From Space Opera to Cyberpunk: Influences of 13 Science Fiction Writers

Where do the ideas that populate science fiction originate? Are ideas beamed into writer's heads from a Russian space satellite? Does a divine spirit breathe the Promethean flame into blessed brains? Does genetic material house racial memories and cultural archetypes, the symbolic language of dreams, from which all of our stories find their nascence? Maybe some of that's true for someone, but for the men and women in the trenches, daily penning SF, the more universal experience is that writing takes thought work. Writers ask themselves, what is possible? What ideas haven't been explored? Where is humanity headed? What technology and what kind of societies will the future hold? While SF writers explore new territory, dreaming new dreams, they also revisit past futures, finding inspiration in the pages of SF past. 

Rapid Transmission asked several science fiction writers to talk about what had the greatest impact on their writing and how such works, whether books, movies, or games, reflect on their own work.

Man Plus - Frederick Pohl

Frederick Pohl's Man Plus is a cynical consideration of posthumanism. Rather than terraforming Mars, scientists operate on a spaceman to create a being suited for life on an otherwise inhospitable planet. Why is this cynical?

It's All a Mating Dance: An Interview with Mark Everglade

Science Fiction encapsulates far more than hard science applied to storytelling. The genre considers history and futurity, gender and sexuality, war and the dynamics of civilizations, the human mind and body, technological progress and regress, life and death. Science fiction is at once about possibility and the hard limitations that humans face, whether of their own strength and lifespan or of the secrets of the near infinite expanse of our universe. And the inner space of the mind and body, grey matter and genetics, are just as fascinating as the vast reaches of outer space.

Empire Records Analysis: Or, Anarcho-Syndicalism Rocks!

I first watched Empire Records in 2000. I was in college and a movie about young, edgy people working together in an independent music store sounded fun. At first blush, the movie comes off as a bunch of posturing young people that aren't comfortable in their own skin. That element is there, to be sure, but to treat the movie as "Just Another Teenage Movie" would be to miss out on a powerful under-riding narrative of collectivism and anarcho-syndicalism.

Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress - Probably a Communist Text

 

What draws me to Nancy Kress is her background studying English, getting a degree from SUNY Plattsburgh. I'm no New Yorker but an English program is an English program. Add to that that I came up with the novum for this novel while brainstorming ideas for short stories. 

I told my friend Bob Wilson, "Hey, what do you think about a story with people that are biogenetically engineered to not require sleep." 

"Yeah, that's a good idea, but it's already been done. Go read Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain."

I did read it. I liked it a lot. I also never wrote a story about the sleepless. I guess I still could. After all, part of science fiction is that it operates as a megatext where everyone recycles the same ideas over and over, hopefully adding to them and thinking about concepts in more complex ways--but not always. 

That leads in to questions about entertainment vs. value. Science fiction is sometimes a galvanizing force for the future or a predictor of ugly things to come--ugly things best avoided, but more often than not science fiction is just about entertainment.