MAYA: Seed Takes Root

Maya #1

by Anand Gandhi, Zain Memon, Hugo Weaving (Narrator)

Combining elements from science-fiction; fantasy; and philosophy; Seed Takes Root is a new mythology for the 21st century - not of gods and monsters; but of us.

The Divya Trials have been announced. Billions will compete. One will ascend to godhood.

On the planet Neh; the living forest called Maya is the planet’s neural network. Each citizen tethers daily to Maya; entering shared dreamscapes for work; play; and learning. The immortal Divyas harvest the data. Every thought and memory; predicting futures and bending reality itself. Everyone is connected. Everyone is tracked. Everyone is controlled.

Everyone except Yachay. An ordinary nineteen-year-old manushya raised in isolation by his ailing grandfather; Daddu; Yachay has never tethered to Maya—making him invisible to the gods of data. Daddu urges him to enter the upcoming Divya Trials; a once-in-a-lifetime competition where billions compete for immortality and omnipotence. Yachay wants no part of it—until his grandfather’s death uncovers an ancient resistance and a lifetime of secret training.

Seed Takes Root; the first novel in the expansive MAYA universe; fuses science fiction; fantasy; and philosophy into an epic of thrilling adventure and urgent allegory. Drawing on South Asian mythology; hard science; and sharp social commentary; it asks the questions that define our Who controls our stories? Who profits from our data? And in an age of perfect prediction; is freedom still possible?

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Audiobook, Fiction

12 pages, Audible Audio

Expected publication August 25, 2026

About the author

Anand 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.

Reviews

[Darlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Hugo Weaving could continue narrating for the series that would be great. His voice added a whole other level to this book.

[Sienna Carmichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most audacious book I have had the pleasure of reading in years. MAYA: Seed Takes Root cannot be easily categorized or confined to any one genre or identity. Right from the first page, the book begins firing on all cylinders, moves seamlessly between genres, and never stops until the end.

The opening arc entails the most sophisticated assassination I’ve ever seen in fiction. Kshar, a serpentine “naag”, needs to find a way to orchestrate the death of the bird demigod Tarkash. The whole thing needs to be invisible because everything that will happen on that day, or any given day for that matter, is also seen by the omniscient Maya trees.

When we meet Kshar, he has been simulating the actual day of the assassination again and again. It feels like a video game as much as it does science-fiction. It reminded me of Hitman in the best way possible. The true definition of a master assassin is to dip in and out, target neutralized, without anyone suspecting foul play to begin with. Kshar’s solution is ingenious, and something even Agent 47 would be proud of. He uses a fruit to simultaneously exploit a child’s hunger for food, a shopkeeper’s hunger for money, and a downtrodden community’s hunger for revenge. After his carefully rehearsed sequence comes to fruition (pun intended) the city is ablaze, the child is dead, but most importantly, so is Tarkash.

The important thing to note is that this hasn’t happened yet. The plan has been made in a powerful simulation that superimposes all probabilities. It’s an extremely trippy sequence, and another brilliant idea, visualized in a way that I’ve never seen before. The chapter is a beautiful meeting point of math, politics, and just good old fashioned action.

This book is bursting with such ideas. Immediately after this plan is figured out, Kshar has an unforgettable conversation with a gandarva character called Tiresia-sanjay. Gandarvas, by the way, are one of the most memorable new species in the fantasy space. They’re sentient mushrooms with two heads and conflicting personalities. Anyway, this adorable fuzzy-looking Tiresia-Sanjay proceeds to drop philosophical banger after banger in a post-run conversation with Kshar. The naag asks him a poignant question, the very same question that had been bubbling in my mind at the time. How can the future be predicted with certainty? I expected the usual SFF psychobabble about fate, prophecy, quantum determinism etc. I was stunned by his actual response.

Tiresia-Sanjay has Kshar trace the journey of a fruit he keeps seeing in the future market simulation, all the way back to its origin. He does this through logical deduction. He knows where the fruit is native to, so he can estimate where it originated from. He knows the size of the fruit’s wings, and the wind conditions of the region, so he can estimate how long it took to travel to the market. By making this causal chain, they essentially travel back in time with the fruit. Then Tiresi-Sanjay inverts this logic and asserts that “seeing the future is not so different.” If you can see all that is, you can see all that will be. And remember the Maya trees I mentioned before? Yeah, they can see everything. Chills.

Moments like this made me feel like I was reading James Gleick but for a fantasy world. Is it at these moments that Maya is at its most breathtaking. And there are so, so many. I would love nothing more than to list them all out down. But I have already been spamming my group chat non-stop since I began reading, and I don’t want to rob you of all the discovery that lies ahead.

A world brimming with VR trees, probability-politics, divine amortals, and a lovable hero awaits.

[Anushka Asthana · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Danny · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so hyped for this, but man… goes nowhere, and swallows itself in world building at the expense of any of it actually sticking or… a plot. By the end you’re reading endless nonsense words, meeting characters you immediately forget, and waiting for ANYTHING to happen. Whomp whomp

[HalloweenSpoonster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Audio, and the authors for this advanced listening copy.

First of all, how could it end like that??? Second, so much happened in this book, and yet it flew by. There’s still so much more that *needs* to happen that it felt like no time went by at all. There is a chance that listening to it (vs reading visually) made it feel like a breeze. Third, the downside of listening is that I didn’t get a glossary. The authors did a beautiful job of throwing you into this universe and building the world around you as if you’d been there all along. The upside to this is that you feel fully immersed in the story. The downside is that there are no explanations for their world’s terminology. I wish I could have read this immersively, referring to the glossary when needed. I also wish that I knew how to spell any of the words the authors have conjured into being.

That being said, I absolutely loved listening to this story. Hugo Weaving’s voice is absolute perfection! I want him to read every fantasy and sci fi book to me from now on. The clear narration! The emotion! The gravitas! His voice is a beautiful instrument that he wields masterfully.

I could tell after only a few chapters that I was going to want to read book 2, but the way it ended really solidified that for me. I need answers! I need to know what happens next! The authors created characters who are so vividly different from one another, but are brought together by seemingly chance encounters that build upon each other until we start to see the bigger picture. As I listened, I felt like I was just taking the story in rather than being aware of connecting to the characters. When things started to happen to them, I found myself feeling for them more than I expected. The authors did a wonderful job of crafting characters you want to root for, and root for them I did until the end. It’s killing me that book 1 hasn’t officially been released yet and I’m already yearning for book 2. Not to mention, I have no idea how many books will be in this series! If each book goes through as much as this one, I imagine it will be at least 3 books total.

Dear authors, please keep these books coming as quickly as you can! And please list all of them on NetGalley so that I can read them even quicker!

🎧 narrated by Hugo Weaving

[Harjas Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Morgan Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars, obviously. I say this knowing this is the kind of claim that ages badly. But right now, it is the best novel I have ever read.

I spoke to my friend Sarah, who had also read it, and we pretty much agreed on all our favorite scenes, passages and ideas. And boy, there are hundreds.

This is a book with an insane number of ideas. Every page has a scene, a moment, a creature, a sentence that I know I am going to remember for years to come. Like Rick and Morty, but serious and intense as if The Hitchhiker’s Guide were written by Dostoevsky.

Most literature is about the seven sins. It is about the forces that pull us apart from within. The ones we aspire to, the ideas larger than us, and the ones we carry in our bodies and minds from the time we were apes or fish. Maya is about these kinds of truths. It makes some of the most amazing ideas I have ever come across visceral, like something physical.

I absolutely loved how Zen parables meet cutting-edge science and classical philosophy inside a restless, breathless story. I did wish it slowed down more, because I loved it each time it took a breath. Or three breaths. I don’t mean this as a criticism exactly. Or maybe I do. I kept wanting to stay inside some of these pauses longer. Many times I felt like the book had just handed me a whole novel’s worth of awe in a page or a scene, and then the very next moment, dragged me by the wrist into the next one.

