Author Samit Basu on the road with his new book

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 the city 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.

Alongside, Basu has contributed numerous short stories to anthologies aimed at children and adults (including to the much talked-about Electric feather: The Tranqeubar Book of Erotic Stories), written screenplays for films and is currently working on a video game while he waits for his new novel Turbulence to be out in October.

Terror on the Titanic could well be called the novel in which it all comes together. “It is as genre-blending as it’s possible to get. It’s a historical novel, but it also has things from several other genres — fantasy, crime, science fiction and romance,” says the author. It is also the book that has pulled him out of semi-hibernation in Delhi, where he lives and works, to touring with the book all across the country — and that doesn’t just mean attending quiet book-readings at posh bookstores but visiting schools to talk to students about books and writing.

On Tuesday, Basu visited three city schools — Gear International, Inventure Academy and Sishu Griha in the morning before the formal launch at Reliance Time Out. Today, he will visit three more before rushing off to Mysore to continue the book tour. “I’m doing a much bigger tour this time than I’ve ever done before, and going to several cities I’ve never actually seen. There’s been a certain amount of international interest as well, all of which is very encouraging,” says Basu.

Publishers Scholastic India clearly have big plans for the book, which is being looked at as the first of a series titled the Morningstar Agency Adventures — a set-up that’s ambitious and rich with possibilities. The Morningstar Agency, an organisation that has existed for many centuries and shaped many world events in secret (until now), hires people with unique talents and even more spectacular backgrounds: one of the protagonists in this book is a young man who turns out to be Mowgli’s son. “I enjoy taking established literary characters and making them mine,” says Basu. “In this book, I’ve created characters whose roots and associations are familiar to the reader. It’s nice to pick up from where the classics left off.”

Ask him how he manages to control the many plot threads that typically make up his books and he says, “It’s mostly practice. Actually, any proficiency I’ve gained at swiftly switching between multiple plotlines over short spaces has been due to the experience of writing comics and screenplays, where space is really much more constrained than it is in a novel.” He likes it, he says, when there are a lot of things happening simultaneously — in life and in books. “In books, at least you do get to resolve a few plot threads,” he smiles.