You Are What You Read

I haven’t been reading much sci-fi or fantasy lately. The last few books I’ve finished have included American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, and The Gulag Archipelago (parts I and II) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (review of the final chapter coming soon), Not All Fairy Tales of Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line As Told by the Ultimate Insider by Ken Williams. Currently, I’m reading Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, and am going to start American Pilgrim by Roosh Valizadeh (his story of giving up his hedonistic lifestyle and returning to Orthodox Christianity). In fact, other than Neon Harvest by Jon Mollison, I haven’t read a sci-fi or fantasy book in 2021–the last was The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons, which I finished last fall and reviewed on October 21 of 2020.

There are so many great pulp authors on my to read list–including A.E. van Vogt, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton, Leigh Brackett, A. Merritt, and Poul Anderson, as well as more by Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, and Edgar Rice Burroughs–as well as some newer books by Tad Williams (fantasy) and swashbuckling adventure (Arturo Pérez-Reverte) that I don’t even know where to start. And I’m looking forward to these books! It’s just that I’ve found myself getting supercharged to write my own pulp-inspired sci-fi by reading books that are decidedly not pulp or pulp-inspired sci-fi or fantasy.

This used to happen when I was writing and playing a lot of music. The stuff I right tends to be traditional rock-inspired, melodic, and loud-and-fast. I like catchy melodies, loud power chords, and just a little bit of insanity thrown in. Yet I’d find myself listening to a lot of avant-garde stuff and prog-rock, as well as ultra heavy hardcore and death-metal, and not exclusivley new wave and punk while I was in a female-fronted pop-punk band. Kind of incongruous, but I found that grafting tropes and idioms from supposedly foreign genres helped me keep things fresh and inspired.

Writing is a similar case. Imbibing classic works in my milieu of choice helps get the creative juices flowing, and provides a familiarity with a genre and its tropes. I read almost exclusively fantasy and the classics when I was younger until I was about twenty-five or so, and then really branched out into the dreaded realm of literary fiction (which I like) while still keeping one foot in the fantasy fiction camp. 

But lately, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve just seen too many of those tropes before I don’t find them inspiring to read about. I’ll read the back cover or Amazon description of highly regarded and recommended fantasy fiction, and it just sounds like stuff I’ve read so many times before. Ditto with sci-fi, which is why Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos was so mind-blowing–it was so different. He took the familiar but really made it feel fresh, not by subverting, but by finding cracks and spaces in genre conventions where others had not explored. It had the wonder, scope, splendor, philosophy, and intellect–as well as the flat-out good writing–of Frank Herbert’s first Dune book, just for multiple books instead of just one, maybe one-and-a-half.

Here’s the thing: I could tell that Dan Simmons read stuff other than sci-fi. A lot of other stuff.

Contrast this with John Scalzi, whose one book I read just screamed to me that all he read was sci-fi, and what other people in fanzines and on the Internet said about sci-fi. I could be wrong–in fact, I probably am–but this is what Old Man’s War felt like.

This is where I am at now as I work through the as-yet untitled third Swordbringer book. I’ll read these non-fiction or non-sci-fi or fantasy works, and get pumped to write. I don’t want to write the next Fight Club (okay, I mean I DO; don’t we all? But you know what I mean), but I want to use what I absorb from authors like Palahniuk in my own work to hopefully create something new and fresh.

I also get inspired by old video games and rock lyrics, though, so take all of this with however many grains of salt you want. 

The Swordbringer, Books 1 and 2, available here!