Influences and inspirations

In this section:

• A reflection upon the influence the ideas and fictions of others has had upon my work
• A bibliography for a short fiction attempting to identify a range of those influences 
• The special influence of music on my writing process
• A list of early influences on my fiction, including art, books, comics, films and television

When reflecting on fictions I created during my upbringing, I find it relatively simple to identify the influences that shaped them. Typically I detect the template of a particular film or book I loved or I can sense the gravity of the parent fiction bending my imagination inevitably in a certain direction. Most probably writing that fiction was my way of exploring what I enjoyed about the story I had read or seen in my own way, but I suppose my younger self had a limited imaginative architecture and vocabulary of ideas and so, like a child repeating sounds and words, used the examples of others. not form imaginative architecture.

Perhaps driven with a fascination with origins, I find it intriguing to introspect my fictions during and prior to their creation and try to understand the forces and fuel that brought them into being. Over time, as I have created more fiction and further worlds of imagination, this process become ever more difficult to achieve with any certainthy. They seem to be so many facets, reflections and refractions of different fictions, past and present that I feel at times as though I should simply say "this is made of everything I have seen and everyone I have been".

With exposure to thousands of books, films and other influences I seem to have built up a kind of imaginative architecture that, while it is built with the ideas of others, is also built with my own ideas. Perhaps , or perhaps more like an organic system, because it feel more organic.  and it has fed upon its self, creating connections in my imagination. It is a landscape of genres, forms concepts and images I have become more agile and adapt in navigating. It is also a landscape that feels alive, fertile. Perhaps more like an organism it has certain characteristics and tendancy but its behaviour can a spontaneous life through absorbing so much over a period of time vast network made from everything I have experienced and absorbed across a lifetime and that network has its own emergent properties. It is not origin, but it is independent.


A Bibliography of a Short Fiction - Atlantis Falls

As an exercise in understand the many influences across a great many years that now form a crucible for any new fiction, I have created a 'bibliography' for a short fiction I wrote early in 2010 about the fall of an inter-galatic Antlantean civlisation.

I am using the conventions of academic literature here of course. Academics produce bibliographies of sources they have read or drawn upon while researching their ideas, so that scholars can understand the foundations of their thinking and also as a form of professional respect and recogniti0on towards those who ideas have helped form their work. The practice is pretty much unknown for fiction writers but as an exercise to illustrate what I mean about the many influences a contemporary fiction can have,

I have limited the bibliography to textual references such as paintings, books, films and television, some of which I have encountered recently and some of which I engaged with many years ago. I have also included an approximately date when I first encounter the text at the end of each bracketed note.

To push this exercise to its logical conclusion I should perhaps include conversations with people or things I have seen but I am sure this will illustrate the point well enough as it is.

• Ashes of Angels, Collins, Andrew (idea of Atlanteans as incorporating eagle and serpent symbology - 1998)
• Atlantis The Lost Continent,
• Babylon 5, Straczynski, J. Michael, et al (space battles after Atlantean's conciousness network is damaged by inter cosmic invasion - 1995)
• Barsoom series, Burroughs, Edgar Rice (six legged creature on mars, created by the protagonist millions of years before - 1981)
• Critias, Plato (description of Atlanteans as glorius civlisation which became corrupt and invited their own destruction - 1991)
• Earth, Brin, David (concept of a global or cosmic conciousness network invoked my his image of global network of nodes used to focus the energy of a black hole - 1992)
• Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock, Graham (1998)
• The Great Day of His Wrath (Painting), Martin, John (the last Judgement - 1981 - but was probably earlier)
• Last Legends of Earth, Attanasio, A.A. (Woman constructing worlds - 1989)
• Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Hapgood, Charles (possibility of Northern Antartica having been ice free relatively recently, and a sea faring civlisation having mapped the coastline now under the ice - 1998)
• Markandeya Purana, Hindu Traditional (the story of anceint lifetimes and a soul having been in an earlier incarnation in a previous cycle of the cosmos transmitting their widsom to some in this cycle of the cosmos - 1982)
• Night Meeting, Bradbury, Ray (scene in the story set on an anceint Mars where Atlantean daughter discuss the fall of civilisations with her mother from an incarnation four million years earlier - 1983)
• Night’s Dawn, Commonwealth Saga, Hamilton, Peter F. (space battles and invasion of dead spirits - 1997)
• Olympos, Simmons, Dan (humans becoming gods through advanced technology)
• Resident Evil (precoious child with adult intellect)
• The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis, C.S. (story of rivarly between two sisters leading to apocaplyse - 1975)
• The Mahabharata, Hindu Traditional (1977)
• The Power of Myth, Campbell, Joseph in conversation with Bill Moyers (snake in the Garden of Eden as positive force - 1997)
• The Time Traveller’s Wife, Niffenegger. Audrey (little girl being aware of her future husband awaiting patiently for her to grow up - 2004)
• Shadows in the Stone (in progress), Dann, Jack
• The Women's History of the World, Miles, Rosalind (Atlantis as a matriarchy reflecting Miles description of prehistorical Cretan civlisation having possiblity been such - 2003)

