Tim Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "adventure"
Original Earth
The most common question I’m asked by readers of Original Earth is: what inspired me to write the science fiction adventure series?
Well, there’s a long and short answer.
The short answer is: I love the character Tarzan and everything he stands for…
The longer answer is: when I was a young boy, my bedroom shelf was full of books. There were three wildlife encyclopedias, but mainly rows of novels. Up until aged ten, I suppose, every novel I read involved animals - Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi for instance, a few stories about foxes and Mary O’Hara’s The Green Grass Of Wyoming, Thunderhead, My Friend Flicka et al. I did read Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, but, for me, Kiki the parrot (actually a cockatoo if memory serves) was the star of the show…
I can’t now recall when exactly I discovered Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, but do remember my imagination exploding when I read about this amazing character who was raised by Kala the she-ape. I devoured every Tarzan novel and re-read and re-read each one until the words faded… To me, at that young age, the Tarzan stories were pure adventure with my perception of the person Tarzan was, etching deep patterns, which shaped the person I was to become. In so many ways, the world Edgar Rice Burroughs had created became my reality. I didn’t only imagine I was Tarzan, he became my spiritual guide. The clear misanthropy woven through Tarzan’s character, became my misanthropy. I truly did begin to see humans as the enemy, especially white man. Tarzan is uncontaminated by human society and so, I began to see the huge flaws in aspects of humankind and the way we collectively live our lives. That insight has stayed with me and is the inspiration at the core of each of my novels.
Which brings me to Original Earth, my science fiction adventure series – three books so far published, but currently writing the fourth and an unlimited series planned.
It’ll be clear to everyone who’s read this that Tarzan is the core inspiration behind the series. Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan in nineteen-twelve, but he would have written and developed the character years before. Africa was still being explored and Rice Burroughs never travelled to Africa, so the creation of Tarzan is an incredible feat of imagination. For me, writing fiction is about seducing the reader into a world of believability and, to the young boy/man I was then, the jungle where Tarzan grew up was completely believable. I was totally seduced.
But, whilst I humbly admit Original Earth is my interpretation of Tarzan, I wanted Original Earth to stand apart and alone, to be different. Anu is an eight-year-old female when stranded in the jungle of an alien planet and I wanted her to offer hope and to say something about the human relationship with planet Earth. The question I posed to myself was the same question I pose to the readers: imagine if we were offered a new, uncontaminated planet and a fresh start, how would I wish to see humanity move forward…? Now, armed with some knowledge of the complex relationships that exist between both fauna and flora - all life with whom we share this incredible planet - what lessons have we learned? This is a story about a new beginning… And then I wanted to give Anu a gift and that gift is her personal vibration being in perfect harmony with the natural world.
For marketing reasons, I had to slot Original Earth into a pigeon hole. Every reader will search the shelves of books they have read, relate to and know they love in order to find the next novel that will grab them. Those shelves have to be labelled to make it easy for the reader to find their next novel. I suppose every author finds it difficult to find the correctly labelled shelf for the novel they have created that, in the author’s eyes, says so much has many different dimensions, but place it we must. I’ve placed Original Earth on the shelf labelled science fiction adventure and added young adult and coming of age for greater clarity.
But does that really explain what the novel is about? Does it convey the depth and complexity of the novel series?
There’s a human community establishing itself and first contact with an alien race… And then there’s Anu who is exploring a jungle and ocean that’s very like the jungles and oceans on planet Earth and through Anu, the reader’s eyes will be opened to our own potential… Our hope for the future.
Well, there’s a long and short answer.
The short answer is: I love the character Tarzan and everything he stands for…
The longer answer is: when I was a young boy, my bedroom shelf was full of books. There were three wildlife encyclopedias, but mainly rows of novels. Up until aged ten, I suppose, every novel I read involved animals - Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi for instance, a few stories about foxes and Mary O’Hara’s The Green Grass Of Wyoming, Thunderhead, My Friend Flicka et al. I did read Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, but, for me, Kiki the parrot (actually a cockatoo if memory serves) was the star of the show…
I can’t now recall when exactly I discovered Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, but do remember my imagination exploding when I read about this amazing character who was raised by Kala the she-ape. I devoured every Tarzan novel and re-read and re-read each one until the words faded… To me, at that young age, the Tarzan stories were pure adventure with my perception of the person Tarzan was, etching deep patterns, which shaped the person I was to become. In so many ways, the world Edgar Rice Burroughs had created became my reality. I didn’t only imagine I was Tarzan, he became my spiritual guide. The clear misanthropy woven through Tarzan’s character, became my misanthropy. I truly did begin to see humans as the enemy, especially white man. Tarzan is uncontaminated by human society and so, I began to see the huge flaws in aspects of humankind and the way we collectively live our lives. That insight has stayed with me and is the inspiration at the core of each of my novels.
Which brings me to Original Earth, my science fiction adventure series – three books so far published, but currently writing the fourth and an unlimited series planned.
It’ll be clear to everyone who’s read this that Tarzan is the core inspiration behind the series. Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan in nineteen-twelve, but he would have written and developed the character years before. Africa was still being explored and Rice Burroughs never travelled to Africa, so the creation of Tarzan is an incredible feat of imagination. For me, writing fiction is about seducing the reader into a world of believability and, to the young boy/man I was then, the jungle where Tarzan grew up was completely believable. I was totally seduced.
But, whilst I humbly admit Original Earth is my interpretation of Tarzan, I wanted Original Earth to stand apart and alone, to be different. Anu is an eight-year-old female when stranded in the jungle of an alien planet and I wanted her to offer hope and to say something about the human relationship with planet Earth. The question I posed to myself was the same question I pose to the readers: imagine if we were offered a new, uncontaminated planet and a fresh start, how would I wish to see humanity move forward…? Now, armed with some knowledge of the complex relationships that exist between both fauna and flora - all life with whom we share this incredible planet - what lessons have we learned? This is a story about a new beginning… And then I wanted to give Anu a gift and that gift is her personal vibration being in perfect harmony with the natural world.
For marketing reasons, I had to slot Original Earth into a pigeon hole. Every reader will search the shelves of books they have read, relate to and know they love in order to find the next novel that will grab them. Those shelves have to be labelled to make it easy for the reader to find their next novel. I suppose every author finds it difficult to find the correctly labelled shelf for the novel they have created that, in the author’s eyes, says so much has many different dimensions, but place it we must. I’ve placed Original Earth on the shelf labelled science fiction adventure and added young adult and coming of age for greater clarity.
But does that really explain what the novel is about? Does it convey the depth and complexity of the novel series?
There’s a human community establishing itself and first contact with an alien race… And then there’s Anu who is exploring a jungle and ocean that’s very like the jungles and oceans on planet Earth and through Anu, the reader’s eyes will be opened to our own potential… Our hope for the future.
