Rand B. Lee
Lots of writers don't know where their ideas come from, and I'm usually one of them. An exception is my new book-in-process, Centaur Station, in which the origins of the themes and images are pretty clear to me.
Centaur Station takes characters from several of my published SF short stories and puts them in a space station setting where half the staff are members of an alien race, the Damánakíppith/fü (duh-MAN-uh-KIP-pith-FOO?).
The D'/fü (duh-FOO?) originally appeared in my story, "Tales From the Net: A Family Matter", published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5, Whole No. 65, May 1993. It was only many years after I invented these furry, silver, huge-eyed tall friendly aliens that I realized my unconscious had swiped them--or their looks, anyhow-- from Robert Heinlein's "Mother Thing" aliens in his juvenile SF book, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, which I'd read several times as a 13 year old.
But my larger ideas for the book--a policeman with PTSD being posted to a space station that is both a research station and a haven for aliens seeking eventually to settle in the Earth system--comes from my own sense of isolation as a child growing up in a dysfunctional home, and my longing for a hero to come and rescue me and take me to a place of safety.
Only when I was 13, it was Robin Hood and his Merry Men I thought of.
Centaur Station takes characters from several of my published SF short stories and puts them in a space station setting where half the staff are members of an alien race, the Damánakíppith/fü (duh-MAN-uh-KIP-pith-FOO?).
The D'/fü (duh-FOO?) originally appeared in my story, "Tales From the Net: A Family Matter", published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5, Whole No. 65, May 1993. It was only many years after I invented these furry, silver, huge-eyed tall friendly aliens that I realized my unconscious had swiped them--or their looks, anyhow-- from Robert Heinlein's "Mother Thing" aliens in his juvenile SF book, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, which I'd read several times as a 13 year old.
But my larger ideas for the book--a policeman with PTSD being posted to a space station that is both a research station and a haven for aliens seeking eventually to settle in the Earth system--comes from my own sense of isolation as a child growing up in a dysfunctional home, and my longing for a hero to come and rescue me and take me to a place of safety.
Only when I was 13, it was Robin Hood and his Merry Men I thought of.
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