How British sci-fi influenced my writing…
[Note from Steve: I wrote this a while ago as a guest post for Shah Wharton’s WordsInSync website. It seemed appropriate to dust it off and repost it here with a few edits that make it more contemporary.]
Many writers are avid readers, at least in their own genre. In fact, I can’t understand how anyone can be a writer without being an avid reader. I suppose there are exceptions. I am also a reviewer, but I read many more books than I review. Some of my reading is information-oriented; most is just entertainment—TV for the most part has few good programs. Consequently, as a native Californian, it’s obvious that American sci-fi has influenced my writing. Less obvious is the influence of British sci-fi authors. There is a reason for that—dystopian vision.
Some of my novels, especially Soldiers of God and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” have lurking in the background what I call “the social singularity”; my novel Survivors of the Chaos moves through it, for example. Unlike a black hole, this singularity is diffuse in space and time. It represents a particular state in world affairs where social problems become so complex that politicians and political institutions are incapable of solving them; where fundamentalist attitudes and local xenophobia have become so prevalent and ingrained that traditional empires break up into more homogeneous, almost tribal units; and where multinational corporations, ever greedy for new markets and more profits, hire mercenary armies in an attempt to keep order. This state I call the Chaos. In brief, it’s my dystopian vision of humanity’s future. It’s not all bleak—I always sprinkle in a bit of hope here and there, created by heroic individuals, of course!
How did I develop such a negative vision of what’s in store for us? Mostly from early British authors. More modern sci-fi authors like C. M. Kornbluth, John Christopher (pen name for Samuel Youd), Phillip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others had their own visions. I started there. At the time, I could only move into the past. I discovered H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ape and Essence, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, and George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Note that these older books are all written by British authors, many of them disenchanted with war and totalitarian regimes (Koestler was born Hungarian but spent most of his life in Britain).
Another characteristic of my books is that they are thrillers. Sci-fi thriller is a cross-genre, of course. While most sci-fi books have some thriller aspects, mine emphasize them a bit more. Here the U.K. authors Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton were influences, both for the twists and apparent paradoxes contained in their stories. The anarchists who were not quite what they seemed to be in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday became a loose model for the conspirators in my novel Full Medical. (Many years before, the fact that the Irish hero Michael Collins was inspired by Chesterton’s book led me to look more into Irish history in my mental quest to understand the origins of The Troubles, but that doesn’t relate much to my writing.)
Many sci-fi authors have a scientific background. I’m no exception. Whether the creative writing of science fiction stories precedes the creative research of the scientist or not is a chicken-and-egg puzzle. When I started reading science fiction, I certainly didn’t have enough preparation to produce solid scientific research results. Yet many authors writing what has come to be called “hard sci-fi” certainly inspired me to stick with math and science. Nevertheless, I don’t become overburdened trying to make my sci-fi too “hard” because, as a scientist, I am fully aware of the dangers of extreme extrapolation. Two British authors who handle it far better than I and greatly influenced me were Arthur C. Clarke, with his Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama, and Fred Hoyle with The Black Cloud.
U.K. authors have carried on the tradition of dystopian sci-fi, and I paid attention. Some examples: Brian W. Aldiss with Non-Stop (Starship in the U.S.); William Golding with Lord of the Flies; John Christopher (Samuel Youd) with The Death of Grass (No Blade of Grass in the U.S.); Margaret Atwood with The Handmaiden’s Tale and Oryx and Crake; and P. D. James with The Children of Men. Several movies have championed the dystopian point of view: Blade Runner, Alien, The Children of Men, and Avatar, among others. The recent Fox show in the U.S. titled Terra Nova is a dystopian view of the future, as were Max Headroom and Firefly.
The books I just listed carried on the British tradition (to be fair, Margaret Atwood is Canadian and is adamant about calling her works speculative fiction—I have come to believe Atwood is far too restrictive because speculative fiction covers everything from Harry Potter to vampire romance, paranormal, and hard sci-fi). The movies and TV shows prove that dystopia is still popular. The question is: why? Those early British novels, depressing as they might seem, are reflections of the horrific deeds men did to their fellow men during the world wars. A bit later, there was the disenchantment with communism and other totalitarian regimes, mostly a Cold War phenomenon.
Today—and I also speak for myself—another type of disenchantment defines our dystopian writing. The infectious hope and enthusiasm engendered by the fall of the Soviet Union and many totalitarian regimes throughout the Third World are slowly being swept away by the realization that humanity’s future just might be incompatible with the Earth’s. We are destroying the environment; our natural resources including the rain forests, the lungs of the planet, are disappearing; we cannot hope to feed everyone a basic, healthy diet; and we cannot provide minimal healthcare to everyone. It is a new dystopia in the sense that there are glimmers of hope. In some small way, writing about it is my way of warning my fellows and ensure a future for my grandchildren. It’s certainly not the only reason I write and not the most important one either, but I have chosen that orientation for my writing for these reasons.
An addendum to the original article: Mr. Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, a return to the bullying ways of the Soviet Union, is cause for returning to dystopian fiction along the lines of old authors’ disenchantment with communism and fascism. The fictional events portrayed in Soldiers of God and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” no longer seem so farfetched.
In libris libertas….
