Embracing our Garbage Literary Influences

All the crap that made us the sci-fi fans, readers, and writers that we are

The paperback fiction section of my high school library was a wasteland. I don’t know, maybe they were grossly underfunded, maybe someone was embezzling funds, maybe the book buyer haunted garage sales. But most of the books available fell into three broad categories: garbage, trash, and junk.

If you wanted to borrow a novel, your choices included:

• Multiple movie novelizations, including Gremlins, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and Total Recall

• Some of the older Stephen King books, primarily from his period when he was so high he couldn’t remember writing them

• Most of the Xanth series published to that point

• Flowers in the Attic and other books in the teen gothic/incest microgenre by V.C. Andrews

• A nearly complete run of the Robotech novelizations

• About a dozen Sweet Valley High novels

• Several Robert A. Heinlein juveniles

But of course, I’d already read the Heinlein novels. So it was on to Gremlins and the Robotech books and, yes, the Xanth novels for me.

You’re going to have to cut me some slack, especially on those last ones. I was thirteen.

Motorcycles that turned into powered armour!

Skeletons in our literary closets

When you read interviews with up-and-coming SFF writers, especially those who are writing short stories that are consciously attempting something we might call “literary,” there are inevitable discussions of influences.

There are standard answers. Le Guin and Tiptree and Delany tend to appear in a cluster. Hard SF writers and older generations tended to focus more on Asimov, Clarke, maybe Bradbury and Bester and Sturgeon. Anyone doing modern cyberpunk has to tip their hat to Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, and Cadigan. Folks who dabble in mixed genres or New Weird revival may mention Miéville, or even Mervyn Peake. About a dozen years ago, it became acceptable to admit to writing fanfic, and the floodgates opened, although writers still tend to discuss it as a boot camp that honed their skills, not dwelling too much on what, exactly, they were reading.

I don’t doubt any of these writers when they talk about their influences. Of course they’ve read those books, re-read them, absorbed them.

But the answer to the “What are your influences?” question is always heavily redacted.

Everyone who grew up as a big reader in SFF has read a metric ton of crap.

And you know what? We should acknowledge that. Because we owe who we are as readers and critics and writers to the stuff that was just bad, that was fun but stupid, that we once loved but left behind, that we still love but won’t mention, as much as we do to the books that are respectable enough to bring up in public.

You gotta dance with the one that brung you

I don’t think I’ve cracked open a Robert A. Heinlein novel in seven or eight years. I do still have a bunch of them, paperbacks picked up here and there. I’m reluctant to get rid of them.

When I was nine or ten, I found up a copy of Red Planet in my community library branch. It was only there because the 1960s/70s hardcover printings of Heinlein’s juveniles were incredibly sturdy – this was the late 1980s. Which is very late to become a Heinlein fan; he’d be dead within a year of me reading that book.

After Red Planet, I kept going back to that shelf, and reading anything else there with his name on it. And from there, hungry for more, I hunted down all the books with the rocket ship sticker on the spine in the children’s section, then the young adult shelves, and then on to the adult SF section.

And then I attacked the card catalogue armed with request slips.

Heinlein was, for a couple of years, my favourite author. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, he’d been displaced by folks like Gibson and Stephenson, but he was still important to me. Even as I got older and saw how his combination of libertarianism and militarism and American patriotism didn’t mesh with the views I’d had even at the age of ten or eleven (an anti-gun control screed in Red Planet was the first time I disagreed with a book’s author, but kept reading anyway) it took a long time to diminish my enjoyment of his books, especially the early ones.

There are still things I remember fondly about Heinlein. His authorial voice and his techniques of drawing a reader in, his delight in satirizing certain strands of conservatism, including taking potshots at televangelists when they were barely a thing, would probably surprise a lot of people who have absorbed the image of him as the proto-fascist author of Starship Troopers.

(It’s possible to truthfully describe The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a book about a guy in a multi-ethnic polyamorous marriage fighting a fascist prison-industrial complex. It would elide a lot of stuff that seems creepy now, but it’s mostly accurate.)

Even though I haven’t read Heinlein in years, I know his influence on my reading and writing remains. It’s as formative as my mom reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to my brother and I, and probably more influential than the time I picked up this book about a guy called Ged who wanted to be a wizard.

Like they say, you gotta dance with the one that brung you. And without Heinlein’s books, I’m not sure I’d be a science fiction fan at all.

We need to talk about Piers.

The Big Book Grinder in our Heads

While I was reading Heinlein, I was also reading… everything else.

Between the ages of ten and fifteen, I absorbed hundreds of books, for kids and adults. My reading included science fiction classics like Foundation and Dune, a pretty complete reading of the Xanth series up to around 1991 or 1992, The Illustrated Man and The Demolished Man, a buttload of cyberpunk and early nanopunk, fantasies by Diane Duane and Diana Wynne Jones, Star Trek and Star Wars tie in novels, D&D tie ins, TMNT collections, Archie and superhero comics, the obligatory Stephen King novels, Niven and Pournelle, Howard Waldrop, George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, a couple hundred SFF novels that I’ve forgotten, and even the odd non-SFF work like Gordon Korman’s YA comedies, The Hardy Boys and Choose Your Own Adventure and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. And yes, I read ALL the Robotech novels. Hey, we didn’t have any way to watch the episodes back then, they were just a vague memory of Sunday morning cartoons.