The first couple of chapters made me think that was what the novel was about. I had skipped summaries and all the noise around it on social media, etc., because I didn’t want it to bias my reading. Which is what I wish everyone could get: the pleasure of revelation and surprise. Sarah already knew what the book was about because she had done a lot of “research” before backing it.

Spoilers and ruined surprises don’t annoy her as much as they annoy me. And the way the book is structured, every few pages, there’s at least a small revelation, if not a full-fledged twist.

So anyway, the next part might contain a few spoilers.

The moment when the winged fruit’s journey is broken by Yachay! What a cool idea. How subtly it is laid out. What a beautiful entry for the hero.

I’d say the same about Ayn’s entry. When Yachay runs into her in the forest for the first time and ends up giving her up to the vanaars. So atmospheric. What a kickass entry for the book’s best character. Blood on her mouth. Gave me goosebumps. I’d love to ask the authors if that’s a deliberate homage to Princess Mononoke, which, as different as it is from Maya, feels like a spiritual cousin.

And before someone gets mad at that comparison, I don’t mean it in the lazy “Asian influence” way. I mean they both understand that nature is terrifying and sacred and that people are nature too, but can be more. Maya just gets there through an alien point of view, which makes it feel even more human. Ayn is the character I would have followed into a completely different book. I kept waiting for her to come back whenever she was gone, so I really hope there will be more of her in the next installment.

I used the gloss a lot for the first chapter, less and less by the second, and by chapter three I'd basically stopped. Turns out you don't need it at all. The meanings land as you go, and the slow figuring-out is part of what makes the world feel alien in the first place. I'd never seen any of these words before, which was probably a good thing. The one exception was rakshasa, from D&D and Magic. Here it is rakshasi and it means something pretty different. Skip the gloss. Just read.

I have too many favorite scenes to write about here, and I am too blown away, too overwhelmed, too jumpy from all the ideas still firing in my head to start listing my scenes out and “reflecting” on them. Just so that others here can tell me how much their list overlaps with mine (and Sarah’s), here’s a quick list in no particular order: Kshar interrogating Yachay under the influence of venom, Moha saying she wants to be a city, Ayn waiting at the cop station for days quietly, every time Baluta shows up, the three breaths prediction mechanism, Johnji finding the lotus (because he loves blue), the writ of aadri thing on the elevator, all the banter between Tarkash and Ayn, and obviously, Fulcrum.

The other idea I am absolutely in love with is the people-and-environment Rube Goldberg logic through the novel. What is the word for deliberately choreographed dominoes made of people and consequences that take years to show up? A few significant scenes in the book are about the bad guys, who are uniquely bad, predicting outcomes and engineering perfect cascades that lead to the desired result by basically using people as parts of their Rube Goldberg machines. This is not what the book is about, though.

The book is about the fact that we are vulnerable to being captured by doomscrolls and desires. You could say the book is about nature and narrative, and those who have so much data that they don’t need to deploy armies to make people behave the way they want them to. They can invisibly alter beliefs and then alter behavior at scale. Wait, I am compressing too much.

I need to sit with this longer. I am writing this messy first-impressions review as a kind of commitment to myself to return later and write out a more careful review. I will read the book again, obviously. I hope the second time is just as good.

I think it is going to be better.

[Vincent Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A spark ignites a flame. A flame starts a fire, a fire becomes an inferno. A chain reaction is beautiful, but even more so is the spark’s innocence.”

An extremely ambitious book and future series! Philosophically heavy in a good way.

”An unsettling truth coiled around his heart: somewhere, the flutter of a wing had, indeed, altered the direction of the wind.”

Things I liked: The middle third of the book is where the meat of the story takes place! I really enjoyed it and appreciate the huge scope and world building shown. The story was interesting and kept me wanting more and more answers about the strange world.

”His heart seized. There was no Daddu.”

Things I didn’t like: The beginning of the book was a little weak and made getting into the story a little difficult. I feel like the concept of Maya wasn’t explored as well as I’d like but I’m sure it’ll be developed a lot better in the coming books.

”All he had seen was the shape of life on Neh. It did not have to be the only shape. It could be better.”

In all, I think this series will shape up to be really good or really bad. The scope of the story is massive and very ambitious, I just hope it isn’t overly so. Looking forward to what comes next. On to the next!

[Genny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook of this and I must say: Hugo Weaving was the perfect choice for narrator. He is both soothing and captivating, and breathes life into the story and lends to its richness and complexity.

It takes about 45ish minutes of listening time to get a true grasp of what is happening, and even then the book has a lot of details that feel like they will be important further along in the series but do not necessarily have much meaning in this book.

The novel itself is poetic. It is part mythical, part sci-fi… and entirely original and imaginative. I loved the world-building of the social structure, invented terminology, philosophical ideology, and tech of this society. It was honestly immersive and I felt like I could see it all vividly in my mind. Doing something on this scale in only 416 pages is mindblowingly impressive and I tip my hat to the authors.

Be sure to grab a copy when it’s released on August 25, 2026!

Thank you to Anand Gandhi, Zain Memon, AE Titles, and Simon & Schuster Audio for providing this ALC for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Heather]

📚 If you love prose heavy, lit fic and want a sci-fi setting, this might be a book for you. This read like season one of a miniseries, there was so much prose, world building and description to establish the the stage the characters and plot are a little lost for me.

🗯️ ‘Oh, you trust me, but you seldom listen to me’
🗯️ ‘Chaos is the natural state of the universe’
🗯️ “Laughter can sound like mockery when trust hasn’t set its roots”
🗯️ ‘A spark ignites a flame. A flame starts a fire. A fire becomes an inferno. A chain reaction is beautiful, but even more so is the sparks innocence’
🗯️ 'If dreams inspire hope, nightmares inform vigilance'

🎙️Hugo Weaving ⏳ 11 hours + 58 min

In the end, I just don't think this book is for me.

[tarungaleela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review of advance copy received from NetGalley

This is the kind of book you can read again and again and catch so many details and descriptions you’ve missed the first time around. Maya: Seed Takes Root is without a doubt incredibly original, an enormous scope of a world you can get lost in, and at times I found myself struggling to keep up. I found the reading experience a bit clunky. There are a lot of words and phrases being introduced at once and it took a while for me to be able to connect with the story. The glossary in the end was helpful, but also took away from the reading experience having to go back and forth to find out what ‘XYZ’ meant. I was unfortunately more frustrated with the writing than I was being engaged in the story. I’d love to give this book another try in the future, the ending is solely what kept me hooked and I’m very interested in the next installment of the series. Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Audio and Author’s Equity for this advance copy. All thoughts are my own.

[Summer]

When I saw on Netgalley this was narrated by Hugo Weaving, AKA ELROND from Lord of the Rings, I hit "read now" so fast I didn't even read the description. However now that I've done that it sounds incredibly interesting and will be reading this as soon as I finish my current read!

[Eve & Rye]

(Review copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio, Anand Gandhi, Zain Memon, and NetGalley.)

DNF @ 25%

I hate to DNF at the best of times, but it really kills me to DNF a story with this much potential. There are some incredible ideas baked into this book. They just couldn’t hold my attention.

During the opening, there’s a note explaining that the story is “translated” from one of the world’s languages and that some words don’t have a clean English equivalent. It invites you to sit with those words, but also says there’s a glossary at the back if that becomes too frustrating. I mean… that’s so NEXT LEVEL

There’s also some Akasha Terminal-adjacent plot machinery (if you know, you know), and that was really rad in theory. But the book had these weird vibes. I kept waiting for it to resolve into weird-cool, but the story never quite delivered on the promises of its premise.

Yachay was actually what ended up doing me in. I went from occasionally spacing out to full-on I-can-not-continue. I was so bored by him. He felt empty, like there was no real depth to his character, and that was where the book lost me completely.

Audio-Specific 🎧: 9 Hours, 30 Minutes. Hugo Weaving. I mean. Just that. Hugo. Weaving.

