Interviewing Gautam Bhatia
Helloooo!
A few weeks ago i was very impressed by The Wall by Gautam Bhatia and I’m very pleased that Gautam has very kindly agreed to answer some questions on the book, their wrtiting and the wider Indian SF scene
Hello, merry Christmas, and thanks for having me on here!
So how would you book-tempt someone into reading The Wall?
“Think of a world that has never known a horizon. Think of a people who have never seen a horizon, but do not miss what they do not know of. And now, think of what happens, when, after two thousand years, a woman imagines a horizon – and determines to find it, no matter what the cost.”
How did the idea of a city with no horizon and very little change come about?
Like a lot of science fiction writers, I thought of a world that was familiar, and there was just that one thing that was altered – and that changed everything. For example, in Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall, a civilisation on a planet with six suns does not know what stars look like for entire generations, as night falls only once in two thousand and five hundred years. How would human beings react to nightfall? Similarly, I wondered – how would human beings react to a world where all their basic needs were taken care of – but you couldn’t go anywhere beyond a circular wall? How would they organise themselves, which prejudices would fall away and which would remain, what would their customs be, which hierarchies would dissolve and which would come up in their place, how would language, dreams, and songs be affected – all of it.
In the novel Sumer the city becomes just as much a character as the humans. How much work did you put into making Sumer work (and in some places prepare to fall apart?)
A lot, and probably more work was needed on Sumer than on its human denizens! Once I had set the design conditions of the world – a semi-closed system with limitless water and air, but everything else scarce, the problems just kept compounding. No fauna meant no bees, no bees meant no pollination, and so the only flora in the Sumer had to be self-pollinating, and I had to figure out how to ensure food, clothing, wood, paper, etc. through a set of self-pollinating flora. Similarly, I didn’t want the Sumerians to be living in the stone age, so there had to be metal – metal from a renewable source? Bog iron to the rescue! But bog iron is extremely weak, and Sumer won’t have alloys – until I fortuitously discovered that the Vikings had fortuitously discovered that bone alloyed with bog iron made it much stronger. I could go on – I have a thousand worldbuilding stories like this. It was fascinating, challenging, exhausting, maddening – and very satisfying to finally see it hang together.
Mithila is our lead character, I liked the idea that we were entering her story after a failed moment of rebellion. What led to her as being your lead character?
To want to break 2000-year old stasis, you have to be both of a place, but never entirely belonging to it. Mithila is an ode to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ beautiful line, “all things counter, original, spare, strange.” She’s of the City, she has her loves and her dreams there, but she’s also never entirely intelligible to her people, even to those who love her the most. I thought her to be an ideal lead character for a book that aims to ask questions of readers, but not force an answer.
Some readers have called her annoying – in tones that range from affection to exasperation – and I confess: she is indeed annoying, but also – I hope – annoying in a very human and understandable way.
The Wall strikes me as a novel of ideas which you explore the ramifications of. With your legal background did you find that an aid to exploring the way Sumer operates?
Yes. Law is part of the invisible plumbing of the world, and access to legal vocabulary (which is a huge privilege) lets you see how law impacts everything we do, whether by its presence or its absence. Law codes the production and distribution of resources, not to mention social reproduction, and all of that is visible in Sumer: for example, in how farmers protests against an unjust system of landed property – but also how the law not only allows, but valorises queer relationships. It also gave me the conceptual tools to plot out and articulate the political structures that would be likely to spring up in a City like Sumer.
How is the Indian Science Fiction and Fantasy scene? Are there are key differences in focus to western approaches? Anyone you would recommend readers look up?
India has a long history of speculative fiction writing, in many languages. Here I will confine myself to Indian – that is, non-diaspora – writers, who write in English. There is a lot of great work being done in the diaspora, of course, but if we were to start listing it all, it would take many pages.
So, Indian writers SFF writers writing in English: I think we’re on the cusp of something beautiful. In 2020, other than The Wall, we had Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analogue/Virtual – two near-future SF novels, set in Delhi and Bangalore respectively, that have been very well-received. Going back a year or two, we have Tashan Mehta’s The Liar’s Weave, a delightful fantasy set in colonial Bombay, and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, a chilling near-future dystopia also involving walls. Going a little further back, we have Indra Das’s critically acclaimed The Devourers (Das is also a respected short story writer and editor), and Anil Menon’s rather gritty Half of What I say (I’ll set an arbitrary bar here at 2015). And the Gollancz Anthology of South Asian SF has a good collection of contemporary writers. I think, like I said, the genre is primed to explode into life in India.
Looking ahead, Prashanth Srivatsa recently signed on with Naomi Davis, a well-respected literary agent, for his debut novel, The Spice Gate – so watch for that ... around 2022, I guess. And I have confidence that short story writers Tamoha Sengupta and Rupsa Dey – who published this year with Fantasy and Clarkesworld – will be back in 2021 with more.
Do you have anything else coming out soon and where can we find out more?
Yes! I am fifteen days away from submitting the sequel to The Wall to my publisher. It’s called – perhaps unsurprisingly! – The Horizon (for now). The novel – which will wrap up the duology – is due into the world in September 2021, and I’ll be eagerly tweeting updates closer to the date. I also have a forthcoming SF short story the second volume of the Gollancz Anthology of South Asian SF. Publication’s been delayed because of Covid, but it should also be out this year. And then it will be on to new projects! I don’t yet have an author website (hopefully soon!), but writing updates – as wall as updates about my non-fiction SFF work with Strange Horizons – are always there at @gautambhatia88, my twitter handle.
If you could get everyone to read one book (not your own) what would it be?
I’m going to be so unfair to so many wonderful books here, but my answer to this question is always Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. High fantasy centred around colonialism and imperialism, political economy as a weapon of war, neurodivergence, sexuality – and a slow-burn romance that rips your heart out in the best possible way. It has everything I want from a genre novel.
