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Maya #1
Seed Takes Root
Not yet published
Expected 25 Aug 26Win a free print copy of this book!
9 days and 15:34:09
25 copies available
U.S. only
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?
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?
12 pages, Audible Audio
Expected publication August 25, 2026
About the author
Anand Gandhi
1 book115 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.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 2, 2026
If Hugo Weaving could continue narrating for the series that would be great. His voice added a whole other level to this book.
Review of advance copy
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.
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.
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.
May 26, 2026
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.
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.
July 1, 2026
“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!
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!
Review of advance copy
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*
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.
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*
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.
Review of advance copy received from Author
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.
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.
June 17, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy
“We are woven from the strands of others. There’s a word for stealing the biomaterial of another living being, erasing the memories stored in it, and repurposing it to store your own genetic code. It’s called eating.”
— Annapurna, the stomach of the great body
Maya tells the story of a young man who’s different from others by virtue of having never tethered to the Maya trees that are ubiquitous to the planet Neh. Everyone else tethers to the trees everyday the way we log on to the internet for work or play. His anonymity makes him invisible to the biological network of Maya, and therefore to the god-like divyas who control the trees. This makes him dangerous to them and so obviously, it also makes him the hero. But there are plenty of other heroes too, as there ought to be in a book that bills itself as the first of a trilogy from a world that promises to keep giving as films, games and who knows what else.
It took me a while to get into this book because of all the new terminology, but context clues turned out to be enough. I don’t like flipping to the glossary, and I didn’t. It feels a little tough at first, but you definitely get used to it. I resisted the urge to look things up online too, because the authors had mentioned somewhere that they’d changed the meanings of words borrowed from existing mythology, so I figured, okay, let’s see where this goes...
Pretty soon though, I got pulled in to a propulsive story. The opening scene has both strategy and action. Five pages in, I was fully hooked and flipping pages as fast as I could. Kshar orchestrates an entire riot by stealing a single fruit. The theft cascades into a domino of events so precise that it seems impossible he could have known how it would all play out. Well, he knew because it was a training simulation happening (wait for it) inside a tree!
The world Gandhi and Memon create along with its inhabitants is richly imagined that by the time I reached the non-Newtonian white Noh lake with Yachay and Daddu, I felt like I was there, living inside the world with them. The scenes are cinematic and humming with constant subtle tension. No wonder the novel has been written by a filmmaker and a game designer.
I found this to be a story about true freedom, equality, sorority, and, above all, a big thought experiment. How does the world really work, and what are the challenges facing modern society? The book doesn't offer many solutions yet, though it hints at them. I’m guessing they’re just laying out the problems first.
What a beautiful imagination, and what phenomenal writing. This is a book I can see myself reading again and getting more out of each time. I’m so glad I backed it, and I can’t wait for the next two. I also can’t wait for my print edition (coughs).
— Annapurna, the stomach of the great body
Maya tells the story of a young man who’s different from others by virtue of having never tethered to the Maya trees that are ubiquitous to the planet Neh. Everyone else tethers to the trees everyday the way we log on to the internet for work or play. His anonymity makes him invisible to the biological network of Maya, and therefore to the god-like divyas who control the trees. This makes him dangerous to them and so obviously, it also makes him the hero. But there are plenty of other heroes too, as there ought to be in a book that bills itself as the first of a trilogy from a world that promises to keep giving as films, games and who knows what else.
It took me a while to get into this book because of all the new terminology, but context clues turned out to be enough. I don’t like flipping to the glossary, and I didn’t. It feels a little tough at first, but you definitely get used to it. I resisted the urge to look things up online too, because the authors had mentioned somewhere that they’d changed the meanings of words borrowed from existing mythology, so I figured, okay, let’s see where this goes...
Pretty soon though, I got pulled in to a propulsive story. The opening scene has both strategy and action. Five pages in, I was fully hooked and flipping pages as fast as I could. Kshar orchestrates an entire riot by stealing a single fruit. The theft cascades into a domino of events so precise that it seems impossible he could have known how it would all play out. Well, he knew because it was a training simulation happening (wait for it) inside a tree!
The world Gandhi and Memon create along with its inhabitants is richly imagined that by the time I reached the non-Newtonian white Noh lake with Yachay and Daddu, I felt like I was there, living inside the world with them. The scenes are cinematic and humming with constant subtle tension. No wonder the novel has been written by a filmmaker and a game designer.
I found this to be a story about true freedom, equality, sorority, and, above all, a big thought experiment. How does the world really work, and what are the challenges facing modern society? The book doesn't offer many solutions yet, though it hints at them. I’m guessing they’re just laying out the problems first.