And he narrates so well that you instantly forget you’re listening to THE Hugo Weaving because you’re fully immersed in the voice work. I genuinely forgot who was speaking until I sat down to write this review. So exactly none of my problems with this book have anything to do with his performance. Stellar work.

I listened at 1.5x because I’m a speed demon, and it can’t be helped. (Sorry, Mr. Weaving. Even you cannot escape the 1.5x curse.)

📌 TL;DR: This book should have been next-level amazing… and it wasn’t. And you have no idea how much that bums me out.

[Dara Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of ARC received at Locus Awards

Maya: Seed Takes Root has gone straight to the top of my list of all-time favorite science fiction books. This is one cinematic novel with marvelous scenes and some jaw-dropping set pieces. There’s a scene I’ve been thinking about a lot. I glossed right over it on the audiobook, but it hit me hard in print. A book like this demands and rewards rereading. Every page is a rabbit hole. I kept going deeper and deeper into them, then looking up to realize I’d been on the same page for half an hour. I mean this in the best way. Maya made me think about all the things I love thinking about while handing me new ways of looking at them. There’s this moment where several thousand young people line up at a Maya checkpoint to prove they are who they say they are. In this world, the simulation’s ability to predict your future is the only legitimate identity, the local equivalent of a Social Security number. Guess we’re getting there.

Nobody on Neh, the planet this story takes place on, has a last name, nor is one needed, because no two people have the same first name. The central technology of the world is Maya, an arboreal network of 330 million trees, wired together underground by fungal filament, faster than fiber optics. You tether (this world’s equivalent of logging in, of sorts) by letting a tendril of the tree connect to you, through the navel if you’re manushya (human-like species), through the mouth if you’re a cobra-person, etc., and then you’re inside the VR-like Maya, watching stories or playing games with friends and such. When you’re born there’s a ceremony where the tree gives you your true name.

Ayn explains some of this to Yachay, the protagonist. She’s a rakshasi, one of the scavenger peoples who can reshape their own bodies through diet, and she’s effectively the second protagonist of the book. She travels alongside Yachay for most of it while chasing an errand of her own, which I’m guessing is a setup for the next book.

Because the system that confers a name is a centralized worldwide web, each name works as a unique username. And the same tree network that issues your username is maintaining an accurate model of you called a chhavi that gets updated every time you tether. That model is also your afterlife. I picture a chhavi as something like a digital avatar, except because it lives inside a root network, it’s still biological. Fascinating stuff! If you repay the three debts you inherit at birth, your chhavi persists inside Maya for your family to visit and talk to. If you die in arrears, then, well, I guess you just die. The book doesn’t say how you clear the three debts. I want to know. I could use a lesson there.

Registration for the Trials doubles as a data sync. It’s how the system makes sure its picture of everyone is current and predictable. The Trials are the once-in-a-generation contest where billions compete for a single empty seat among the Divyas, the near-immortal rulers of the planet. People get fined for not tethering regularly, and the fines double the longer you slack, but that’s the small stuff. Godhood and afterlife are the carrots that actually make everyone toe the line. If you don’t sync regularly, you lose your one shot at becoming a Divya, and you will most certainly not be getting a chhavi afterlife.

So, thousands of Trials hopefuls line up to register, mostly late teens and early twenties from what I gather. To register, each participant walks up to a two-headed gandharva official tethered to a Maya tree. One head examines the person in front while the other conjures up their chhavi (model/avatar) from the root network.

The design of the scene is just superb, and I could actually see it play out in my head (no wonder one of the authors is a filmmaker and the other a game designer). The tree shows the participant’s chhavi on one of the bio-resin screens stretched between its branches. It looks like the person’s mirror image, except the twist is that the mirror is showing a reflection from a few seconds into the future. The reflection moves first, then the real person follows. The person and the screen are separated by a partition so nobody can cheat by timing their action to the prediction. The chhavi/avatar leads, and the original person catches up.

The chhavi on the bio-screen reaches out, takes a small clay pot, and spills six long bone dice onto a virtual table. A few moments later, the actual person rolls theirs on the other side of the partition. The authors could have done something simpler here. Match the digits and the markings on the dice. Prediction says four and six, the person rolls four and six, model’s accuracy confirmed.
But I love that they go a step further and complicate it. The dice on the crystal-ball-ish Maya screen come up marked with dots and glyphs that form an equation. When the real person rolls, a completely different set of signs and numbers appears on their side. What has to hold is that the equation balances. Left must equal right.

If it balances, the system has predicted you so well that even a random action of yours produces an outcome that matches the prediction in what it means and where it matters. Then a simian guard hands over the entry pass to the pre-Trials (by fastening a seed to their wrist and pouring water on it until the seed sprouts roots that burrow painlessly into skin).

If anyone fails the check, the fix seems trivial. They call it a Maya-dip. A quick login, a round of a game or a story, I suppose, and the system watches your preferences and updates its model of you.

As far as I can tell this is the only place in the entire book where the general public gets an unambiguous view of Maya’s ability to predict their future. And it scares nobody. Much the way most of us accept an algorithm’s ability to predict us and don’t start screaming. Everyone on the planet casually calls the Divya rulers vidhi-vidhaata, makers of destinies, and nobody truly believes it, because otherwise, the horror of it! The horror of accepting that your whole future is being written out before you have any say in it!

That equation is the key to a puzzle the book keeps coming back to, about prediction, chaos theory and complexity science. The neuroscientist Anil Seth plants it in the foreword, where he brings up Lorenz nudging a simulated atmosphere by one part in a thousand and watching the whole simulated world drift into something unrecognizable. The popular heuristic for this idea is the butterfly effect. Tiresia-Sanjay, a two-headed gandharva, gives the counterargument to a naag (cobra-person) intelligence operative named Kshar, and it’s one of my favorite passages in the book.

“Ah,” said the younger head. “Wings may catch the wind, but cannot alter its course. Our actions are stones in time’s river, splitting the current into a tangle of minor streams. Yet even as the flow divides, it seeks reunion, compelled by laws that were old when time was young.”

Kshar then has to literally inhabit that idea, replaying one market morning over and over inside a probabilistic simulation, watching every detail change between runs while the outcome stays exactly where it was. Another astounding cinematic scene that I’d love to write about someday. If this book ever becomes a film, and I hope it does, this would be Maya’s answer to bullet time in The Matrix.

Since we experience all this wonderful magic through the eyes of people who’ve seen it a million times, the magic gets served up as mundane, which is exactly why I suspect plenty of readers might skate past how good some of these scenes really are. Even the hero doesn’t gawk, and he’s the closest thing to a reader proxy we get. He’s busy solving the equations, or busy figuring out the engineering of a death machine that’s about to kill him.

I felt we were being handed a major clue when Yachay mentions that as a kid he had six friends and every single one of them was also called Yachay. Ayn tells him that isn’t possible. Every true name is unique, and at least three exhalations long. My bet: Adharvan, Ayn, Tarkash and Baluta are all the other Yachays.

5/5. Best science fiction of the year for me.

[Elias Thorne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stories are the greatest tool we have as a species. We are built to absorb the narratives around us, almost always unaware of how deeply these stories shape our behavior and actions. The only reason I know who to root for in a war taking place on the other side of the world is because the stories that reach me shape my truth. Entire industries are built around the race of which narratives will reach me first.

It seems most of us are willfully ignorant of the invisible threads attached to all that we consume. Those who control the stories, control us. But we don’t care, or can’t escape perhaps, because the ones in control are way ahead of us. They know me better than I do. The number of times my algorithm has served me something that felt like it had been pulled straight from my brain is scary.

Maya: Seed takes Root takes the same idea and scales it up to a level that might feel fantastical at first, but becomes increasingly plausible the more time you spend with it. A system that feeds stories also extracts as much as it can. Maya has perfected that art. It is the ultimate biological machine that has evolved to know everything there is to know about you. It, too, knows you better than you know yourself.

