Mukul Kesavan: I've read Gaiman in his prose fiction. I have to say there was a wonderful short story which I read of him which sort of takes off on the Sherlock Holmes theme and he marries it with science fictional grotesque which is a complete tour de force. My concern is, I do enjoy his prose fiction and I am not familiar with the Sandman series, but certainly on basis of his prose fiction I am not persuaded that his imagination is…why would he be in purely in speculative science fictional terms, why would he be ahead of, say, Margaret Atwood, who is a great novelist, who has written great speculative fiction?
Nilanajana Roy: There is no comparison between the Sandman series and anything that Atwood has written. His prose fiction is really not the best example. I think Sandman cast a wider shadow on the writers of this generation.
Mukul Kesavan: Who are these writers?
Nilanjana Roy: I think everyone from George R.R. Martin, I don’t think Atwood would have been influenced by Gaiman, to China Mieville…
Mukul Kesavan: I think Martin is not a writer of any consequence. He is a dreadful novelist. He is enormously influential and the television series has done wonders for his book but he wrote a first-rate first beginning. The first novel is very good but after that he seemed to abandon any attempt at addressing any question of narrative or method.
Nilanjana Roy: I think there is a whole world of speculative fiction and fantasy writers out there. That is a genre into itself and pretty much every writer who's won the Nebula Prize in the last ten years is influenced by him, he is everybody’s hero. I think we will be ignoring a whole generation of readers.
Sunil Sethi: He is your hero, but is he everybody’s hero?
Nilanjana Roy: I think he is very much this generation’s hero.
Sunil Sethi: Well, the rest of the panel is not convinced, so we are clearly not this generation.
Nilanjana Roy: I didn’t mean to put it that way…
Nilanjana Roy: It is a series and has to be taken in that flow.
Mani Shankar Aiyar: The fact that many of us haven't read this, it’s a genre that’s different, I think I would like to vote along with Nilanjana.
Nilanjana Roy: Alright. My next is a science book: The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. Another book that surprised me when I read it and more interestingly when I re-read it because it’s about such an important moment in human history.
Sunil Sethi: I think one way of taking this debate forward is to ask the first elemental question, what do we look for in a book? What is this first impulse that draws us to reading? Is it entertainment, is it a desire to be informed, what is it?
Mani Shankar Aiyar: Surely, on our bedside table you have a dozen books. I mean, I always have a Wodehouse. At the same time I also have The Rise and Fall of Third Reich. One reads for a variety of reasons, some of which is entertainment, some of it is enlightenment, some of it is reflection, some of it is because someone has recommended it to you. And the desire to know what happened and why did happen and how did it turn out. So there is no singular answer to the question why we read.