Imagination Comes First
It still amazes me how much joy I felt simply imagining it—ISRO, India’s space agency, not just building rockets or launching satellites, but becoming a true spacefaring force. I’d sit for hours on my couch, eyes half-closed, imagining Gaganyaan lifting off with the sun rising behind it, imagining the BAS—India’s first full-fledged space station—gleaming like a silver lotus in low Earth orbit. I imagined India not as a player tagging along behind the spacefaring nations, but as the torchbearer of a new era in human history.
It was not hubris but hope. It was belief.
We often underestimate the quiet power of dreaming. But imagination has always preceded progress. Long before a single human boot touched the Moon, long before the sound of Sputnik crackled across radio receivers, there were stories—novels, essays, drawings, pulp magazines filled with tales of future cities, alien worlds, and vast space journeys. From the 1920s through the 1960s, American writers and thinkers imagined a cosmos full of possibility. That collective dream lit a fire in the minds of engineers, scientists, and explorers. The dreamers led, and the doers followed. Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein—they didn’t just write; they sparked revolutions of thought.
Why India? Why Now?
I believe it is now our turn. I see my India like that America. A country young in its space ambitions but old in its soul. A nation brimming with genius, potential, and hunger. And yes, I dare to imagine an India that discovers instantaneous interstellar travel—a form of faster-than-light propulsion that doesn’t rely on warp drives or antimatter, but on something far more intimate and mystical: the human mind at its highest state.
This idea forms the heart of my first book in the Zero Dimensional Space series. What if meditation, when mastered to its highest form, could bend space itself? What if a consciousness freed from ego, anxiety, and want could slip through the cracks in reality and take a spacecraft with it?
Writing this story and building those awe-inspiring worlds was genuinely breathtaking. I imagined our engineers wrestling with strange new physics. I saw Lata, a quantum physicist, making the world-changing discovery. I followed Nilima as she faced impossible decisions. I invented enemies too—Weili from China, calculating and cold, and Zoe, a radical environmentalist who sees humanity itself as a parasite.
But more than the plot, more than the speculative tech, what really stayed with me was the India I imagined. A confident, futuristic India. An India that not only catches up with the world but redefines it. One that doesn’t outsource its imagination to Hollywood, but crafts its own unique stories. We have the minds. We have a 5000 year-old civilization behind us. We have the hunger. All we need is to believe.
And that’s what I’m trying to do, in my own small way.
The Role of the Writer as Visionary
Zero Dimensional Space is my offering—not just to lovers of science fiction, but to every young person in India who has ever looked up at the stars and wondered, “Why not us?”
So yes, this novel is about spaceships and future wars. But it’s also about bliss. About a level 1 entity, the one who is able to neutralize all quantum fluctuations. Remember, anyone can become a level 1 entity. There are no superheroes, special powers, nor are there any saints or god-people. In ZDS there are the ordinary people who achieve the extraordinary by shedding all that is unnecessary, by ‘letting go’. They don’t just represent the end goal of both science and spirituality, but are that end goal, they are the absolute, they are freedom, they are truth.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for imagining with me.
And if you find yourself daydreaming after finishing the last page, then I’ve done my job.
Manoj K.
Author of Zero Dimensional Space
allthingsreal.net