The Music of the Spheres

While I might not easily be able to tease apart a fiction and locate the strands of imagination I have woven from others with certainty, in the case of music I can pretty much identify its effect on my work and individual scenes and passages with almost total precision. And usually the music that has influenced a fiction is very recent.

So much of my fiction is born from specific music tracks or albums, scenes are choreographed to it and their sensiblities and emotional fabric developed by listening to a particuarly sequence of music repeatedly while playing with the ideas and possiblities.

Often new fiction ideas, or elements of fictions come from the music itself in the first place, but where this is not the case one of the first things I do when apprehending the image or idea is to look for music in my collection that seem to relate to the feeling or image and listen to that music to further explore and expand the idea. If I cannot find something suitable I will start exploring new music until I come across something that does resonate with the initial image and discover it hungrily and enthusiastically.

A fiction like a novel is to me alive with the music that inspired it - some pieces provided a wash in the tone of the fiction, other parts specifically created by listening to a track over and over again. Since I started using Windows Media player I have taken to compiling play lists for particular novels and adding to the list as I encoutner new tracks that resonate with it or contribute to it. The play list for my current novel, The Devil's P.A. is nearly seventy tracks long now, but that for the sequel, which I have not started writing yet is short.

• Avatar, Soundtrack, Horner, James, 7567895761, Track 1 (scale of Atlantean civlisation and Ninael's - 2010)
• Black Hawk Down, Soundtrack, Zimmer, Hans, Decca 440 017 012 2, Tracks 1, 2 (Ninael's machine - 2010)
• Ennio Morricone:. Soundtrack, Virgin Records CDVD2516, Disc 2, Track 8 (general atmosphere and Athael's encoutner with Enneke and Enneke's gift of a vision of The Lilith - 2010)

Early Influences

There are of course a lot more influences that I list here, I have restricted myself to salient influences up to the age of 13 years - those that have shaped my imagination in some fundamental way or stayed with me across my life and are perhaps essential building blocks or structural features of my imaginative architecture. I have included Art, Books, Films and Television but given greater emphasis to books.

This is probably the origin of my fascination with impossible imaginary spaces defying gravity. Many many times in my fiction I have created landscapes like this.

Art

Album Covers

I would like to place a series of images of album covers that influenced me in childhood but as they are copyrighted the best I can do without going to the copyright dark side is place some links to other sites.

When I was growing upon the Seventies my uncle Finbar was still living in my grandparents house. He had a collection of LPs, some of which had belonged to my father, and I would study the images upon them with fascination. A number of them made a marked impression upon me, I have choosen a couple below.

Close to the Edge - Yes. Art by Roger Dean

The Threshold of a Dream - The Moody Blues

My father gave me this album in the early seventies. This nightmare like image did not frighten me, but it is the earliest example I can recall of mists of imagination being filled with extraordinary things, some of them dark and ominous. Thinking of a reality as possiblities swirling together.

William Blake

Of course Blake was also a writer, but I encountered his work as images long before I actually read his words.  His images tell stories, usually of a dramatic nature and they seem to me to embody a sense that dreams or visions can be more fundamental and more real that mundane things, one of the principal reasons I often lean towards write fiction of a fantastic nature.

I learned The Tyger, the poem Blake illustrated in the image above by heart at the age of 9 and had a copy of the collection its comes from, Songs of Innocence and Experience, as a child. This had the illustrated prints on one page and the words typeset in stark black and white on the opposing folio.

I was certainly inspired by Blake's integration of the written word and images and as a result produced a number of illustrated letters (including some I sent to my first wife before I had met her), stories for younger children. I think I can credit Blake as for showing me that there is no necessary division between different creative forms.

Encountering Blake later in life in different ways, such as through reading Peter Ackroyd's biography, I also found Blake inspiring as a personality, a visionary man who never lost his conviction. He has something of the quality of the importance of respecting artistic vision for itself, not for what audience it may find.

