Exclusive NYCC Interview With Anand Gandhi, The Creator Of 'Maya'
Image Source: Department of Lore Inc.
At New York Comic Con 2025, CultureSlate had the opportunity to attend a panel and talk to the author and creator of MAYA, Anand Gandhi. MAYA is a wonderfully rich world-building science fiction fantasy story. The story itself will be and is available across all mediums, from novel, film, graphic novel, and board games, just to name a few. It asks deep questions of morals and science, especially artificial intelligence, and immerses you into such a unique story with characters the like of which you’ve never encountered before. It’s diverse in the characters and the creators who have helped work on it. If you are a lover of science fiction and fantasy, you are not going to want to miss this, and even if you aren’t, take a look anyway. There might be something for you in all of the many ways this story is being brought to life.
CS: Tell me a little bit about this world, the concept, and how it came to be.
Anand: Imagine a world that's ruled by Facebooks and Amazons, which is not a very hard world to imagine. And imagine the rulers of this world were, not only wealthy, but worshiped as living gods. Their intention was the living will of every individual, not enforced through military, but enforced through narrative manipulation. It's a world that's very familiar to us. It's a world not of gods and monsters, but a world that feels familiar to any of us who have lived in this world of social media, AI, and internet. What does the future of humanity look like? What does it look like to live in a world where we could not be very certain all the time that our intentions, behaviors, and beliefs are truly our own, and if they're not being nudged by stories that we have been shown by the great algorithms.
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Image Source: Department of Lore Inc.
We have taken this world, which is analogous to the world we are in, and we have created a fantasy world out of it. A world with completely new creatures and species unlike any we have seen before, a magnificent world, a mixtopian civilization, and invented that world with endless cultures and histories and its own scientific logic, its own biologies, its own cultural and political histories, its own conflicts between various species and various groups, and built a very, very rich lore around it.
From this vast lore of MAYA, we're now presenting to the world, films, games, graphic novels, board games, RPGs, and a wide variety of experiences. Of those experiences, the first expression that people will be able to engage with, the gateway to the world, is the novel. That novel has been recorded and narrated by the great Hugo Weaving (The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings).
We also wanted people to start imagining the world with us as we wrote the novel. We got some of the greatest concept artists from around the world, people who have worked on some of the greatest works that we have seen in the last decade such as Avatar, Planet of the Apes, and Marvel. They have started imagining the world even before the film comes out. Even at the level of the novel, you get to see all this gorgeous concept art as if it's already a film.
CS: Is the film going to be animated with all of that beautiful art?
Anand: The film is lifelike. Think of Planet Of The Apes. Is it animated, or is it people wearing costumes? We don't need people to wear ape costumes anymore, but we can have actors puppeteering the 3D characters and make them look extremely lifelike. That's the technology that you can expect. The experience of the film is live action, but it's entirely animated.
Image Source: Department of Lore Inc.
CS: The novel was just on Kickstarter, but for those that missed it, where and when are they going to be able to get the novel?
Anand: As of right now, we surpassed 2,000% of our funding goal on Kickstarter. So, we are at $210,000 right now. [The Kickstarter ended up raising over $419,000 after NYCC]. The community has been very accepting and warm and excited about it and is building. The novel will be up for pre-sales for those who missed the Kickstarter around February.
CS: What other mediums is MAYA in as of right now?
Anand: The first two board games are ready. We have been making them for the last four years. That's the thing about MAYA, all expressions are embedded in the DNA of the project. It's not an afterthought. We started making the games and the books and the films simultaneously. The first two board games are done. The first board game [launched] in Essen, Germany. It'll be on Kickstarter in February for everyone to buy. Right now we are doing play tests around the world. It’s a massive board game. It's a deck construction board game with an arena control element and hundreds of cards. Right now we have 300 hand-drawn, hand-painted, illustrated cards. We will be at PAX. We will be at Gen Con. We will be at Spiel Essen.
Image Source: Department of Lore Inc.
CS: You mentioned briefly in the panel when you were talking about the mediums that stretch across everything that gaming is the big one. When you started with the concept, was it just to make a game, and then it has grown from there?
Anand: It was always to do everything simultaneously. We wanted to engage all of humanity in every language we speak, in the diversity of expressions that we have at our disposal. So we have games, films, graphic novels, novels, and all of it was thought at the very inception of the world. We have nonfiction work coming out of MAYA. We, of course, have the lore engine, but we also have nonfiction essays. We have, for example, Anil Seth who is the neuroscientist who we have invited to write the essays on cognitive science and neuroscience of the fictitious species within MAYA. We have all kinds of wonderful science that we will be talking about. There are all kinds of really amazing work, and all of this was conceived at the very birth of MAYA.
The first novel of MAYA will be available for purchase in February of 2026. You can still pledge late to the Kickstarter for MAYA: Seed Take Root, the first novel. The board game will be on Kickstarter in February of 2026. Stay tuned for news and updates on the various mediums that this story will be told in, and come dive into the world of MAYA.
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Source: Kickstarter
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