Babel Clash

KEN:

Moving from junkie to dealer in the genre has been a hoot for me.  Over the last few years, I’ve had the great gift of meeting and chatting with some of the influences that were instrumental in me moving from a reader and consumer of Story to a writer.

For me, I got hooked on SF/F as a small child, initially through television and film.  I started with Speed Racer and Batman, then quickly fell into The Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Marine Boy, Land of the Lost,  Star Blazers, UFO, Space 1999 and Star Trek.  The Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits, along with healthy doses of the old black and white films featured on Sci Fic Theater and movies like Star Wars, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and Logan’s Run were my mainstays until I fell into books by Jack Williamson, Lester Del Rey, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Andre Norton, Ursula LeGuin and an army of other influences.  Of course, I’ve always read widely outside the genre, but SF/F has been the dearest to me, a comfortable life-long companion that I love coming home to.

Bradbury convinced me to write in his essay “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” and I started slinging my type-written tales into the marketplace when I was fourteen or so.  After a long break, I came back to it as a result of Frank Herbert, Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind and Tad Williams and a host of others and eventually, I broke in with a short story in 2000.  Nine years (and several short stories) later, my first novel showed up.

So how did you come into the genre?  What was your initial draw and what convinced you to become a writer?  How and when did break in and what keeps you rooted in SF/F?

KATE:

I’m just a world-building geek.  Or, if you will, a world-building nerd.  Or, if you must, a world-building dork.  I can go with any of those.

Man, I was building palaces with my Lego blocks from time out of mind.  In late elementary school, my brother and I would tape together notebook paper into long strips and then we would draw a line toward the top for the surface of the earth and below that draw long science fictiony fortress mazes below ground which always, always, featured one little dungeon cell in some isolated spot with but a single entry hatch in the ceiling.  In junior high, we drew up a starship and signed up classmates for the crew (I always wanted to be the astrogator).  Soon after, I got into drawing maps of imaginary countries.  It was all downhill from there.

I have no idea why I did this.  It was before Dungeons and Dragons (yes, I am that old), or at least it was before D&D reached my rural childhood home.

Reading and viewing influences in my youth?  The Time Tunnel.  Alias Smith and Jones.  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.  The Avengers.  The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  Star Trek (TOS), of course.  I was very young and had to beg to be allowed to stay up late enough to watch.

The first sf novel I recall reading was Robert Silverberg’s debut novel, Revolt on Alpha C, which was a revelation.  I told Silverberg that once:  “I read your novel when I was 10 years old!” to which he replied, without missing a beat, “and I wrote it when I was 16.”  For all I know, that may be true (but I don’t think so . . . ).

I really loved animal stories, but read Tolkien, Bradbury, Burroughs, and Tolstoy when I was in junior high, although I didn’t retain any of the Tolstoy beyond, evidently, a tendency to populate my novels with a cast of thousands (I was never, by the way, a precocious reader).  Notable influences in high school were Ursula K. Le Guin and Jane Austen and way too much loud rock music.  In college and post-college I moved into C. J. Cherryh, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and many others.  Also, I began reading extensively in non fiction (but that’s another topic).

I began to write in junior high school (aka middle school) mostly because I wanted to tell stories, but in part I also think because in almost all of these cool novels I was reading there were few or no females.  I wanted to read a story about what people “like me” could do, not just about others whose lives I would follow as if I were a spectator (I’ve never been much of a spectator).  In retrospect, I think I’ve always tried to write novels with a diverse cast because of my experience of feeling “left out” when I could see no other rational barrier to my participation except societal assumptions about what was proper or “normal.”

In that way, science fiction and fantasy as fiction always called to me:  I still love sff fiction more than any other kind of fiction, and I still adore well-done sff films.  So, like I said, I’m just a skiffy geek at heart.

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