few that I've wanted to read again as soon as I finished. It is a bit dense, with strange characters and concepts, but worth pushing through. Before I knew it, I was fully immersed. I loved it!
February 27, 2026
A gripping read, I was thoroughly engrossed from the first chapter. Mythology fiction based in the 21st century combined seamlessly with familiar South Asian philosophy. Highly recommend
February 27, 2026
Reading this right now and ruining my sleep cycle from not being able to put it down.
April 9, 2026
“Our peace rests on a barbarous elsewhere”
I finished the e-book in 2 nights flat about a month ago. The following are my thoughts though i think i’d be able
to review it better after a second reading.
I’m not a fan of fantasy/sci-fi at all but i HAD to read this given it was a creation of Anand Gandhi and i’ve been a big fan of Ship of Theseus and Shaasn by him and his team.
To label this book as fantasy/sci-fi is reductive. Although the book involves world-building of the highest echelons like some of the best fantasy books, this is a really philosophical book masquerading as fantasy.
Though it is set in the fictional world of Neh, the central themes around free-will (or, at least, the illusion of it), algorithms shaping our desires, surveillance, the apathy of rulers/the taming of empathy and ethics at ten altar of practical considerations by our overlords (govt, big tech etc), the nature of reality, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves as a society are all issues of the real world.
The book grapples with some of the big questions of our time in a world where AI is poised to upend a lot of the current societal structures and systems.
The creators seem to bake in all the complexities of our world and model it into a fictitious world with multiple species, languages, histories and take a very systems-driven approach that makes everything feel lived-in.
Maybe the best way to talk about humanity’s biggest issues without making it feel didactic is by transmutation into an alternate world.
The best i can do to sum up my experience of reading this book is this quote from the ballad of buster scruggs “You know the story, but people can't get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.”
I can’t wait for the physical copy and the next installment of the trilogy to see where the story takes us.
Big props to the team! This was fantastic.
I finished the e-book in 2 nights flat about a month ago. The following are my thoughts though i think i’d be able
to review it better after a second reading.
I’m not a fan of fantasy/sci-fi at all but i HAD to read this given it was a creation of Anand Gandhi and i’ve been a big fan of Ship of Theseus and Shaasn by him and his team.
To label this book as fantasy/sci-fi is reductive. Although the book involves world-building of the highest echelons like some of the best fantasy books, this is a really philosophical book masquerading as fantasy.
Though it is set in the fictional world of Neh, the central themes around free-will (or, at least, the illusion of it), algorithms shaping our desires, surveillance, the apathy of rulers/the taming of empathy and ethics at ten altar of practical considerations by our overlords (govt, big tech etc), the nature of reality, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves as a society are all issues of the real world.
The book grapples with some of the big questions of our time in a world where AI is poised to upend a lot of the current societal structures and systems.
The creators seem to bake in all the complexities of our world and model it into a fictitious world with multiple species, languages, histories and take a very systems-driven approach that makes everything feel lived-in.
Maybe the best way to talk about humanity’s biggest issues without making it feel didactic is by transmutation into an alternate world.
The best i can do to sum up my experience of reading this book is this quote from the ballad of buster scruggs “You know the story, but people can't get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.”
I can’t wait for the physical copy and the next installment of the trilogy to see where the story takes us.
Big props to the team! This was fantastic.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews