1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
I’m Lavanya and I write science fiction! I’m the author of The Ten Percent Thief, which was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award earlier this year. It’s also available in translation in French, Italian and Catalan, with more languages forthcoming. And my new book Interstellar MegaChef, has just made its way out into the world!
I’m also occasionally a game designer–if you ever played FarmVille or Mafia Wars, your Facebook feed was partly my fault. I’ve also built a ton of other games, tinkered with augmented reality and created custom 3D-printed robots as part of my gaming career.
When I’m not working, I spend my time immersed in videogames, playing the piano, and travelling the world. I love animals, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t caring for dogs, cats, or birds. I spend most of my year shuttling between Bangalore and Hyderabad, India.

2.- How did you start writing?
I think my journey as a writer began as a reader and a listener. I fell in love with stories as a child–my parents read to me every night, and I swiftly decided that I needed to be able to make sense of words on my own. I was an early reader, and I grew up devouring books at a pretty alarming rate, often supported by indulgent librarians who let me borrow more books than I was technically allowed. I loved how the worlds within pages made me feel, and how they opened my mind to different people and perspectives. I wanted to be able to create that for other people, and decided very young that I wanted to be a writer.
I had notebooks filled with stories when I was in school, and often found myself lost in fictional worlds of my own invention. I wrote a novel at thirteen–it was epic fantasy! But somewhere, my inner voice told me that I hadn’t found myself, yet. I had to keep experimenting with form, structure and voice until I arrived at the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. There was a moment when all the pieces fell together, and The Ten Percent Thief (née Analog/ Virtual) was the outcome.

3.- Could you tell us about how the idea for the original Analog/Virtual (The Ten Percent Thief later) appeared?
I worked as a game designer right from the beginning of my career, and it’s a high-pressure industry. I was constantly plugged in to all my devices–smartphone, tablet, multiple gaming consoles, smart-watch, you name it. And I took to fueling my drive to succeed by working long hours, as everyone tends to do. This led to me trying to handle the rest of my life remotely–I’d get my laundry picked up, my groceries delivered, and even took to shopping for cushion covers via apps.
I finally took a break after a few years, and I found myself having a panic attack when I visited a grocery store for the first time in ages. I was overwhelmed by the fact that tomatoes were, in fact, 3D objects and not jpegs on the screen of a door-delivery app. Sounds dramatic, I know. It was.
The experience prompted me to reassess my priorities, and it sparked the first chapter I wrote in my debut novel, The Ten Percent Thief.
It began as an exploration of the cognitive dissonance I’d experienced, and as the words emerged on the page, it became the origins of a world. In my case, I’d failed to establish boundaries with my personal technology, but what if I didn’t have a choice? What if all my technology was invasive, mandated by an unforgiving system? This was the beginning of Apex City, run by the insidious Bell Corporation, utilising the Bell Curve as an algorithm applied to society. And of course, once I had these pieces in place, I had to go off and explore what the other people in Apex City were doing.
The Ten Percent Thief reflects my concerns about the future. It’s both an urgent warning and social satire, and seeks to examine the impact of technocapitalism and the climate crisis in near-future Bangalore, rebranded Apex City. It’s structured as a mosaic novel, written from the jagged perspectives of over twenty protagonists, all of whom are struggling to find meaning in a ruthless, relentless reality.

4.- Why did you use this particular narrative structure on The Ten Percent Thief?
Apex City is governed by a corporation, and its citizens are mapped onto the Bell Curve. Productivity and the right social persona can catapult individuals to the top twenty percent of society. If you succeed, you get the chance to belong to this Virtual elite–there’s limitless access to privilege, including cutting edge tech that makes your world a better place. Fail to perform, and you risk falling to the bottom ten percent—routinely deported from the city and branded Analogs, with no access to running water, electricity, or your humanity.
When I started writing the first chapter in this novel (it’s not the first chapter in the published version, though!), I followed a single protagonist through a slice of her life–she’s failing to perform at her workplace, and finds herself put on a “Performance Improvement Programme.” In this reality, this means that she’s stripped of all her technology aids, and forced to navigate a grocery store IRL.
As I walked in her footsteps, living in her world, visions of everyday people going about their lives under the all-too-real pressure to perform, to constantly present the best version of themselves, popped into my head faster than I could put pen to paper. I wanted to follow their paths through the weave of the world they belonged to. And that’s when I realised that I wanted to tell the story of a city pushed to its breaking point, pummeled into submission by the climate crisis, struggling to prove its worth to its corporate overlords, its foundations crumbling beneath the burden of survival, trying to save itself. A city on the knife edge of something remarkable, teetering between evolution and annihilation.
Over twenty different voices, their threads running in parallel, crossing over each other, cutting each other off, lending texture and color to each other, emerged on the page, one story at a time, knitting themselves into this narrative. The story of a city is the story of its people, and I wanted to reflect as many people as I could on the page. There was no other way this novel could be.

5.- Would you say your personal background has influenced your novels?
 I find myself drawing on a lot of my personal background and life experiences when I’m writing. I grew up in Bangalore, and watched the city transform into a tech and startup hub in under a decade. We experienced unchecked, barely-planned development–for all the economic upside, and the benefits of a more cosmopolitan city, my hometown is fraught with many of the most pressing issues associated with the anthropocene epoch. We have some of the worst traffic in the world, the effects of the climate crisis are tangible, social disparity is a growing rift… And all my concerns with this find their way into my debut novel, The Ten Percent Thief.
As a game designer, I’m very familiar with a lot of the technology dictating the times we live in. I’ve effectively peeked behind the veil at the tech concerns that we’re grappling with. And while games might be harmless entertainment when viewed in isolation, what I’ve seen paints a terrifying picture when applied to data privacy, AI, the echo chambers of social media, and the capacity for all the unethical tech-bros in power to manipulate us all. These concerns find their way into nearly all my work, including my new novel, Interstellar MegaChef.
This new novel centres on the quest for personal identity, and the struggles one might face attempting to reconcile it with the wider world. As an Indian woman portraying a snapshot of the Global South in my work, I’m a product of a post-colonial world, and working within a reality framed by racist and gendered stereotypes. I enjoy subverting these expectations when I bring my background into my writing. There’s no singular version of India, or of the Global South, and I love the multidimensional approach this allows me to take when challenging stereotypes all while reflecting aspects of my heritage, and the concerns unique to where I live, on the page. In Interstellar MegaChef, I choose to do this by focusing on food cultures, drawing upon my own food culture as a source of inspiration.

6.- How did the first idea for Interstellar Megachef appear? Did it change much from its inception to the book we are currently reading?
The book you read today is fairly close to the one that first popped into my head–I wanted to reflect humanity’s relationship with food through a tale set in the far future. The novel is largely written from the perspectives of two protagonists: Saras Kaveri is an Earthling chef whose entire career is built on Earthling food. She escapes her difficult past for the planet Primus, the cultural center of human-occupied space. Her goal is to prove herself as a chef, and win the culinary critics on Primus over with food that reflects her identity. She experiences shocking xenophobia, instead.
Serenity Ko is a tech whiz-kid on Primus, who knows nothing about food but wants to harness its potential for a new sim she’s developing. Woefully underprepared for the challenge, a chance meeting with Saras Kaveri results in their working together to change the future of food.
The incidents that prompted me to write Interstellar MegaChef popped into my head at two distinct moments in time, about a year apart from each other.
I was recovering from a rather serious illness, and I’d completely lost my appetite. All I could stomach was a traditional Tamilian food made by my grandmother–rasam and rice. Rasam is a broth made from tamarind and tomatoes, infused with a spice blend (every family has its own secret recipe!), seasoned with tempered mustard seeds, and garnished with fresh cilantro. There are dozens of variations, each one is unique, and all of them are delicious. But, this is a food that people outside my culture have nearly never heard of!
How could this nourishing, restorative, genuinely delicious food have such a low-key existence? Why is it that some foods catch on in the popular imagination while others… don’t? And who holds the power to make that happen?
I went down the rabbit hole looking for answers. I delved into the relationship between food and cultural hegemony. I followed the journeys of chefs from historically marginalized backgrounds, and lost myself in the history of all the foods we take for granted—like salt, once the most valuable commodity in the world; sank into the colonial origins of curry; immersed myself in tracing food cultures passed on through human migrations, farming practices, food myths and propaganda from MSG to corn syrup…
Cut to: one year later, when the world lived in lockdown. Much like millions of people, I experienced the loneliness of social isolation, dreaming of spending time with my friends at the local pub, or large celebratory dinners with family. And all the while, there were millions of people in India alone without access to food, and I began to support food banks and community drives to help feed them.
All this led me to examine food as a privilege, food as a social experience, food as an axis of cultural stereotyping and xenophobia, food as a reflection of deep-seated power structures… And Interstellar MegaChef began to spill over onto the page.

