Guest Post: My Influences are Showing! by David Liss

Several years ago, when my daughter was in elementary school and steeped in the Harry Potter novels, I began to think that maybe I should try my hand at writing a book for children.  More than that, I wanted a book that adults could enjoy along with their children, or even if there were no children in the picture.

I love fantasy, don’t get me wrong, but when I looked around at the novels my daughter and her peers were reading, fantasy seemed to be the beginning and end of genre fiction for kids.  Where was the science fiction?  Most of the SF I saw was for older readers, and that tended to be bleak, depressing, and post-apocalyptic.  I like that sort of thing in moderate doses, but I couldn’t help but feel that kids should grow up with stories about cool aliens and space ships firing energy weapons at each other.  If no one else was going to do it, I’d have to step up.  I was going to write a space opera that would get kids as excited about space travel and alien life and exploring new planets as they already were about self-abasing elves and non-specific magic systems.

I produced about sixty pages before the project screeched to a halt.  The problem wasn’t that I didn’t like the material, it was that I liked it too much.  I couldn’t quite figure out how to shake my own genre influences long enough to come up with original worlds and aliens and technologies.  Everything I devised felt like shades of the films, TV shows, fiction, and games I grew up loving or still love today.  I walked away disappointed, thinking I just didn’t have the right kind of scientific mind to work up original sci fi.

Then, a few years later I read a couple of novels that made me see things in a new way.  They were Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and Red Shirts by John Scalzi.  What struck me about these books was that instead of writing around their influences, trying to ignore them or working hard to make sure they didn’t creep into an original creation, these books met those influences head-on.

That, I realized, was what I needed for my book.  My job wasn’t just to write in the genre, it was to write about genre.  In the same way children’s fantasy novels speak to, and often subvert, conventions of fantasy and fairy tales, my book could play with the building blocks of what kids who like science fiction already knew from TV, film, comics, books, and games.

When this thought struck me, I was in the process of finishing the final draft of my most recent historical novel, The Day of Atonement.  I had about six weeks of work left, and I found when I wasn’t concentrating on polishing the manuscript, I was making lists in my heads of all the genre properties, concepts, conventions, and even clichés I wanted to play around with in my story.

The end result was Randoms, a book I enjoyed working on more than anything I’ve ever worked on.  I, quite literally, wrote the rough draft in a week, writing  each day until my hands hurt too much to continue.  The final product required a great deal more time for polishing, of course, but it remained a labor of love.

It’s a book about being a fan as much as anything else.  The main character, Zeke Reynolds, is one of four human adolescents chosen to spend a year on a space station belonging to the Confederation of United Planets.  Each of the others have been selected because they have remarkable talents or abilities, but Zeke is the random, picked by pre chance to serve as a representative sample of ordinary human life.

But Zeke isn’t just an ordinary kid.  He’s a fanboy.  He loves science fiction movies and TV shows and novels.  He loves comics and videogames, RPGs and tabletop games.  The whole package.  But it turns out that science fiction has been influenced by facts.  The Confederation has seeded the truth about the wider galaxy into our popular culture so we wouldn’t be shocked when the aliens make contact.  Zeke’s love of genre becomes, over the course of the novel a kind of superpower, giving him the ability to understand the cultures he encounters and make sense of the unexpected dangers he and his friends face.

Early readers were adults who got the references, and I was really gratified by their enthusiasm, but I worried that kids, the book’s supposed target audience, would feel alienated by references they didn’t get.  Not ever middle schooler who likes science fiction has sent he entire run of Deep Space Nine, for example, or has played through Mass Effect.  I was nervous when I passed the book along to kids whom I knew were big readers and loved good escapist reading but didn’t necessarily live and breath science fiction.  To my relief and delight, they were drawn in by the characters and the adventure, and didn’t worry about the references they didn’t get.  I think that’s probably part of being a kid, anyhow – life is largely composed of references you don’t get.  But when these kids were finished with the book, they wanted to know more about Star Trek or Babylon 5.  It’s my hope that readers don’t necessarily have to be hardcore fans to enjoy Randoms, but they’ll want to know a lot more about the genre after they’ve finished.  There’s nothing I’d like more than if a book that sprang from my own fandom spread the obsessive love to a new generation.

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More about David Liss at davidliss.com.

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