Our Seminal Influences
The slushmaster posted a list of his Seminal Ten SF/F Writers here. In short, it is a list of the ten works/writers that had the greatest impact on his development as a writer.
Seems like a cool meme. Herewith mine, listed in order of exposure:
1. A whole lotta children's books. I don't even remember the titles and authors of most of the ones I got out of the local library. They weren't classics, but there was one about a kid who traveled to other planets with an alien, and it was very cool. I was probably around five or six years old when I read that series. There was another about a bunch of kids who time travel back to the era of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. I didn't understand a thing about that book, but I loved it. These books were just generally more appealing to me than books about regular kids. I liked Nancy Drew, but I liked the stories about clever, adventurous people in faraway lands so much more.
2. The Hobbit. I was around age 10. My sister had to read it for 7th grade English class, and so I read it too. I love The Hobbit much more than LOTR, because it's a strong, self-contained story. It's character-driven, all about what happens to this guy Bilbo, and how he goes from being sedate and stuffy to being daring and brave. I particularly loved the bit with the spiders. Bilbo had such panache in that scene! People talk about The Hobbit being a children's book; these are obviously people who never read it. It has an intrusive narrator, which we associate with fairy tales, but the language and grammar and so on are not kid-level. The edition I read was a mass-market paperback, possibly the first one I ever read. It made me want to find more of them, because kids books weren't published in mass market format, and I wanted grown up books.
3. The Fellowship of the Talisman by Clifford Simak. About a week after I finished The Hobbit, I knew I wanted more books like that, more fantasy novels written for grownups. So on my next trip to the library, I walked over to the grown-up section, and there was this book with a cover depicting what I would eventually recognize as Fantasy Novel Art: a man with a sword, another man with a club, a monk-like guy, and a woman riding a griffin. A castle in the background. Lurid purple and orange. That was some art, hoo boy, dramatic and eye-catching (only later I would learn that Michael Whelan was one of the most respected cover artists in the genre). The story was interesting, not world-shaking, but this was my first taste of a fantasy novel written specifically for genre readers. It made me fall in love with the genre, and realize that here was what I wanted to be reading.
4. Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn and the rest of the Thieves' World anthologies (well, the first four. They started downhill after that). I kept seeing this book in the bookstore, with this catchy title, and something about it both repelled and attracted me. I think I was worried what my parents would think if I brought this home (I was only 11 or 12 years old, and my folks weren't fantasy readers). But I bought it anyway, and this was my first introduction to "low" fantasy, nitty-gritty sword and sorcery. I ran out and bought the preceeding book, and then looked for the subsequent collections each year. (A few years later, in high school, I met a boy who was a year older than me, and he was talking about a character he was impressed with in a book. As he described him, I realized who he was talking about: "You mean Hanse Shadowspawn, right?" The boy was utterly stunned that a girl would read Thieves' World books. And then impressed that a girl would read Thieves' World books.)
5. Deryni Rising (and subsequent novels in the series/world), by Katherine Kurtz. I was 12 years old and had broken my arm. I was in the hospital for surgery, and my aunt asked me what sort of books I wanted. I said "science fiction" because I knew that term, because that was where the books I liked lived in the bookstore. She brought me this book and Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon. The Deryni books are the books that made me want to be a writer. I didn't know what fanfic was, and it never occurred to me to write in someone else's universe, so I had to start making up my own universe so I could tell stories there. I had fallen absolutely in love with Alaric Morgan. I wanted to tell stories with likable heroes who sometimes had to choose between two evils, one not much lesser than the other. I wanted to tell stories with drama and hard choices. The influential effect of these books on me as a writer cannot be understated.
6. Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini. When I was 13 a friend discovered these at a store near where she went for violin lessons. I started giving her money and she bought the back issues for me, and eventually I got a subscription (I remember my parents wouldn't write a check for me to subscribe to a comic book, so I had my first experience with getting a teller's check cut at the bank). Elfquest continued what the Deryni books had started: my abiding love for stories about people put in a tough situation and forced to make hard decisions. Elfquest also opened my eyes to fandom. They had an active letters page (and I even had some of my letters published there!), and a fan club, and people wrote stories set in the Elfquest universe, and formed their own holts, and and and... It's fair to say that every convention I've ever been to, every writer I know, is part of my experience because of Elfquest. It was the thing that taught me that other people love this stuff, too.
7. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber. I'd heard of these tales via the lists at the back of one of the AD&D sourcebooks (the DMG, I think), and then again they'd been mentioned in the editor's note at the back of Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn. When I was 13 or 14 I discovered the Ace-published collections. I grabbed the first one and got addicted. These were ur-texts to me. They felt old and dark and mysterious and rich. Leiber's creativity vibrated off every page.
8. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (specifically Nine Princes in Amber, the first one). Sometime around my 15th year, my sister and I convinced my dad to let us join the SFBC. (Comic books they wouldn't help with, but real books of text were encouraged regardless of genre.) We picked these books because they were a two-volume omnibus; my sister and I reasoned that we were getting five books for a single selection. It was a great move, because we both loved these books. Here was creative worldbuilding unlike previous in my experience. As I got older and my critical ability to analyze prose technique grew, I started to see how Zelazny's minimalist style contrasted starkly with Leiber's adjective-laden lushness; yet both told wonderful stories. That combo has given me a wealth of study about wordsmithing. Decades later, I still analyze Zelazny and Leiber for technique with language. This is a well with no bottom, I think.
9. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. First year in college (age 18) I decided I needed to read more of the classics of the genre. TMIAHM showed me how a science-fiction book could make a commentary on our present world. This was probably the first time I realized that books could be more than just entertainment..but still be highly entertaining! (It also made me determined to go to Agra and see the Taj Mahal. Heinlein infected me with wanderlust. This is a very, very good thing for a writer in general, and a spec-fic writer in particular.)
10. Dune by Frank Herbert. Also read sometime in college, probably when I was around 20 or 21. By this time I'd been writing my own first novel for years, and it was bugging me that it wasn't getting any closer to finished (largely this was because at that age, no one is the same person for more than a couple of months at a time. I was growing and changing faster than I could write). Dune showed me that a book could be big, could be full of complexity, could have many characters with plots upon plots, wheels within wheels, and this was a good thing. It was also, incidentally, what I had been stumbling toward all those years, in some instinctive drive, some urge towards complexity as a thing of beauty and drama. Herbert told me it was okay to have that urge, that there was no reason to start small.
In the past mumblety mumble years, I've read a lot of books I love immensely, but I'd have to say all the "formative influences" hit before I was 22 years old. I never stop learning what I can from other writers, but these ten books are the ones that if you took them out of existence, I certainly wouldn't be the writer I am today.