Everyone tethers to the tree on the planet of Neh. It doesn’t need to be enforced, it’s as normal as breathing. If you find that idea whimsical, ask yourself how many doomscrolls you have suffered through today, willingly, unable to stop. Ayn starts showing physical symptoms after not tethering to the tree only for a few days. She’s addicted to the stories that give her life meaning.

Making ideas physically tangible through direct allegories is really difficult to pull off. But the novel does it again and again. One of my favorite examples is how, by slightly changing the price of a toll, the Divyas divert a population of travelers to a different route, re-introducing insect eggs to a region that would need them in the future. An innocuous change, but it saves the lives of millions, while sacrificing the lives of a few. A small decision that massively cascades into an entirely different future. Another idea I loved was how the young kids in Khasiya are fed Maya stories that demonize the other species. All you have to do is seed morsels of half-baked stories, and the part of their brains that evolved to fill in the blanks for survival will do the rest for you.

The best stories have razor-thin boundaries between the protagonist and the antagonist. The same holds true for Maya as well. *SPOILERS AHEAD*

Yachay and Divyendra are two extreme opposites on the spectrum of control. And both of their positions seem equally enticing. Yachay is a complete anomaly in a system that can’t afford to have one. His very existence is enough to create unpredictable ripples that could bring down Divyendra. But the opposite is true as well. It is difficult to hide from a system that sees everything. The moment you choose to interact with it, you reveal yourself to the God. Divyendra, on the other hand, IS the system itself. He tethers to the tree without any physical tether at all.

Both are also slaves to their positions within the system. Yachay can't have a normal life because he is denied the very thing that makes up the social fabric of his world. Divyendra is so far above everyone else that he can no longer see individuals. Only emergent patterns and data points.

How different are Yachay and Divyendra by the end of the book?

The way Divyendra explains his plans about Hiranyagarbha to Parthiv makes it clear he is not interested in preserving lives. He wants to preserve the very thing that makes life possible. Whatever it is that makes matter persist and replicate itself. The stream of consciousness of Maya. The shape of life on Neh. That is what Divyendra wants to preserve. Not the people. Not civilization. The pattern underneath life itself. The seed, not the tree.

We see Yachay engaging in a battle with his very being through the jalpari of Aadri. He strips away everything that makes him him, and slowly reconstructs himself solely on the basis of facts. He rebuilds, forgoes all doubt and emotional baggage, thinks logically and critically, until his consciousness becomes a stream of certainty.

One has spent centuries trying to distill civilization down to its irreducible essence. The other, in the span of a desperate moment underwater, performs the same operation on himself. Both strip everything away until only the current remains. The difference may simply lie in what they are willing to burn to get there. And yet, the writer of the stories that shape everyone is not so different from the one who never had the chance to be shaped by them.

I, for one, am grateful to have now been shaped by such an incredible story. Maya is exactly the kind of epic fiction that the world needs, and I’m going to be thinking about this book for a long time.

[Darius Vance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most books leave you with a memorable character or two, the joy of a unique premise well delivered, tropes executed in a fun way, and if you’re lucky, a single shift in perspective. This book has moved me in a dozen different ways. My assumptions have been challenged, my mind has been changed, and my hunger has been stoked. As someone who holds several works of fiction close to his heart, I find myself surprised to realize that Maya is now decisively my favorite.

Maya is a book about the nature of control. The theme is explored beautifully, sensibly, systemically across every single character and storyline. Here are some in no particular order. Yachay’s grandfather loves him deeply, but controls him by forbidding access to the only thing he desires - Maya. Kshar is bound to his mysterious employer, Adharvan, who controls him with the promise of medicine for his sick son. Adharvan himself, for all his power, seems little more than a useful tool controlled by his love for Divyendar. The Divyas themselves control all of Neh by peering into various futures, and subtly shaping the present into the ones they prefer. More subtle, yet equally important: the vaanar order controls its members with rigid rules and oaths. And everybody controls the kulies that labor and die for them.

The last time I felt so many things click in place was when I read Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Maya reads like Chomsky collaborated with Tchaikovsky to create a vivid new world that blurs the lines of fiction and non-fiction. And then Ursula LeGuin came in to render it with all of her sensibilities and wisdom.

The novel is so densely crafted that I am tempted to do justice to it with an equally well structured review. But that’s going to be difficult to do, so here’s a highlight reel of the things I’m going to be thinking about for a long time: There is an execution device that looks like a ferris wheel that drowns people one by one. There is a predator lurking under the water. It is the most horrifying thing you will read about all year, but you will also grow to sympathize with it. There are flesh-eating rakshasis who consume old, dead people, and you will marvel at their sophistication anyway. Like our neurodivergent protagonist who sees riddles where others see dead ends, you may even be attracted to them. There is a holy communion where the price of divine connection is a head shrivelling back to its body. There is a long speech made with broken words which lands with perfect eloquence. The phrase “big-dark-nothing” will be burned into your brain.

Another thing that’s worth spending time on is just how deeply rendered every species is. The rakshasis are going to be an obvious favorite for most people, with their fascinating mix of alien beauty and disturbing rituals. My standout, however, are the vaanars. They are almost the background hum of Neh. They are the most recurring species in the novel, showing up whenever there is trouble to contain it. They are also the administrative arm of the world. A species like this usually exists as a binary in SFF. The faceless, unsympathetic enforcers of the evil emperor, or the honorable soldiers who swear oaths to protect the weak. The vaanars of Neh are far more messy and interesting. They can kill innocent bystanders in the pursuit of criminals and then feel genuine remorse about it while accepting the collateral damage as necessary. They operate within a defined military structure, and yet every soldier has the official capacity to appeal a command they do not agree with (not without cost, of course). They also have elaborate rituals that hint at codified forms of corruption. They manage to do all of this - uphold the law, break the law, maintain order, smoothen the chaos resulting from their own actions, be trusted by everyone, be feared by everyone. It’s genuinely fascinating.

I insisted that my book club immediately pick Maya up for our next session. It was an easy sell. A couple of friends have already thanked me for tethering them to this universe. I can’t wait to discuss all of this world’s themes and systems with them.

The easiest five stars I’ve ever given.

[Ben Hartley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up, Ayn Rand was a titan. Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged were defining works that opened my eyes to the tyranny of mediocrity, and worse, having it be imposed on you by those who were content to conform.

I think she would have loved this book. Especially the Divyas.

The Divyas are amortal beings in the world of Neh, with technology that is so far ahead of everyone else, they may as well be gods. The Divyas don’t age (more on that later), they govern the entire world, and as a reward, they are literally worshipped by the non-Divyas.

Before your mind goes to the scheming, shadowy councils of evil, let me tell you who the Divyas really are. They are inventors, innovators, preservers, and in the novel’s own words, “makers of laws and destinies.” They are entrepreneurs operating at the frontiers of technology. They build new systems of energy, create powerful pieces of media, and ensure that darkness does not extinguish the light of civilizational progress.

And here’s the best part: anyone can be a Divya.
Whenever there is a vacancy, the entire planet comes together to celebrate meritocracy. Every eligible person alive is given a chance to prove themselves worthy. If you clear the trials, you become a god.

If Rand read this premise and the opening chapters, I’m sure she would approve. What could be a better libertarian utopia?

I wish I had Maya: Seed Takes Root when I was a teenager. It would have saved me years of my life, because Maya continued the dialogue that Rand had closed off, and led me to believe was already concluded.

Because it took a while for the cracks to appear in my own mental model of the world. It took a moment for me to understand that some of the libertarian assumptions I proclaimed were in fact, assumptions. And deeply flawed ones at that.

Like the fact that everyone has an equal chance to win in this world, and if you don’t, you’re lazy and didn’t tug on your bootstraps enough. But is the competition really fair if one person is struggling to make it into an elite school, and another is struggling to put food on the table?

