Influences on My Writing - Part I - Major SFF Writers · 6:57am Aug 23rd, 2014
Introduction
I thought I'd make a list of (some of) the main influences on my writing -- both mainstream SFF authors and fanfic authors from this site. I think this might be of interest to some of those following me. So here goes.
I. Mainstream SFF Authors
I have been very strongly influenced by writers from the 1920's through the 1960's, though I've also paid attention to writers from before and after that 50-year period. Some of the major influences from mainstream SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) are:
Poul Anderson (1926-2001)
Known as The Bard of Science Fiction, he was notable for his incredibly lyrical style and his intense focus on multi-sensory description in scenes and the interaction of strong, admirable characters. He had a very good understanding of hard science (he was trained as an engineer) and an even better understanding of history; his work breathed the glory and tragedy of history, in particular the inevitability of the fall of even the most admirable civilizations, but always with an appreciation of the wonder and nobility of the human spirit. He was both a strong rationalist and poetically mystical, at one and the same time.
He has very much influenced my descriptive style. You'll notice that I always try to incorporate at least three senses into any extended description of a scene. That's something I learned from Poul Anderson. My imagining of Celestia and Luna as strong, brilliant, and passionate but fallible beings owes a lot to his heroines, who were often noble and heart-breakingly beautiful of spirit, but never perfect -- and were all the greater for their imperfections.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
He was one of the great polymaths of human history -- a popularizer and systematizer of almost every field of human scholarly and scientific endeavor. He wrote or edited some 500 books, and contributed significant content even to the ones he edited, including both fiction and non-fiction. He single-handedly invented the concept of restrained artificial intelligence and contributed to the notion of cliometrics (the scientific study of history); his two most famous series (later mashed up into one universe) -- the Robot stories and the Foundation novels -- are about these two subjects.
His most obvious influence on my fanfic is the Paradise Entity, the AI running and powered by the Great Wish, that ran the G3 universe and which is now attempting to restore it from the backup copy it made of its entire inhabited Solar System. This is inspired both by his supercomputer Multivac and by his Three Laws Robots: like Multivac, the Paradise Entity is a godlike AI, and Paradise is explicitly Three Laws compliant (towards Ponies, of course, rather than Humans). It's because of Asimov that the Paradise Entity is a friendly god.
Stephen Baxter (b. 1957)
Stephen Baxter is in many ways an heir to Arthur C. Clarke and H. G. Wells. He's a mathematician and an engineer, and his science fiction is both hard and scientifically-daring -- he is not afraid to examine the possible implications of the most daring and cutting-edge scientific theories. His work often involves radically-different environments and sapient races dwelling in those environments, and cosmic wars between very alien races.
Stephen Baxter has strongly influenced my concept of the Cosmic Concepts as having emerged from the interplay first of natural forces and then psychic ones, and as having been very alien at the moment of their first emergence. My image of the battleforms of the Cosmics owes a lot to his Xeelee, as does my image of their terrifying power and merciless nature on human or equine scales. My concept of the Changelings and their not-too-bright Hive Minds draws on his Coalescent phase of Humanity. Sorry, Ceymi.
David Brin (b. 1950)
David Brin is most famous for his Uplift War stories, which are space opera about an ancient inter-galactic super-civilization whose most important social institution is that of Uplift -- in which one sapient race raises pre-sapient races to sapience, and then becomes their Patron for many hundreds of millennia to come. The most important concept from that series is that of Uplift itself.
This has obvious influenced my version of the origin of the Ponies, in which the Great G'marr took ancestral horses and raised them to sapience as the Proto-Ponies -- then the Eldren took the Proto-Ponies and modified them into the Five Kinds (Earth Ponies, Pegasi, Unicorns, Sea-Ponies and Flutter-Ponies). And now, of course, the Alicorns Celestia and Luna have decided to further meddle with the Ponies, raising them to still-greater heights of intelligence and capability.
