I'm gonna need a minute here. :pinkiesad:
High Castle inspirations · 11:19pm Mar 2nd, 2015
This was originally a lengthy comment in the comment section of Equestrian Time-Slip in response to TheFeanor asking what my inspirations for The Mare in the High Castle were. I decided to repost it here, with some minor additions, because it seemed like a better fit for a blog post.
Just off the top of my head, here's a rundown, but be warned, it's a long 'un:
Philip K. Dick, obviously. Aside from High Castle, his books Ubik, The World Jones Made, Eye in the Sky, and Time Out of Joint were pretty big influences. The idea of everybody screwing each other over for promotion was inspired by Vulcan's Hammer, and Thorny Bends's final monologue has a bit of the last lines of Solar Lottery in it.
Umberto Eco's first three novels, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Island of the Day Before. There's a kind of strange simultaneity to both authors, who share a similar postmodern sensibility about people suffering through existential nightmares as they wander through untrustworthy realities.
Speaking of....Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (that book Neo hides his software in in The Matrix). Semiotics and symbolism in general. Jungian psychology. Epistemology, that is, learning how people learn things, how knowledge is built, how people construct worldviews and meaning and project them onto other things. The TV show Lost taught me how to write characters; how people dogmatically say "this means something" not necessarily because it's true, but because of their own emotional hang-ups. That show was practically a masterclass in psychological character writing, and I think it's a shame people misunderstood it as being about the mysteries of the universe, instead of about people being driven to obsession and insanity by mystery.
A lot of the spy flair was inspired by another one of my favorite TV shows, Spooks (or MI-5, as it's known in the United States), which never failed to find the human heart inside of complex and tricky political issues.
Although I never got very far into it, there's a touch of Ulysses in the idea of this rambling, epic story about characters wandering around a city over the course of one day.
A lot of it I drew from real life, as well. There's a kind of generation loss if you just keep copying from other stories. The real world has so much to get inspiration from (and even better, it's all public domain). Learning about actual magic and metaphysics, like the Daodejing or Aleister Crowley's Thelema or John Dee's paeans to the divinity of mathematics, gave me more inspiration for magic in my stories than the umpteenth Tolkien clone hurling fireballs. (Although speaking of Dee, another fictional work that inspired me was The Tempest, yet another work about magic, unreality, and fiction.)
Another Shakespeare inspiration: Sweetie Belle's favorite radio program, The Princess's Pride, was (very loosely) based on As You Like It. It's also the source of a famous quote, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."
The bulk of my real life inspiration came from the Weimar Republic, especially the modern art and jazz scene, and the Nazis' fanatical crusade against it for being part of the grand "Cultural Bolshevik" plot to destroy western culture. People love to obsess over the minutiae of World War II, of nations clashing and patriots idealistically marching into battle; I always found the nationalist persecution complex that festered between the wars far more relevant and insightful, when the streets of Berlin echoed with dark conspiracies about cabals of leftist elites like Freidrich Ebert and Matthias Erzberger who had stabbed the nation and its soldiers in the back and about evil Jews plotting terrorist attacks in the name of their atheist God, Karl Marx. (Hell, if you swapped out "Jew" for "Muslim", it could almost be the contents of a Twitter hashtag about American Sniper.)
In the same vein, the conflict between materialism and idealism and the whole historical background of the story is 100% hardcore historical materialism (much like George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which I also love). Situationism, too, went into the stew, with some Andy Warhol and Dadaism and other surrealist art movements. Charlie Chaplin's mix of goofball slapstick charm with a passionate political conscientiousness. Galleanist anarchism. Minstrel shows. The American National Guard being summoned over a handful of black kids attending a white school in the 50s. A lot of Gone With the Wind went into the musical.
It's all supposed to feel huge and engulfing, that society is on the tipping point (something else both Dick and Eco excelled at: grounding everything in economic issues and making the time period of the story feel vital and alive and yet also dangerously uncertain), that the people trapped inside the system feel powerless to control it as it self-destructs. That both sides have fundamentally irreconcilable goals shaped by their worldviews and claim (justly or unjustly) that the other side is trying to seize power and destroy them, so they have to strike first. That is, when the masses aren't descending into the underworld of the theater to escape from it all.
And there's no better soundtrack for all that than London Calling. Its prominent themes of industrial decay, racial tension, the apocalypse, alienation, and unemployment were a huge influence on the story and the city it took place in. Every brick and girder of this alt-Canterlot resonates with the Clash's cry for justice and equality in the face of Thatcherism.
Some of the dreamier passages were inspired by artists like Moby ("Overland", "Southside", Twilight's psych session dream was entirely "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters") and M83 ("Teen Angst", Thorny Bends's final monologue was all "Outro").