Maya makes it impossible to not ask this question. In a world where everyone lives and dies with the aspiration of someday becoming an amortal, the novel interrogates that desire - and then cranks it up a notch to ALL desires. The pace at which this densely knitted yarn unfolds is also amazing.

When Yachay meets the orphans in Khaasiya, we see exactly what the promise of winning the trials means to them. It’s a way out. It’s a golden ticket to a better life that would otherwise never be in reach. It’s the only alternative (no matter how improbable) to a lifetime of working in the new coal mine in the next village. When one of the kids wonders aloud if the children of Divyas might have some kind of advantage in the trials, one of the other kids, Mikash, is livid at the mere suggestion. He believes deeply and sincerely that the trials are a fair test for all. He needs to believe it.

Because if that isn’t true, everything falls apart. The very promise that stitches the social fabric together comes apart. And what reason does the kid have to believe it would be otherwise? He knows a great many things. He knows that the families displaced by the new mine are rogues and villains. He knows that the rakshasis who aren’t like him are monsters. He knows the almighty Divyas are beyond reproach.

Throughout the novel, we meet many young people whose lives are defined by the same aspiration. More brilliant, worldly people also want to be Divyas. The son of a Divya also wants to be a Divya, and seems to be working very hard to get there. Mikash would be vindicated briefly.

That would last until the Chapter called Vidhi Vidhaata.

In what can only be described as one of the most mind-boggling, brilliant chapters in recent history, Vidhi Vidhaata finally takes us to the room where it happens - the heart of the Divya council.

We realize, slowly at first, and then all at once, that the Divyas don’t just safeguard the future, they create it. They browse eventualities, and pick the ones that preserve their control. But control towards what end, you may wonder?

Innovation? Prosperity? Nah. Dividends. Good old fashioned returns on capital invested in the market. The Divyas manipulate the entire world with stories and narratives (sup Mikash) just so they can gouge the world for all its resources to make an elixir that arrests aging.

The makers of laws and destinies are a bunch of fat cats obsessed with longevity, ready to raze down forests just to make the toilet paper that wipes their ass. And they insist that you should be too.

Sound familiar?

Maya: Seed Takes Root reveals what took me years to realize over 400 blistering pages. It does this with imagination, bluster, and the absolute empathy of hearing out your position first.

I was joking, by the way. I don’t think Ayn Rand would have loved this.

[Shey Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a seriously high-concept novel wearing the clothes of a classic hero’s journey, while reinventing every stage of it. The worldbuilding is mind-boggling and even though the novel is dripping with it, you get the idea that this first book is only scratching the surface of what seems to be one of the vastest, deepest, most serious worldbuilding exercises in recent memory. The story is propulsive and yet thoughtful. It is thrilling, emotional, and cerebral at the same time.
Neh is a planet whose socio-technological infrastructure grows out of the ground. (What seems to be) millions of Maya trees carry the internet in their root network. This tree-based internet holds the memories of the people, their accounts/unpaid debts, and the avatars of their ancestors (another cool device in the novel called ‘chhavi’). The tree branches unfurl resin screens that show the news of the world and the dream-games that people play while being tethered to the trees.
On Neh, tethering to one of these trees is what people do the way we check our phones. The law mandates regular tethering. Every law could be repealed tomorrow, and nothing would change, because the reflex to tether has become a way of life on Neh. The Maya trees are the planet’s social media and entertainment, delivered as immersive virtual reality. For the elite Divyas, it is also a predictive intelligence that they use for all kinds of benevolent and malevolent purposes.
The obvious socio-political real-world analogue is a world completely dominated not by kings or warriors, but by Meta and Google. Musk and Bezos are more than wealthy trillionaires. They are immortal gods who control what people learn, what they crave, and what happens to people’s memories after they die. The trillionaire-gods don’t need armies, of course. They rule with your feed, planting the craving before the product arrives and the suspicion before your neighbor disappears. Every mind on the planet is mapped and every outcome is managed. Beneath this glittering empire of the Divyas, a revolution simmers. The premise is classic, but the take is completely fresh.
My reading is that the seven species of Neh map to structural positions that recur in every civilization, every era. These are positions that empires throughout Earth’s history have always converged on, even when historically independent of each other. What I liked the most is that representing every one of these positions is also a character you end up caring immensely about.
The avian garudas are the knowledge-hoarding elite. They treat information as proprietary advantage. Their cultural sophistication creates the language for generational class privilege to masquerade as merit. One garuda character says about a passing garuda that “everything below her is already hers… not by conquest, by birth.”
The dual-headed gandharvas seem to be the technical-specialist class, the coders, if you will. In this case, they seem to be coding by pruning, hybridizing the trees, etc. They are indispensable to the Divyas and to Maya. Their loyalty to the platform is a part of their physiology.
The manushyas are the vast middle, present at every stratum without the specialization that defines the others: refugees, farmers, orphan aspirants, even rulers. The reader’s proxy, of sorts. The absence of their physiological description hints at them being the most human-like species, biologically.
I think the rakshasis, as a species, kind of represent the countercultural class. They are artists, scientists, etc. They are ones the system surveils most aggressively and mourns most performatively. They hold the same relationship to knowledge as the garudas but with the opposite philosophy. That is, they believe in copyleft over copyright. They are also non-violent cannibalist scavengers, and one of them makes a pretty good argument for the lifestyle.
The snake-people naags are the powerful but precarious minority. This is usually a very large minority that competes head-to-head with the main ruling class. They are perceptually gifted, never quite safe, pushed into holding hidden forms of power on the fringes of what’s strictly legal. In many cities on Neh, they seem to be treated as outsiders and make actual physiological changes to try and fit in.
The vaanars are the simian enforcer class, bodies deployed when prediction fails. They are cops, guards, militia, etc. that every region employs. There’s a lot of cool worldbuilding in their militaristic society. I loved this small passing moment where the protagonist observes a post-conflict experience from the lens of the antagonist. A young vaanar soldier sits shaking in the rubble of a village he’s just helped raze, and the thing that gets to him is the worry that he won’t look presentable for his sister’s upcoming wedding because of his injuries. The moment reminded me a lot of Syril Karn from Andor.
The kulies are the position most civilizations invent and refuse to recognize. They are the engine and the fuel of the world. They are essential, made disposable, systemically denied selfhood and agency. More kulies die maintaining the machinery of the world than die inside it as prisoners, conscripts, the weak, or the sick. Also, my favorite character in the book is from this species.
The Divyas are the platform owners whose wealth crossed into functional immortality nine centuries ago. Everyone is a rentier on the infrastructure owned by the Divyas. The worldbuilding takes the idea of technofeudalism to a literal rent-debt that everyone is born with. From what I gleaned so far, nothing happens if you die without repaying this debt, except you are deleted from the cloud and your avatar doesn’t get an afterlife on the Maya network.
In a fantastically argued book called Nudge, the behavioral economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein proposed that a society could shape the decisions of its citizens by altering the order or the context in which the decisions were made, while leaving every option technically available. Put the salad before the fries in the cafeteria line, and cafeteria customers make healthier choices. Make the default enrollment option “Yes” for a retirement plan, and enrollment rises because choosing “No” now carries the burden of active choice. The person can very easily opt out of the default choice being presented. Their behavior has thus been ever so gently nudged by someone upstream, presumably benevolent.
Thaler and Sunstein called this libertarian paternalism. I have spoken about the philosophical tension this presents often in my class. If the nudger’s preferences diverge from yours, your “free choice” becomes an instrument for producing someone else’s desired outcome, and the libertarian half of the phrase becomes euphemistic. In Maya, the nudgers quite explicitly call their act nudging, which I suspect is a nod to the concept by Thaler and Sunstein.
In one chapter, a Divya called Hidamma issues an order that looks administrative and even trivial for a god. The Avanti highway toll should be raised by fifty coins. Because she knows travelers will react. A large number of them would redirect onto an alternative route. Unknowingly, they are carrying the larvae and eggs of an insect called thraak on the soles of their feet. The alternative route passes through a region where the insect has gone extinct. Their rerouting will reseed the insects in this region. Why does it matter? Well, because thraaks feed on another insect called flitt. Thraak extinction would cause the flitt population to explode. Flitt swarms would devour fields like locusts, causing famine. The famine would cause mass migration. The mass migration would cause political tension in another region. The political tension would accumulate over the years and lead to a civil war that would kill millions of people. So by raising the toll by 50 coins, the Divyas manage to avert a war that would have happened seven years later. I read somewhere that someone called this an ecological Rube Goldberg machine and that’s a good way of looking at it, but it’s so much more. I have never seen such a synthesis of big data, prediction, chaos theory, behavioral economics, resource asymmetry, agency/free will, and the trolley problem in a single book, let alone a single chapter.
Hugo Weaving (The Matrix, V for Vendetta) narrates the audiobook exactly how I like my books read. Straightforward and less performative. 5 stars and another star for a read-along audio app the publishers made, perfect for ADHD readers like me.