None of this would have been conceived so clearly by me without the example of David Brin.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)
There was a brief shining period -- between around 1945 and 1965 -- when Arthur C. Clarke wrote short stories of such diamond-like brilliance, clarity and precision that they will stand as monuments to the genre of how to write science fiction short stories for a very long time. Some of these include "Second Chance," "A Walk in the Dark," "The Fires Within," "Rescue Party" and "Time's Arrow." Many of these were lovingly-understated tales of incredible cosmic horror.
Arthur C. Clarke had a lot to do with a certain unsentimental rationalism that I manifest at the darker moments in my stories. He also has a lot to do with the care I take toward my word choice and sentence and paragraph structure. Clarke's best stories read like prose poems, with very careful moderation of language to convey mood. Clarke was a communications and radio engineer, the inventor of the concept of the communications satellite, but his greatest acts of communiation lay in these short stories.
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
He was a man poised perfectly between the past and the future. He was a sentimental antiquarian who loved the 17th and 18th century America whose last vestiges were vanishing in his lifetime, and a coldly-rational amateur scientist who saw the horrible and nihilistic implications of the revelation of the antiquity of the Earth and Universe and the unimportance of Humanity in the cosmic scheme of things.
His great achievement was to take the whole genre of horror fiction, which most other authors had seen as supernatural, and ground it firmly in science fiction. His gods and demons were (mostly) malign extraterrestrials or ultraterrestrials. He curiously combined a rational fascination with their natures with a fear of them as alien, one which mirrored his own cultural xenophobia. As he continued to write, xenophilia gained ground over his xenophobia -- had he survived into the 1940's, I suspect he would have written some truly awesome first contact tales.
His writing has extensively inspired my fanfiction. Claire Quartz Pie is very much a good-girl version of Wilbur Whateley's Twin -- indeed my origin of Pinkie Pie is a eucatastrophic version of The Dunwich Horror. Rational rather than blindly malign versions of the Byakhee and the Deep Ones dwell on and around the Pony Earth. My whole concept of the Night Shadows is intentionally-Lovecraftian, and Nyarlathotep comes straight out of his work. The "old" Earth on which I write, with layer upon layer of history and forgotten civilizations and races, is inspired by Lovecraft's complex fictional prehistory. I have and always will be a tremendous fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, and it surely shows in everything I write. I even emulate his style in places when I write horror.
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961)
Mostly forgotten now, Clark Ashton Smith was one of the most prolific and imaginative contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos. He possessed an erudite and lyrical style, which combined strong sentiment with a pronounced rationalism and a strong sardonic humor. He was, unlike Lovecraft, fond of romantic themes in his tales, and (very unusually for the time in which he wrote -- the 1930's) was strongly sympathetic to both interracial and interspecies love (more than one of his stories ends with a human and his alien beloved living happily ever after).
The Voormis (whose highest civilization, the Great G'marr, are credited by me with first uplifting horses to become the Proto-Ponies) and their home of Hyperborea (Greenland), are both Clark Ashton Smith's creations. The strongly positive attitude I take toward interracial and interspecies love (The Reconciliation, Sparity, and Claire's marriage to a Byakhee coalition) is inspired in part by Clark Ashton Smith. He was in many ways a more humane writer than was common before World War II, and deserves to be recognized for it.
Edward E. "Doc" Smith (1890-1965)
Quite simply the most intellectually-productive author of space opera ever to live. "Doc" Smith almost invented the concept of the peaceful, multi-species interstellar federation (though Edward Hamilton anticipated it in some earlier work): his Civilization is the archetype of most good-guy societies in space opera today. He also invented the concept of the psychic amplifier artifact: his Lens of Civilization is the original both of the Green Lantern Rings and of the Elements of Harmony.
He was one of the first authors to write tales of interstellar adventure, and one of the first to take seriously the scale of energy, space and time implied by the early 20th-century discoveries of the Universe, and consider what they might mean for future civilizations. He told tales of epic scope and cosmic wonder. His heroes were big enough for the stages on which they strode: they were awed by the immensity of Space and Time -- but never quite dwarfed by them.