In other words, I absorbed a lot of stuff that was good, and a lot of crap. In many cases, I didn’t sort out which was which until much later.

Everything at that age becomes grist for the mill. You slowly – sometimes very slowly – develop discernment. You turn fourteen and see that the next Xanth book is called The Color of Her Panties, and you start to question some of your reading choices, and also to wonder what the fuck is up with this Anthony guy, anyway? You start to think critically when you read the jacket copy. You chase authors’ influences via mentions in introductions and interviews, you read short story collections and notice that these stories were published in Asimov’s, F&SF, Omni, and hey, your high school library at least has a subscription to Omni!

But when reading, especially as a genre obsessive, you only discover your own personal tastes by trying a lot of different stuff.

Some people follow their taste down a rabbit hole, and become heavy readers of one or two sub-genres, happily absorbing book after book, as long as they tick off enough items from a checklist of tropes. Some are those rare folks whose tastes remain broad, and are large-hearted enough to find something nice to say about 90% of everything they read. And some people find themselves picky, getting more and more concerned with quality, which is subjective and impossible to define, but still real, still important.

No matter how far down any of those paths you go, your early reading is still there. It fertilized the ground. Later in life, writers can seed their new work with chosen predecessors, key influences developed after the arrival of discernment.

But the fertilizer? Well, the best fertilizer contains a lot of shit. It’s not just inevitable, it’s necessary.

Pulp literature, not pulp versus literature

Theoretically, what with there being eight billion and counting humans on the planet, there probably is one person who became an SF fan only by reading classics and books considered part of the canon, however you want to define that. They read The Left Hand of Darkness at age eleven and never looked back.

But I don’t think that’s common. You see literary authors try to claim this sort of thing, “Oh, I’ve been reading Dickens and Faulkner since I was nine!” which should be treated as self-mythologizing bullshit until proven otherwise.

In most cases, if you tried to yank a copy of some subpar YA adventure out of the hands of a kid and forced them to read some “good” literary SF, you wouldn’t be making a better SFF fan. You’d be just as likely to drive them away from the genre entirely.

There’s a low-key war going on in the genre between folks who believe we should give as much praise to books that are fun, low-effort fluff as to books that are aspire to do more. I’m firmly on Team Write Better, Goddammit. But that doesn’t mean I dismiss the cheesy, trashy side of the genre. We need that wild who-gives-a-fuck energy that comes to us straight from the pulps. From the pulps we came, and to the pulps we must return.

(This isn’t all positive. I have a hell of a hard time conceptualizing plots that aren’t based on action/adventure structures, which is likely caused by absorbing books that were mostly action/adventures for years.)

The path writers I admire take is not to knowingly, willfully write trash, and it’s not to outright reject the trash that inevitably influenced us, either.

You look back, clear eyed and with hindsight. You give your young self a full measure of empathy. You ask, what was it that made that book, that frankly crummy book, light a fire inside you back then?

And how can you capture that spark, and nurture it, and combine it with hard-won craft and skill, so you can make someone else feel something like that, too?

How do you say something real about the human condition, while also writing about giant robots punching each other?

Goodbye, Heinlein

I never managed to read every single book and story Heinlein wrote, though I’ve read an awful lot of them. By the time I was in my mid to late teens, and I was reading Job: A Comedy of Justice, and Time Enough for Love, and Farnham’s Freehold (ugh), the gears were starting to grind. I never finished The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and I didn’t even try To Sail Beyond the Sunset. You either get tired of lectures on the importance of slide rules and paying free market value for your oxygen, or you wind up reading Atlas Shrugged.

For the most party I’ve grown beyond Heinlein, whatever that means. It sounds pretentious, and part of me wants to deny that you ever “grow beyond” your early influences. Every book I read, and every story I write, my way of thinking about story, is subtly influenced by Heinlein’s work. There are a lot of other writers’ works I’ve returned to more often, that have fed me in other ways, but it would be a lie to say that Red Planet and Citizen of the Galaxy and Tunnel in the Sky aren’t always there, even if I can’t separate out a specific thread.

Even while I was still a major Heinlein fan, within a year or two of devouring Xanth novels, for god’s sakes, I was also reading A Wizard of Earthsea and Virtual Light and The Broken Land – books that I haven’t outgrown. I’m still trying to grow into them, frankly.

It’s more interesting for us to talk about our experiences in the genre as a journey with a lot of stops changes of direction, than to pretend we arrived fully formed, plucked from the head of Zeus and reading the Clarke Award shortlist. So embrace your influences – problematic and awkward and just plain bad alike.

Obligatory Self-Promotion Corner

Hey, I actually have something to plug for once! I’ve got a short story sale to Analog Science Fiction & Fact to talk about! It’s called Terminal City Dogs, and it’s about urban coyotes, the importance of graffiti, and who really owns our cities. I do not know when it will be out! I will let you know when it is!

Also, I’m currently collecting suggestions for 2022 books that weren’t on the Hugo ballot, but that you think should have been. Leave a comment or contact me at ouranosaurus [at] gmail.com. I’m also available for writing fiction/about SFF for laughably small amounts of money. Hit me up, or, y’know, don’t.

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