As an after thought, his grave is in Bunhill Fields cemetary in London; there is a humble stone market for him and his wife Catherine, situated not far from a public toilet, but no one knows exactly where he was buried. Nearby however is a giant Victorian folly of a monument dedicated to John Bunyan, writer of The Pilgrim's Progress. I find it somewhat poigniant that Bunyan, a best selling superstar in his day, is now pretty much unknown outside Christian circles, but Blake's visions have endured and touch people of all kinds of persuations and will undoutedly continue to do so for a long time into the future.

John Martin

I first saw John Martin's dramatic, wide angle big canvas visions in the Tate Gallery in the UK which I would often visit in my teenage years either with my family or sometimes by myself.

Many of my fictions aspired to a vastness in scale and landscapes, describe dramatic, vivid and fantastic landscapes either in an alternative reality or within the collective pysche. 

Vast landscape is also important to me. I also often have dreams that are like the images above, sometime flying above them and as I am able to lucid dream not infrequently, sometimes I will explore them. Over time parts of these dreamscapes have become familiar to me and I visit them or see them again in dreams. Sometimes it feels to me that they are in fact one large landscape of myself I am gradually mapping by living and dreaming.

Books

The City and Stars
Arthur C Clarke

Photograph of Arthur C Clark by en:User:Mamyjomarash [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

There are plenty of classic science fiction novels I could cite as influences on my fictions, Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein or Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt are two which immediately spring to mind and I also discuss The Stone God Awakens by Phillip Jose Farmer below.

Even as I draft this, I find myself recalling that there was a creature in van Vogt's piece that was left over from a previous cosmos - really I should add that to my bibliography of a short story above, as I use this idea in that story and I think about that image sometimes. I have to smile however, as I cannot recall whether I encountered this concept in Voyage of the Space Beagle or in the traditional Hindu mythology I encountered earlier in childhood, which of course predates van Vogt by thousands of years.

I have choosen to write about The City and Stars, is that I read at a young age and was deeply inspired by the concept of an individual breaking out of the illusionary apathy of a decaying future world.

A young man in a future city, one of the last on Earth where the inhabitants indulged in a kind of virtual reality.

It was exiciting to think of waking up anceint cities, discover an anceint space ship under the sand as the character does.

It is also the first example I can think of encountering future history being like past history, that undiscovered parts of the self lie in our origins, a concept I find myself returning to again and again in my work.

Finally, there is also Video games something that drew me to play video games now where it is possible to enter iamgination worlds and explore them, but I, like him, always want to get outside the game and discover something outside the limts of the proscribed dream. The game is not enough, I wanted to look outside it.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams

This was a radio show prior to being a TV series, which was my first encounter with these stories. I read all the books that had been published at that time not long after watching the series.

Adams black humour coupled with grand imaginative scale and actually highly sophisticated concepts is something that certainly influences my fiction strongly and is also something I aspire to in the those
fictions. Also I identify with Adam's way of putting ordinary things or people put into extra ordinary cicumstances, or showing extraordinary or galatic things as familiar and mundane.

A restaurant at the end of the universe, a space drive that works on probability, constructing entire planets to solve a philosohpical conundrum. 

The Magician’s Nephew

C.S. Lewis

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis' children novel about four very spiffing WW2 children who find their way into a magical land called Narnia, through the back of a wardrobe, and get mixed up with the local political scene - a prophetic struggle between good, represented by a talking Lion, and evil, represented by, surprise surprise a child hating witch.

This book and its 6 siblings or sequels, had a profound effect upon me, which is my adult, disinterested way of saying I loved them to bits until I got a fair way into puberty, and then still loved them, but pretended I was meerly aware of them.

An uncle read the first Narnia book to me at the age of about ten. A purist, he started with the chronological founding volume of the series, The Magician's Nephew. The book was actually written some time after The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, even if it took place at least 50 years beforehand, and dealt with the creation of Lewis' magical land, Narnia. It also explained where the witch came from and made her sound a hell of a lot more interesting than she was in his originally penned tale, where she was basically just a nasty, power hungry bitch and more than probably the snake from the garden of Eden, given Lewis' Christian leanings.

As a child, I imagined Narnia like a park or a valley, somewhere you could see across in a glance, from one mountain to the next. I also imagined it was somewhere not only real, but not actually not that far away. I imagined this quite simply because it really felt like this to me - like a place somehow only a heartbeat away, if you knew just how to look. It felt as though it should be real even if it was not.