If anything that can be called the "seed" from which the story sprung, it's the song "Madness" by Muse. Downbeat and downtrodden, yet hopeful and defiant all the same, it gave me such a vivid image of all these broken, damaged reflections of Twilight and friends crossing paths on the streets of a nightmarish alternate universe Canterlot that I had to write about it. I took so much inspiration from its aurality (if that's not a word, it is now) that the early chapters (especially chapter two) have its indelible mark stamped all over them.
But I suppose, despite all of what I just said, my biggest inspiration was actually Friendship Is Magic. Boring, but true. Because it's right there in the title, isn't it? I had just watched Rainbow Rocks for the first time when I wrote this, and I was struck by much it confirmed what I'd been writing: that love and unity is an actual, metaphysical force that surrounds the characters, penetrates them, and binds the galaxy them together, ushering in a better world in the process.
"They say I have to say what reality is, and I never had any intention of doing that. And the reason that I never had any intention of doing that is that I don't know -- I have no knowledge at all of what reality is. All I can do is plaintively inquire 'Hey, gang, what is really real?' [...] Well, I just sort of sat there at the typewriter. I did eleven drafts of that novel. I mean literally; I'm not using that as hyperbole. I had a complicated code system worked out so I wouldn't start feeding old drafts back in, in which case I guess I'd still be there today. I decided the thing that was really real was love. Then I thought, Y'know, somebody else said this; now who the hell was it that said this? Well, actually, a lot of people have said it."
--Philip K. Dick
And that's pretty much everything that's come back to me now, some eighteen months after I started writing it.
Well, not everything. I'm keeping a few things close to the chest, or else it'll become blatantly obvious (even moreso, I mean) to see where the story is heading. But my readers will find out in due time.... 
I wanted to write a story that wrapped around the canon universe like a matryoshka doll and told the story of what happens to these characters when the magic that sustains them has faded away, and to see how they would deal with it; how much of them remains when everything is so different.
But there's a sea change brewing in the water and everything now turns to the future, and what happens to these characters when the magic starts to come back...
Interesting stuff!
Not having read The Man In The High Castle, how much of your story, and what parts of it, would you say are adapted from the original? I'm definitely getting the sense that a lot of the big themes about the nature of stories and the way they influence reality are faithful to the source, though the setting itself is either divergent or very strongly ponified (there's no tension of the two opposing conquerors … hmm. Or is there? Are the pegasi and unicorns the Nazis and Japanese?) I'm just curious in hindsight.
Interesting array of influences. I don't think my writing has ever been influenced by music. How might I make that happen?
...yeah. But Dick didn't get that by philosophizing; he was psychotic. He reportedly didn't always know what was real, not in the "but what is real, man?" sense, but in the "little yellow men from Venus are trying to kill me" sense.
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It's more of a broad homage to the author's early period, rather than copying the specific plot of the book. In fact, saying the book has a "plot" is probably too generous. It's four mostly self-contained character stories that occasionally crossover. Aside from the premise, the only major thing I took directly from it was Twilight accidentally wandering between universes.
Another major thing from it inspired me, but I decided to move it into the sequel instead because there wasn't room. If you've read Equestrian Time-Slip, you'll already know that Twilight is writing plays that mimic episodes of FIM, which was the role The Grasshopper Lies Heavy played in the original book.
However, even though I didn't ape the plot of the book directly, I did deliberately try and evoke the tone and theme of the author's body of work:
* Sci-Fi (at least by the standards of the main FIM universe)
* Multiple intersecting plotlines whose protagonists are ordinary, not-very-heroic schlubs just trying to make a living
* Life under fascism or some other corrupt socioeconomic conditions (with extended infodumps describing how it happened) that the main characters are powerless to change or confront directly
* Being trapped by artifice and simulacra, yet searching for the "authentic"
* The power of art and artistry, of creating something and being inspired
* The power of mass media to construct false worldviews
* Extended musings on metaphysics and philosophy
* The subjectivity of experience and the impossibility of absolute knowledge
* The main character unsure whether they're experiencing schizophrenia or a divine revelation
* Characters visiting a (Jungian) psychologist
* The unsettling notion reality is an illusion
* The idea that a quiet gnostic epiphany is more important than heroic battle
* An ambiguous, uncertain ending to a cynical story that nevertheless offers a ray of hope for the future
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I just put the music on and let the visions come to me.
Yeah, he was a character, all right. But his speech, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart", is a highly lucid and cutting description of the postmodern condition, showing that he never really lost his presence of mind entirely. He stresses that he's skeptical about what his experiences, even the most vivid ones, "mean", if they mean anything at all.
He reminds me of a 20th-century Buddha more than anything.
Two things: one: did you know you can tag blog posts with a specific story? two, I follow your not because I've read any of your writing, but because it sounds like you're such a high-level writer compared with myself and the dreck I produce, and I find that really admirable.
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Yeah, I knew that. I just forgot.
Thanks for the compliment! But....I don't really blog all that much....