Vikram Chandra

Hugo House: In a couple of months you will debut a brand-new piece at Hugo House; have you started working on it yet?

Vikram Chandra: Yes, I have been working on it. It's the beginning of a new book, but these are very early days, and I'm still feeling my way into this landscape.

HH: What were your first thoughts on receiving an invitation to write on an assigned theme? Any regrets on having said yes?

VC: No, no regrets at all. The theme happened to be something that I was thinking about anyway and actively working on. So it was a bit of a happy coincidence.

HH: Could you tell us a little bit about your process—how you approach writing something new?

VC: I generally start with an image. I mean a cinematic glimpse of a character in some space, not just visuals and sound but also, often, smell and taste and a feeling that hangs over the whole thing.  For instance, “Sacred Games” came from an image of a cop talking over an intercom with a famous gangster who has barricaded himself inside a strange, bunker-like house. I had no idea who this gangster was, why the house was hardened, how they had ended up in this situation. But the scene stayed with me, and when that happens I know there's some energy there, the seed of something. So then I start asking questions about the people, the place, and the situation, and end up with a story, which always feels half-constructed and half-found, especially in the first draft.

HH: If you could create an avatar for your work as a writer, what would it look like?

VC: Oh, I think I've already done that, in my first novel, “Red Earth and Pouring Rain”: a monkey at a typewriter.

HH: In “Snow Crash,” Neal Stephenson writes of the “metaverse,” a user-defined world that was the inspiration for “Second Life.” Describe your metaverse for us.

VC: The “real” world that we live in is increasingly saturated by technology, our bodies are festooned with devices that connect and map and interpret. We are watched, listened to, recognized, gathered and collated. We leave tracks through this geography that are frighteningly precise, that are available to those with money and power. We're inside cyberspace already.