Filled with this sentiment, this quest, probably my first true flickers of seeking for something beyond myself, I went searching for suitable magical woods, as found in the Magician's Nephew. When I did find a place near my childhood home that seemed to fit the bill, I stood there, trying to feel something, half believing for moment or seconds that I actually was transported to somewhere else. I also, after reading the later books, explored the back of a few wardrobes - at least the big impressive antique type ones I found when visited some relatives, not the tiny modern ones in my home.

Perhaps I always had an imagination a little too active, and a little too convincing for my own general welfare. After all, I sulked for days and days when my grandmother told me Santa Claus did not exist. This was no obstinate refusal to accept reality as dictated to me, but an empircal rebellion. I had actually seen Santa Claus in a waking dream or perhaps in a fevered childhood vision or perhaps it was an early example of lucid dreaming.

To this day I can picture the image I saw - a little blurred, but round and red and real nonetheless - and I can, despite my adult logical faculties still identify a sense of emotional reality with that image. I can also recall the distinct sensation of a huge toy filled sack being placed on the end of my bed, while he searched for just the right stocking of toys for me.

I find it interesting that some people cannot identify with these sort of fantastatic stories, or in some cases can be extremely hostile to them.

I can remember saying something very me to my first wife as we approached a Scottish Island on a ferry. It was a scene unlike anything either of us had seen and I told her how I imagined a distant hillside and the shapes upon it - probably houses - like tents for knights on a battlefield, and the trees below like massive creatures, waiting, held back by their handlers from entering the fray that sure was soon to begin. This was actually a Narnia-like vision and even perhaps reflected a memory of an illustration I had seen in one of the Narnia books. I said it to try and convey the sense of wonder I felt at seeing something so different from my experience that I could not quite grasp it as anything other than an alien landscape from somewhere in my imagination.

"But that's not real," she insisted, meaning that is not what is there. Oddly enough, she ended up as a modern artist, transforming the real in front of her eyes into a form no-one but she would ever recognise.
Having in my adult years had a few experiences beyond the veil, I know it is actually all about finding things that are there all the time, inside you, but the language of desire, the frame of self need and the forms it gets projected onto in both the imagination and every day, is perhaps different for different people. The metaphor of finding a magic land is that for self discovery, so is the metaphor of finding the house you feel completely at home in, or the painting that expresses the feeling beyond photoreality.

A lot of what gets called fantasy deals with total immersion in a world where outlandish, magical or impossible things can really happen. Lord of the Rings is the archetype for this, but Star Wars is another example, as are things like fairy tales.

There is, however, a category of fantasy that deals with people from our own everyday modern world, being transported into a magical world. Or alternatively, discovering a magic hiding in our own world or a part of the world this is magical. For my mind, this kind of fantasy fiction is most immediately relevant, conceptually at least, to our own lives and to our humanity. It is also the sort of fantasy that has always interested me the most.

In these stories magic and the fantasy world basically represents the discovery of a part of our inner world or self we had not previously been aware of, distracted by the ordinaryness and banality of the world we are familiar with. Usually, once the magic is found the character is transformed by it, and when they return to their everyday life they often bring something of their experiences back into everyday life by becoming a different kind of person. Thus in some way they transmit into the ordinary world a little of that magical realm and bring the two somehow closer together.

This is also what happens in mystical experiences: the individual touches upon something profound or beyond the every day world, and is evolved in some way as a result. He or she then takes that experience back to the every day world and lives differently, sees things differently because of what they have touched and how it has affected their character.

A Princess of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs

The covers of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Barsoom' books (planetary romances set on Mars) are some of the ealiest I can recall seeing. I was raised by my grandparents until the age of 13 and there was a book case outside my bedroom filled with books their children - my father, and his brother and sisters - had read when they were growing up. Llana of Gathol and a couple of other Barsoom novels were among them (there is a montage of Burroughs covers here, including the New English Library editions I saw as a child).

Although I saw these books and their covers from an early age, I was actually introduced to the stories themselves by my grandfather who described his enjoyment of reading them when he was a child in the 1920's. The stories sounded like great fun so I went out to find them, not realising some of the later books were sitting on the shelf outside already.

One very salient influence Burroughs work has had on me is his fascination with scheming false gurus and other deceptive priestly figures using the power of religion to manipulate followers to their own ends. This is prominent in the second Barsoon book, The Gods of Mars and also in Mastermind of Mars. This sort of thing often appears in my work - a corpoate cult possessed by a dark lord from anotehr land in my Novel This World We Live In, the Fundamentalist Christian elite desperate to instigate Armageddon in the current novel.