[Henry Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

If an all-seeing, infallible oracle prophesies that you'll be a child-murderer next week, and there's nothing you can do to change it, would it break you or would it set you free?

There's certainly freedom in accepting fate. But the other option, like with every mythical king and scholar when shown their future, is to spiral. To try every strategy against fate, short of maiming yourself, and watch as each preventive action, only catalyzes it faster.

So you do the smart thing and learn to make your peace with fate. But now you need an explanation, so that the whole problem can digest better. Maybe it's negative karmas resolving, or the necessary early culling of a future tyrant. Or maybe, it's all just a test of your faith. And right before you pull the trigger, a guy appears from a burning bush to tell you it was all a test and you passed. Yes, any one of these would surely make infanticide a cosmic net-good.

In Maya we follow Kshar, a disgruntled ex-intelligence operative single father (AND A SNAKE MAN!!), grappling with this problem. The best prediction algorithm on the organic neuralink tree internet of Maya has shown him without a doubt, that in order to save his terminally ill snakelet son, he has to kill a young girl. This will set off the cascade of events that end in the death of his actual target: the most favoured champion, slated to win the worldwide ascension competition that is fast approaching.

As he plans this heist, using a simulation of the future day, his job is to find the triggers that cascade into his ideal outcome. The task is to hide his handiwork inside long enough causal chains, such that there's zero cause for any suspicion. In the infinite superposition of probabilities, he discovers that the only way to kill his target is to use a young girl's death as a trigger to an all-consuming riot. In his eureka moment, after the plan finally clicks, he allows himself a moment of guilt, thinking: if this is how it was always predicted to be, am I wrong in just greasing the wheels of fate? Is my murder of this child justified, since I could find no other alternative within all the causal chains of the all-knowing oracle tree?

There's a juicy mass of ideas writhing within this tiny piece of introspection: paradoxes of free will and determinism, divine interference vs. divine non-interference, wu-wei and path of least resistance, and a bit of the good old trolley problem. The book goes even further to investigate the agency vs. fate problem. If you learn enough to make an informed prediction, and if your predictions keep getting better, then is reality a deterministically causal machine? What happens when the prediction machine is forced to reconcile with the impossibility of absolute completeness of data?

This is but a single kernel within the white-hot crucible of Maya. It nests entire college courses inside throwaway dialogue between its bird people, monkey people, snake people, tree people (?) and its people people. There's entire technologies and architectures that seem specifically designed by architects and designers for these species. And complex socio-politics that emerge between them. Its peoples are a welcome addition to the roster of fantasy species archetypes that finally has something new to offer, after elves, dwarves and dragons - with a distinctly South-Asian flavor.

All of this is centered around the worldwide metaverse made of hallucinogenic trees, from which the book gets its name: Maya. And heist planning is just one use of this biological supercomputer network. It's revealed later, that the de facto gods in this world, are doing a much higher level of the very same thing. They're foreseeing bad outcomes like wars, famines and market crashes and then nudging the world's population with simple, minimally invasive policy changes, that are disguised as divine writ.

Yet for all their seeming benevolence, there's an errant data point that stands to throw the entire worldwide system into whack. And that's the call to adventure for this dense, high-octane and irreverently intelligent novel. If any of this sounds appealing to you, I'd recommend it in a heartbeat. If not, there's still a rich, aesthetic fantasy world with fun character romps and plausible technologies that feel fleshed out enough to be a complete escape. There's something within here, for whatever flavor of impossible your heart desires. This much is foreseen.

[Ella Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this so much. So many incredible ideas packed into one book. I always look out for stories with complex worlds, but they only work if you are anchored by characters you care about.
Yachay is particularly lovable. It's immediately clear that he's very different from everyone else. His naive but insightful POV is the perfect cushion in the strange, new world of Maya. The only person who truly seems to understand him is Daddu, his grandfather. Their relationship is beautiful and complex.

At first, Daddu appears to be the very archetype of the seasoned mentor, training the chosen one for a greater calling. But the more attention you pay, the more interesting it gets. Daddu isn't protecting Yachay from any visible evil. There are no bedtime stories about fallen heroes. What Daddu is actually shielding Yachay from is the very way of life that is normal for everyone else in this world.

Imagine denying a kid from ever owning a phone, cutting off his access to the internet and homeschooling him in the Himalayas away from people his own age. That's how Daddu has raised Yachay. Maya is kind of like the internet. Tethering to it is as normal as breathing but Yachay has never entered it. He yearns to connect with the teenagers he meets, be in on the games they play. He tells them about the books he has read, and doesn't understand what people find funny about the things he says. For Yachay, the world is made of patterns and questions. A guard mistakes his neurodivergence for stupidity. Daddu shuts it down. He doesn't let Yachay feel bad about himself but neither grants him the freedom he desires. Daddu is both his salvation and his prison. The dynamic is delicious.

One of my favorite moments is when Yachay offers fruits to a living idol of Hidamma (a goddess). Daddu disapproves of blind faith and ritual superstition. Yachay knows this, can't help but silently seek permission from the authority he has known his whole life. He proceeds when he realizes that Daddu has also taught him to be kind, and therefore, he shouldn't mind. The scene is a great window into their relationship. Yachay trusts his grandfather to be his guidance, but he also trusts his own little acts of rebellion.

The Noh Lake is another great scene. Daddu takes Yachay along on a routine business deal and then pulls the rug out from under him by selling all of their lives' belongings. I felt Yachay's shock in that moment - the stinging betrayal you feel when an elder decides on your behalf because "they know better". I'm re-reading the book now, and I keep thinking about how different things could have been, if only Daddu had trusted Yachay as much as he trusted him. Had he been more open, more honest, sooner, the rift might not have widened into eventual tragedy. But like so many parents, he couldn't see past the kid.

The book has many big themes but the one that stands out to me is alienation. Every character that we meet along the way is an outcast, a rebel in some shape or form. Yachay's whole arc is a search for belonging. How fitting that he meets Ayn, someone who is villainized just for existing. She is another great character. I don't know how interspecies relationships work in Maya, but I ship Yachay and Ayn for sure. My one complaint would be that the character of Vidha, who is briefly teased as a love triangle possibility, feels too plain in a book that is otherwise original in every way. Maybe people who are team Vidha will disagree lol.

Can't wait to find out what happens next!

[numbatreads]

Audiobook review: MAYA: Seed Takes Root by Anand Gandhi & Zain Memon

Narrator: Hugo Weaving

Vibes: 🍄🐍👊

Thanks to Netgalley and AE Titles / S&S Audio for the free ALC.

(soft) DNF @ 30%

I can't believe I'm saying this because it's Hugo Weaving and his voice and narration are gorgeous but in my opinion, this is not a book well suited to consuming via audio without an accompanying text to read.

