Samit Basu on the road

It’s a pleasure to be called a young author. These days authors, like footballers, are over the hill at 30,” says Samit Basu, who has written the GameWorld Trilogy, India’s first science fiction/fantasy series. Basu is in Bangalore to promote his new book Terror on the Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure, written with young adult readers in mind, and while he is a youthful 30, he cannot help but be aware that some others writing in this genre are barely out of their teens themselves.

Basu, who wrote his first novel (The Simoqin Prophecies, Part I of the GameWorld Trilogy) in his early twenties and became a published author at 24, is not exactly a stranger to precocious literary fame. In the years since he dropped out of IIM Ahmedabad because his heart was not in it, Basu went to the UK for a course in film-making, wrote his first book, became a journalist in Delhi and later, a full-time author.

Not satisfied with writing a richly plotted fantasy series teeming with characters, sub-plots and allusions each more lively than the other, Basu, a huge fan of comic-books, has also written comics series Devi and The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma (published by Bangalore-based Virgin comics) and co-written a graphic novel Untouchable with Mike Carey of Lucifer and X-Men fame.

Full report here DNA