7.- Food plays an important role in this novel, so I must ask: what does food mean for you? Or the act of cooking it, as for our main character?
One of the things I love about living in India is that no two cultures are entirely alike, and your friends and neighbours are inevitably people from multiple cultural backgrounds. My own cultural heritage is shaped by at least half a dozen different cultures in India. I grew up with a glorious number of these influences in the food I ate–every dish spiced differently, often using similar ingredients in entirely unique ways… and food has always been this meeting place of different fragments of my identity, connecting me to different places and people across space and time.
When you open yourself up to different culinary experiences, you open yourself up to different people, their perspectives and histories, their languages and self-expression. I see food as a bridge to understanding the people around me. When I travel, I make lists of local foods I want to try—from street foods to local beers and spirits, and even the occasional fine dining experience. And I always try and take ingredients back home with me, so I can experiment in my kitchen. 

8.- Tech levels on Interstellar Megachef are almost scary. Would you say it is influenced by how fast some technologies have been developed in our own world?
Yes, and no. Considering the book is set two thousand years in the future, I’d imagine civilisation would be so advanced that their tech borders on magic. And some of the tech reflects this—there’s flowmetal, which is an intelligent mycelial network that is used for all construction and to craft all physical objects on the planet Primus. There’s advanced food technology rooted in harvesting “Ras” or the essence of an ingredient, and concentrating it to extract flavour. And there are varied forms of space travel, of course, because humans have found alternative sources of fuel to help facilitate that.
And yet, a lot of the tech in this book feels very familiar, as if we could visualise it existing five hundred years from now. I’m talking about the nanotech bio-circuits and sim entertainment that I write about in detail, in particular—we’re making giant leaps in these spaces, and accelerating so fast that they could be reality far sooner than two millennia from now. And yet, they persist in this future that I imagine. This is intentional. I wanted to draw attention to the innovations that humanity is prioritising today, and our entrenched value systems that dictate what a “good life” should look like. I think we’re likely to stagnate when we accomplish those goals—look at how attempts to shift towards clean energy are constantly thwarted, in a web of vested political and industrial interests. I believe we tend to stop looking to the future when the present becomes profitable, and some of the technologies and their underlying value systems in this novel reflect these concerns.

9.- What other hobbies do you enjoy to do in your free time?
I love to read across genres, and when my fingers start to twitch, I switch to playing video games, either on my console or my phone! I’m also a pianist—I’ve been taking lessons since I was a child, and I’m always practicing or expanding my repertoire.
I enjoy traveling, and I do my best to visit a different part of the world every year, and soak in new experiences so I can better understand who we are—all the incredible similarities and differences that make up humanity. 

10.- What can we expect from Lavanya Lakshminarayan in the future?
There’s a sequel to Interstellar MegaChef in the works!
After that, I’m tinkering with a few other ideas. My reading currently includes a ton of ancient and medieval history, spy thrillers and philosophical texts… who knows where that will lead? I’m excited to find out!