I'm no stranger to being thrown in the deep end with intricate worldbuilding. I appreciate being allowed to learn about the world and its inhabitants organically through the storytelling rather than having everything laid out at the beginning. However, this story takes that to quite an extreme with a plethora of unfamiliar terms and concepts right from the start. I think this would be easier to digest when reading with your eyeballs, as it would make it easier to recognise plurals and be able to pause and reread particularly jargon-filled sentences (or even refer to the glossary). But in audiobook form I was having to just vibe along with Hugo simultaneously delighting and confounding my ears with many almost unintelligible sentences. Ultimately this wasn't a terribly rewarding reading experience, so I'm putting it aside with the intention of possibly picking up the printed book in future.

There is a huge amount of world building and little asides in this story, some of it extremely cool but other parts a bit confusing and detracting from the momentum of the story. I've since learned the authors have a lot of other things planned for this universe, including tabletop and video games, a feature length film, graphic novels, etc. In that sense, I think the heavy emphasis on worldbuilding makes sense, but I think it's a good idea to go into this one knowing what you're in for. It's definitely a world-driven read rather than a character one, at least in my opinion.

I really enjoyed the first POV character, Kshar, who is a Naaga (a half human half snake man from various Asian legends 🐍). The way he and his biology was written was SO cool. However, we soon switched to Yachay and I found his character far less compelling, being (at least up until the point I got to) the typical savant genius 19 year-old. All the characters in this story also appear to be philosophers, busting out parables and proverbs at the drop of a hat. I very much enjoy a thoughtful story that makes you think, but this, to me, felt fairly forced.

The action sequences, on the other hand, absolutely blew me away! You can tell that one of the writers is a film producer, because the way they are written plays out like scenes from an epic action movie. Even if the book didn't quite hit for me, I'm very interested to see what else the authors do with this world they've constructed.

Pub date: 25 August 2026

[Steve Heaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an ARC for Maya: Seed Takes Root by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon. I would like to thank Author’s Equity Publishing for providing me with this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

This is book one in what the authors plan to be the Maya Narrative Universe. This book is a lot to explain, and it may be difficult to do so without giving away spoilers, but I am going to try my best!

At first, this book can be a bit confusing, with its plethora of creatures, some with high levels of sentience, as well as pets and other animal-like beings. Luckily for us, there is an extensive appendix complete with a dramatis personae, a map, a compendium of the different main races in the book, and a dictionary of terms unique to the book. In other words, it has everything the reader needs to keep from getting lost in the woods.

Another feature of this book that I loved is the illustrations. There is one at the beginning of each chapter, as well as illustrations in the dramatis personae for each race. In my opinion, we need more illustrated books in the fantasy genre.

Enough with the "milk"; now to the "meat."

This is a story about a world where, presumably, all of the citizens link up to Maya trees, which are communal spots spread throughout the different civilizations. Upon linking up, the creatures are able to see the future, as well as interact with it in varying ways. The problem with this is that there is a hegemony of select beings, known as Divya, who manipulate world events based on what the citizens are viewing when connected to the Maya network. Basically, Big Brother is not only watching your actions but is also inside your mind. Everyone must connect to Maya regularly, or there are punishments meted out by the government

The story is told from two main POVs. The majority of the story follows a young Manushya, which is a land-dwelling human race, named Yachay. Yachay has never connected to a Maya tree, and his grandfather molds him into the chosen one who will fix the ills of their corrupt society.

The other point of view is from an assassin named Kshar, who is a member of a race called Naag. These are cobra-like humanoids. He enters the Maya network through bonsai trees away from the central hub and is tasked with assassinating a high-society member who is a candidate to win a contest to become a Divya. Kshar repeatedly enters Maya to find the best way to complete his task, dying multiple times within the network in his attempts. He feels he has to do this to receive medicine for his ailing son.

The creatures in this book range from water beasts to snakes, eagle-type beings, and so many more. They are pretty amazing. Yachay's journey is gripping, and I am really looking forward to book two!

[KC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook Review: MAYA: Seed Takes Root by Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon

What first drew me to MAYA: Seed Takes Root was Hugo Weaving’s narration, but I was also intrigued by the creative backgrounds behind the story. Anand Gandhi, known for his philosophical and visually ambitious filmmaking, and Zain Memon, a game designer with experience in interactive storytelling, bring together a blend of cinematic worldbuilding and immersive speculative fiction. Hugo Weaving’s narration gives the story the gravity and wonder it needs to make its vast, philosophical world feel immediate and alive.

The story follows Yachay, a young man who has never connected to Maya, a living planetary network that links society and allows people to share knowledge and memories. In a world where nearly everyone is connected, his disconnection makes him an anomaly, but it also gives him a perspective no one else has. Standing outside the system that shapes his civilization allows him to question what everyone else accepts as normal, and that distance becomes central to the story’s larger theme of whether constant connection is enlightenment or control. After his grandfather’s death, Yachay discovers that the man he thought he knew was hiding major truths about their world and his place in it. That revelation pulls him into the Divya Trials, a competition that could grant unimaginable power and forces him to confront what Maya really means for humanity.

The worldbuilding and storytelling are both major strengths of MAYA: Seed Takes Root. The authors have created a richly layered society, and the novel reveals its living forest, technology, social structure, and future slang in ways that make the setting feel immersive and fully realized. At the same time, the narrative keeps moving with a strong sense of mystery and discovery, balancing big ideas about power, consciousness, and choice with a story that stays engaging throughout.

Overall, I really enjoyed this audiobook. It is ambitious, imaginative, and unlike much of the science fiction I’ve encountered. The pacing occasionally slows when the novel pauses to unpack its philosophical ideas, but those reflective stretches ultimately deepen the story’s emotional and thematic impact rather than diminishing it. Hugo Weaving’s narration, combined with the vivid worldbuilding and compelling story, made this a memorable experience. I’m very curious to see how this universe continues to expand. 4.5 stars.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ALC. This is my honest and voluntary review.

[Francesca Myman · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, it’s hard to know where to begin with this book, lol! You begin at the beginning, but the beginning takes you right to the end, and then back to the beginning of story itself. Why we have story, why we need story, what story means to us as humans of flesh and blood operating in this world — though this is another world altogether, and the closest thing to humans is the race of manushyas which share the world of Neh with many other colorful characters such as simian vaanars, serpentine naags, avian garudas, and other beings, some of which you will recognize as inspired by or adjacent to precursors in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain epics and histories — while embodying their own completely new trajectories. The familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar. I think what I appreciate most about this book is how it destabilizes me, how it encourages me to read with skepticism. Without spoilers, let’s just say that it’s rare the narrative experienced by the characters is exactly what’s really going on. The central characters, Yachay, Daddu, and Ayn and her asymmetrical but adorable sidekick Johnji, are endearing and relatable, and even the more complex characters like Kshar and his son and the imperious but charismatic garuda Tarkash, while not literally human, are human and compelling in their goals and motivations. Never make the mistake of underestimating anyone in this book — if you dig down for the moral core of it, it’s very carefully realized and understands the reality that everyone is the hero of their own story. There are no disposable people and no disposable stories in the traditional fantasy trope sense — a trope is, in fact, a big signal to watch out for more. This has big science fiction ideas and philosophies for the SF readers, worldbuilding and mythic sweep that will appeal to fantasy readers, lots of plot twists for adventure readers, and holds up to multiple rereadings. Let’s just say I am particularly curious about the story of Sheshan. I have a lot of faith and trust in this universe and look forward to finding out what will happen in the next book, knowing that it will not disappoint.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story kept me reading and wanting more. Despite not knowing most of the words, and despite having the index inaccessible to me (as I was listening to the audiobook), Hugo Weaving did an excellent job of stating what was present and building a world based on the facts in front of him without needing to elaborate. But none of that could have been accomplished without Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon's attention to detail and dedication to building a world that shows far more than it tells.

This book felt like a meeting between Babel by RF Kuang, Witch King by Martha Wells, and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern saga. From the impact of words and stories to the mystery of Yachay, our main character, and the unfolding of his story and destiny, to the wide expanse of the world of Neh and the Divya - near-gods, who work to maintain order - this story swept me up and set me back down to earth far more times than I expected, but not a single time more than I wanted.