"Doc" Smith exerted an enormous influence on all subsequent science fiction, especially space opera. Star Trek in all its permutations was greatly inspired by his work. Among other things he invented the concept of the disembodied super-intellectual energy being -- of the sort that John DeLancie got to play, and which has more than a minor influence on the characterization of Discord. Much Japanese space opera animation has also been influenced by his work -- to cite a minor example, he invented the original version of the wave-motion gun.
"Doc" Smith's presence is in my mind whenever I write an epic action scene, whether heroic or disastrous. Numerous flashbacks in Nightmares Are Tragic, and the description of the Cataclysm in Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason, were more or less directly inspired by his work.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
Tolkien took the old epic fantasy form and adapted it to modern English language fantasy -- he almost single-handed invented both High Fantasy and the concept of the elaborate secondary creation. He wrote in a deceptively-simple and straightforward style which carries an air of rolling majesty that is difficult to duplicate. He was also a skilled poet, and his various works contain numerous poems of really excellent quality.
Tolkien was a strong and obvious inspiration for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in general. The whole civilization of Equestria bears a very strong resemblance to one of Tolkien's Elven or Westernessean cultures, complete with an admirable noble female ruler (Celestia owes more than a little to Galadriel) and simple, welcoming homespun towns (Ponyville was IMO inspired by the Shire). Tolkien even liked horses, as is obvious from his creation of Shadowfax (Gandalf's steed) and the equestrian semi-barbaric culture of Rohan.
Those of you who have read An Extended Performance are aware that he not only strongly-influenced my concept of evil, but that I outright stole one of his most famous characters and put him in my story. I say this unashamed, because one can do worse than to steal from a master. Aside from Gandalf/Wisedreamer/White-Beard the Grey, and his little friend Delver/Smeagol, Trixie learned a version of the Beren and Luthien from her mentor, and delights audiences with it whenever she gets the chance. She's not afraid to steal from the masters either. She may have been sorrier that she had heard of the Nazgul when she met the Nightstallion.
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Next: Part II - FIMFiction Author Influences
You know, I think one of the strongest direct influences on MLP:FiM is almost certainly Harry Potter. There are too many analogous characters and situations to be coincidental.
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It even gets directly referenced in the "A Little Glass of Water" song, remember?
Rowling's not a big influence on my writing though, mainly because I didn't encounter her until my style was mostly set. However, she is a really good writer.
You have fantastic taste.
Clarke's Rescue Mission is perhaps the best tale of its type I have ever read, if you get a chance check or the audio version done by Escape Pod. It is at once dealing with a rather gloomy future (Earth being in the state it is) and yet is ultimately hopeful.
Doc Smith, Asimov, Anderson and Tolkien is like taking a shelf from my childhood library, and Lovecraft is my recent passion.
If you had mentioned Larry Niven I would have wondered if you where reading over my shoulder.
2393475 I have to admit that I'm badly undereducated in sci-fi. Fantasy's different, but even there, my favorite writer is Terry Pratchett. Except for Tolkein, of course.
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Canterlot is supposed to be modeled on Gondor and Minas Tirith.
Question: do you also have influences from modern writers? (ok, yeah, all of these writers are "modern", I mean authors who are alive and currently popular right now and may still have to produce their best work-to give an example, a lot of people are influenced by Jim Butcher, although whether that's a good or bad thing I'll leave it up to you)
And Charles Stross wrote a novel that he now can't continue because everything in it has come true :-P
You are much better read than I. I've sampled a few of these literary giants, but from the sound of it, I haven't done so nearly enough. I'm going to treat this blog as a reading list.
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Well, Baxter and Brin are still alive. I mentioned them for my version of Alex Warlorn's Cosmics and for the Changelings; and for the concept of Uplift respectively.
Some other living authors who have influenced me, though not particularly as regarding my fanfics, are Alistair Reynolds (most notably his Inhibitors), Gregory Benford, Peter Hamilton, John Wright, Alan Dean Foster and Stephen King.
