Chris Le Roy asked Caitlin Demaris McKenna:

What was the first science fiction book you ever read, and how much of an impact did it have on you?

Caitlin Demaris McKenna Hi Chris! It's hard to say for sure which book was the very first, but *one* of the first was Brian Aldiss's The Long Afternoon of Earth! If you've never read it, it depicts a far future where the Earth has stopped rotating and the parts in sunlight have been overgrown by a giant banyan tree. Humans have evolved into small green gnomelike creatures preyed upon by carnivorous flora.

This book had a huge impact on my ideas about humanity's place in the universe. It decenters humans within Earth's ecology and suggests that to survive we need to be symbiotic with other organisms in the ecosystem rather than dominate them. After all, such dominance is always fleeting. It's also a viscerally biological book: Aldiss took great joy in describing all kinds of mobile plants, fungi and other strange creatures. As a direct result, I think, my own sci-fi has a distinct focus on creatures rather than machines.

flag