This book covered themes of love, loss, and questioning the world as you see it. These are told through Yachay, our main character, as he interacts with a world largely foreign to him - though as the reader we don't quite grasp the implications of that until later on in the story. His view of the world and his grandfather figure irritated me at first, seeming naive and frustrating in his direct and unambiguous thinking, but he won me over in the end.

The overarching plot, as well, where Maya trees connect every member of society and shape not only joys and games and memories but also information and desires, was eerily reminiscent of the sort of social media and Automated Intelligence era we find ourselves in today. We can find connections, and we can know so much more than we'd glean on our own, but at what cost? What cost to ourselves, our minds, and our own desires?

A book I'll definitely be picking up the sequel to, I wholeheartedly enjoyed this read and I look forward to when it comes out and I can share it with more people.

[Mikala · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Audio, and the authors for the advance listening copy.

There is a genuinely fascinating book inside MAYA: Seed Takes Root, and the ideas are what kept me going. The premise is certainly unique: a planetwide network of living trees that sees everything, and therefore can predict everything, is used to ask questions I haven't stopped thinking about. Chief among them: why do we eat and consume what we do, and who decided that for us? The plot turns on hunger being engineered as a weapon, and the book is smart about how appetite gets manufactured and pointed at a target. It reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "What Is It Like to Be a Tomato?" chapter in I Am a Strange Loop, where he pokes at his own line between what he'll eat without a thought and what he won't. This book keeps drawing that line and then erasing it.

Where it lost me was the execution. It is far more gruesome than I expected, and the violence isn't glancing as it lands on children and on communities that never had a chance, and it's rendered in detail. Readers who are sensitive to child death, mob violence, or depictions of slavery should go in prepared.

On the audio specifically: Hugo Weaving's narration is clearly a deliberate choice, and plenty of listeners love it. For me it read as flat and unvarying, which flattened the emotional range of a story that badly needed some lift. Combined with the subject matter, the result was relentlessly dark and, honestly, depressing to listen to for nine and a half hours. I'd also note that the audiobook gives you no access to the glossary, and this book invents a lot of vocabulary. I spent a fair amount of time unsure what I was hearing.

I'd recommend this to readers who like their science fiction dense, philosophical, and bleak such as the Dune and Children of Time crowd. It wasn't the right fit for me, but I don't think it failed at what it set out to do. I just didn't want to be in that world.

[Michael MRBookReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating: 2.5 / 5
Format: eARC and ALC via NetGalley

MAYA: Seed Takes Root is a sci-fi fantasy story with very deep world building, brimming with politics and unique species. Although I enjoyed the world, this was a very challenging read because of the amount of new terminology. The authors have a note at the beginning to expect this, but I did not expect to have an accompanying glossary with over 160 entries. This slowed down the story for me and my progress in the book because I had to constantly lookup words to clearup my own confusion.

I was able to access the book’s website, which had more detail, such as visuals of the species and world. While this was very helpful, this is the first time I’ve ever needed to do this for a book to get a better experience from it. This story was too ambitious by building a world and terminology to the point of complicating things so much it became distracting and stalled the story progression.

I think the authors wanted this to be not just a book from the beginning, but a franchise. This is evident with plans to expand MAYA into film, games, and graphic novels while the first book is still not fully released. I believe having those large ambitions lead to constantly expanding the world by thinking it would make it worth all those ventures. Unfortunately the constant expanding did not improve the story enough for me and overall it was a deterrent from my experience.

This was just the first book in this universe though, so I’m hopeful the future books focus more on the story and progressing it, rather than further expanding this already bloated terminology. While I had access to both the eARC and ALC, because of the challenges I experienced with the book, I mostly used the eARC. The narration I did listen to though was done well.

Thank you, Authors Equity and Simon & Schuster Audio, for providing me with this book and audiobook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Edgar Woods · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I just finished the audiobook and it was enthralling.

This is an extra-special book in my mind for many, many reasons. This is one of the best reading (listening? Hugo Weaving is awesome) experiences I've had in a long time.

Each chapter consistently delivers these delicious moments of philosophical wisdom. It’s wild.
Here are a couple of potent passages that I saved and keep coming back to.

“Always approaching, never arriving. What prison could be more exquisite than desire?”

“Intelligence itself is prediction... Sight observes what is, hindsight recalls what was, insight recognizes patterns in all that's collected, and foresight extends those patterns to predict the next moment."

The sheer scope and ambition of worldbuilding here is insane. Literally everything about this universe feels completely different from the real world… but also recognizable. It’s so comprehensively well thought out, down to how every species looks, thinks, and behaves.

While reading it, I found myself thinking of Harry Potter. It was one one of the first books I fell in love with, which truly evoked wonder in me. Later, I found myself reflecting on their differences. Harry Potter was a simple, beautiful story about adolescence and good versus evil. The first chapter of Harry Potter is such an easy sell. It's just a weird cat and an orphan boy in a dysfunctional family. Which is great. It works.

The first chapter of Seed Takes Root has a humanoid snake slithering through a biological tree internet hive mind simulation to practice the murder of a humanoid eagle rich kid in a market with the most interesting murder weapon of all time. A fruit.

The wonder feels like it should be a harder sell. But buying in felt effortless.
Okay bye, I am going to re-read this.

[Sara G · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel kind of bad for the low rating because my advance reader copy came from a Locus magazine fundraiser, which is why I went into it with no context on the background of its development. But "It was ok" is pretty much how I felt.

The actual book: Moderately engaging, terribly paced, very fleshed-out world, characters that don't achieve the same depth as the world-building. It is the most Book One that a book has ever book-oned, honestly; despite some intense action scenes, the book spends so much time with setup that it doesn't get to play out any satisfying arcs. The world it creates its interesting to explore, but the writing doesn't balance it in quality or story. Edit: I should give it more credit for the refreshed cyberpunk themes - data privacy, meta-space, systems control. The post-punk genre aesthetic is hard to square with our modern dystopia, so taking it entirely outside of our world was effective. Fine, have a third star.

My opinion was certainly biased by the extraordinary lengths this book goes to for self-hype. It has fawning pull-quotes on the jacket and an actual foreword extolling its virtues and introducing the concept of fictional worlds to the reader (!!). So, naturally, my skepticism was activated. After finishing, I learned that it wasn't so much written as produced, that a lot of that production is Kickstarter-funded, and that the creators' intention is to release lots of media set within this world: games, films, etc. The world-building was thorough because that's what their focus has been. I have no beef with crowd-funding and I sort of admire the intent to flip traditional models around and start with the expanded universe. But I don't think it helps the book be a good read. The perfunctory title gives away the game.

[Emboldened · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Authors Equity Publishing, and AE Titles / S&S Audio for the e-ARC and audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is an ambitious and wonderfully detailed story that asks readers to be patient at the beginning. The authors warn you that the vocabulary and concepts may feel unfamiliar at first, and they were right, but everything gradually began to come together. Once I understood the world and its systems, I could appreciate how much thought went into the story’s ideas about technology, intelligence, shared knowledge, and the ways information can shape entire societies. The novel is set on Neh, where intelligent species connect through Maya trees that enable shared dreamscapes and glimpses of the future, giving the book a fascinating foundation in science fiction and mythology. The writing is meticulous and packed with detail, but it ultimately builds toward one heck of a story. I enjoyed watching the unfamiliar language and worldbuilding become clearer through context rather than having everything explained immediately. Pairing the audiobook with the e-book was the perfect way for me to experience this book. The narration helped me work through the vocabulary as needed, while having the text in front of me allowed me to revisit passages and absorb some of the denser details at my own pace. This was definitely a more immersive read than a quick one, but I’m glad I took the time with it. The combination of text and audio made the world easier to enter, and by the end I felt rewarded for staying with the story while everything unfolded. I’m especially glad I was able to experience MAYA in both formats because each one added something valuable to the reading experience.