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Oh yes, Canterlot is very much on the model of one of Tolkien's cities. Beautiful -- and given its location, highly-defensible against anything save air attack. (Too bad so many of Equestria's potential enemies can fly).
Were you ever a fan of Michael Chriton? I loved his works. Prey and Jurassic Park being my favourites.
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Michael Crichton wrote some really good stories, almost all of them classifiable as science-fiction horror. The strange thing is that he tended to view almost all of his wonders from a very reactionary "this is a violation of how things should be" point of view, with the consequence that he wound up creating (or very much popularizing) numerous wondrous concepts which other writers then picked up on as such but which he had originally presented as having horrific consequences.
The most obvious example of this is the idea of bringing back extinct species for a zoo or preserve, which he showed in Jurassic Park and The Lost World. In his novels, it fails miserably -- but the reason for its failure is a poorly-conceived security system and the consequences not really any worse than would be the case if lots of really dangerous animals escaped from a real-life zoo (and note: you're as dead if killed by a tiger as if killed by a tyrannosaur, and it's not notably more difficult for the tiger to accomplish).
A rare benign example of this, with what he imagined a happy but would really be a horrific ending, is the fate of Amy in Congo. Amy is an acculturated gorilla who is sent on a mission to a lost city in the Congo inhabited by a subspecies of gorillas who had been trained as war-beasts by an ancient civilization. She winds up defecting to live with a local gorilla tribe.
Here, the inspiration is obvious (Koko) and the reason why Amy winds up mated rather than dead is because it's pretty much impossible to hate Koko (and I believe Crichton met her personally); Koko's a pretty sweet creature. Though I'm not sure that Amy would have really enjoyed her life in the forest -- Koko probably wouldn't have enjoyed living at the subsistence-level, constant-danger level of wild gorillas, even when she was young.
Ironically, Crichton's long-term influence on the genre is that he has injected into popular culture, as wondrous expectations, many of the scientific developments he very obviously feared.
Of Baxter I've only read Anti-Ice which was okay, if kinda short (read it in a half hour).
How about Stanley Weinbaum and his Planetary Sequence? He was a contemporary of Doc Smith and is credited with developing the first truly non-human aliens (i.e., not only non-human in appearance, but in psychology as well). The science in the series was good when written (1933) but is a bit, well, behind these days. Still, it's not a space opera, and it's obvious that Weinbaum tried to make his stories scientifically accurate, at least by the standards of the day.
Have you read George Griffith? His space travel stuff was written in the 1890s, and is pretty much all nonsense, if fun nonsense. (Advanced Greek speaking humans who live secretly on Ganymede! Blind Hairless Feeler-Apes of the Moon! Double-ended Sea Serpents of the gas-oceans of Neptune!) That being said, the space suits he puts his characters in are remarkably realistic. Odd, given everything else.
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I thought about Stanley G. Weinbaum -- he's influenced my concepts of how to write aliens (and alien ecosystems) in my non-fanfic, and he probably will when and if I start writing my far-future Ponyverse tales (when the Ponies expand outward into the Universe). One of the nice things about Claire's Gates is that they permit interplanetary and even interstellar exploration without high energy expenditures, meaning that it can be done on the cheap, and even by wagon, truck or railroad. That gives me the excuse to write science fiction with a very Golden Age feel to it, especially since the crash-program Lensman Arms Race which let the Ponies win the Shadow War have left them with a serious mismatch between culture and technological cpability -- they have a rather early-to-mid-20th-century culture as they are pioneering the worlds of the Solar System and taking their first halting steps beyond to other stars.
I've not gotten around to reading Griffith yet, though I've heard of him before.
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Here is a review of "Rescue Party" I originaly wrote around eight years ago and reprinted three years ago.
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Thanks for sharing, this quote in particular struck me.
As much as i love cataclysmic fiction and the post apocalypse, at times there is a element of hope that is lost in the shuffle.
And because i forgot to provide a link before, here you go...
http://escapepod.org/2013/06/18/ep400-rescue-party/
(Sorry that i can't hot link from my phone )