Amit Majmudar is a poet, essayist, and novelist from Westerville, Ohio, USA. His latest book is THE BOOK OF KILLINGS (Penguin India, 2025), the final volume of a trilogy retelling the Mahabharata.

Amit’s story ‘Scarlet Harvest’—in which an organ recipient is haunted by the memories of his unwilling organ donor—features in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION. The anthology’s editor Tejaswinee Roychowdhury interviewed him to find out about his literary influences.

How do you perceive speculative fiction vis-à-vis the world around you?

I feel that speculative fiction is an open area of a graph without data collected yet. Over here, to the left, there is the present moment and all we know about it, already plotted. I can draw a trend line and extrapolate that trend line into the future, into the blank right-hand side of the graph. Wherever that trend line ends up, that’s where the story is.

Who and/or what are some of your influences while writing speculative fiction?

Probably Kurt Vonnegut, although he wrote in a more humorous vein. For the darker aspects, I have read a fair amount of Philip K. Dick, and that almost certainly played into my style.

Tell us about the creative process behind your story.

This story, like most of the fiction and poetry I have written, was composed freeform, without much sense of where anything was going. There is usually a very broad seed idea or scene that I work from or towards, but I try not to stay anchored to it; that is, I am willing to scrap it or alter it if the piece alters itself in real time, as I am writing it, in some other direction. So the creative process is very much a process of learning to balance the sense of a destination with the willingness, eagerness, really, to let myself go.