What a beautiful imagination, and what phenomenal writing. This is a book I can see myself reading again and getting more out of each time. I’m so glad I backed it, and I can’t wait for the next two. I also can’t wait for my print edition (coughs).
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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.
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.
Review of advance copy
This completely pulled me in…
Immersive, intelligent, and deeply adventurous,
this read was like an incredible ride unfolding through ideologies, intricately archived histories, and countless details that made me re-examine the world we inhabit. It expands the imagination into a profound universe filled with fascinating species, perspectives, and possibilities.
I was especially captivated by the Wheel of Offering, an elegant mechanism for political and energetic equilibrium that thoughtfully navigates uncertainty, anxiety, and collective balance. It is one of many intelligent, beautifully woven artifacts of imagination that stayed with me long after I put the book down. Anand and Zain crafted this thought-provoking story that lingers well beyond the final page.
Immersive, intelligent, and deeply adventurous,
this read was like an incredible ride unfolding through ideologies, intricately archived histories, and countless details that made me re-examine the world we inhabit. It expands the imagination into a profound universe filled with fascinating species, perspectives, and possibilities.
I was especially captivated by the Wheel of Offering, an elegant mechanism for political and energetic equilibrium that thoughtfully navigates uncertainty, anxiety, and collective balance. It is one of many intelligent, beautifully woven artifacts of imagination that stayed with me long after I put the book down. Anand and Zain crafted this thought-provoking story that lingers well beyond the final page.
Review of advance copy
This was fabulous. Such creativity. The world building and the character development.
For some it might be a bit much with all the world building.
I loved Daddu and his attitude. Ayn is super cool.
The art in the book was so nice to see how the characters look and pronounce them.
It had great action and I like the surprises in the plot.
For some it might be a bit much with all the world building.
I loved Daddu and his attitude. Ayn is super cool.
The art in the book was so nice to see how the characters look and pronounce them.
It had great action and I like the surprises in the plot.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you NetGalley and S&S Audio for an early copy of the audiobook. Hugo Weaving is fantastic. So many unique characters and the world building is so interesting. It took me about 10% for everything to click but then I was really able to lock in. Great intro book to a trilogy. I am looking forward to seeing where they go with the story and I can’t wait to see more artwork on the characters!
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Will pull you in and never let go!
review-netgalley
June 26, 2026(Review copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio, Anand Gandhi, Zain Memon, and NetGalley.)
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Everyone is plugged in whilst one guy is just trying to survive on airplane mode
3.25
Arc from NetGalley
3.25
Arc from NetGalley
Review of advance copy received from Author
I've become rather annoyed with sci-fi over the years. Most of it today is simplistic emotional drama dressed up in genre tropes. Despite that, it still continues to be my favorite genre.
Because every once in a while, you decide to give a new author a chance... and it reminds you exactly why you fell in love with the stuff in the first place.
Gandhi and Memon approach sci-fi as it should be; a laboratory of ideas that have bodies and costs. I love how they have managed to weave cutting-edge science together with mythology and politics so seamlessly that the scenes just reach out and grab you.
There are so many moments in this book that I love, it'd be tough to round them all up here. The moment when Yachay first encounters Ayn in the forest. I loved the atmosphere, the tension. Honestly, for whatever reason, I loved the moments when the novel turns dark the most haha. The wheel of offering, the jalpari’s horror, the scene when Kshar interrogates Yachay, the tension when Hidamma arrives at the prison.
There are parts that are meditative like the three deaths chapter, and they pull you in even deeper. I have no clue how the authors pull off these Zen moments right in the middle of all that breakneck action.
Best book I've read in a long while.
Because every once in a while, you decide to give a new author a chance... and it reminds you exactly why you fell in love with the stuff in the first place.
Gandhi and Memon approach sci-fi as it should be; a laboratory of ideas that have bodies and costs. I love how they have managed to weave cutting-edge science together with mythology and politics so seamlessly that the scenes just reach out and grab you.
There are so many moments in this book that I love, it'd be tough to round them all up here. The moment when Yachay first encounters Ayn in the forest. I loved the atmosphere, the tension. Honestly, for whatever reason, I loved the moments when the novel turns dark the most haha. The wheel of offering, the jalpari’s horror, the scene when Kshar interrogates Yachay, the tension when Hidamma arrives at the prison.
There are parts that are meditative like the three deaths chapter, and they pull you in even deeper. I have no clue how the authors pull off these Zen moments right in the middle of all that breakneck action.
Best book I've read in a long while.
June 15, 2026
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
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.
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.
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