I also pucked up a love of Deux ex machina endings - Burrough's tales had many of them, such as the invisible spaceship the main characters lost at one stage in Fighting Man of Mars, and found again by accident. The planetary romance of mixing advancing technology and sword fighting or chivilrous behaviour. Imaginative.

But the greatest influence is certainly the vision of a dying Mars with remnants of anceint glory, anceint abondoned cities marooned on the shores of no longer existing anceint oceans. Burrough showed an entire worl like this.

Burrough wrote close to 100 novels and I while I am nowhere near having read all of them, I did read a considerable number in my teens including the Tarzan, Pellucidar and the Venus books and The Moon Maid and The Moon Men.

Nesta’s New School
Angela Brazil

The image above is not the cover for Nesta's New School, but The Fortunes of Phillipa. This was however one of the novels in the omnibus edition of Angela Brazil's school stories that contained Nesta's New School. It was another book that was on the bookshelf outside my bedroom when I was a child and most probably originally owned by one of my aunts when they were kids, as these types of English boarding school stories were still popular in the early sixties. The novel was originally published in 1932 (and the Fortunes of Phillipa in 1906) when school stories were far more popular than they are today.

I went through a phase of reading school stories in pre teens, but found those written for boys not terribly engaging as they mainly seem to focus on pranks and antics and rather than emotional stories. Nesta's New School was about a girl whose mother is an actress educated at en exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. When her mother is killed in a car accident she discovered that she is is actualy a twin, given away by a poor family who could at the time not afford to feed an extra mouth. So the second half of the book was about her adjusting to a very different life and family. Not the sort of story you typicaly found in Just William.

The Stone Good Awakens
Phillip Jose Farmer

This was the first science fiction book I read; it was another book from the shelf outside my bedroom as a child. It concerns a scientist petrified by an accident during an experiment some time in the near future who is returned to flesh and blood 20 million years later when humanity has vanished, animals have evolved into sentient beings and a giant concious world tree has covered much of the planet.

Perhaps a major influence or a fortuitious start to reading fantastic fiction it use many tropes I have returned to in my work over time, it's themes of religion, a far future where humanity has devolved. The scale, the outsider.  or vanished and huge scale ideas. I can remember them explorating a river flowing along a single branch.

War of the Worlds/The Time Machine
H.G. Wells

My father was greatly impressed by the 1953 film of H.G. Wells's novel.

I read the novel later and the Time machine and many of Well's short stories probably around the age of 11.

Fascinated by destruction of London by alien creatures.

I also had the Jeff Wayne musical version, which frightening the life out of me. I have wanted to write an alien invasion story ever since and am finally working towards this at the moment.

Comics

2000AD

I was bought the first issue of this by my uncle when on holiday in Aldeburgh a windy town in Norfolk.

This was a major influence on me. The quality of the imagination of stories such as Judge Dredd. The stories in 2000AD were varied, some horror, some science fiction.

Amra Chita Katha
http://www.amarchitrakatha.com/

I read dozens of these indian comics when I was a kid (most of them were published in English as well as Indian languages). Unlike traditional western comics they are simple retellings of stories from anceint Hindu mythology, which is a rich and vast world more outlandish and imaginative than that of many comic worlds. 

Dieties walking on the earth, outlandish goings on and even way out technology such as flying craft and cities that could be hidden under the Earth. People living for lifetimes. People emmersed into ephemeral alternative realities. Wars fought over principles or points of etiquette. Monsters invading heaven. People with abilities and powers.

Films
Ealing Comedies

When I was a child I would often watch Saturday afternoon films on BBC 2 with my grandmother and saw dozens of films she had watched when she was a young woman in the 30s and 40s.

The Ealing comedies I remember well because they were simply fun and very English.

Deanna Durban. Musicals.


Flash Gordon (1980)

I saw the Buster Crabbe black and white serials as a child and I even saw some of them in a movie theature, as there was a cinema in Victoria Station in London that still ran a programme in the seventies. My father took me to the place when we were waiting for a train.

It this film however, that made the greater impression upon me. The mixture of outlanish, camp and imaginative visuals and tongue in cheek adventure turns up in many of my pieces. Visually it was stimulating with worlds suspended in a luminous void of swirling clouds. Advhanced technology styled like retro. And there was Brian Blessed as Vultan the king of the bird people, whose booming voice.

The Empire Strikes Back

I was of the Star Wars generation and saw the first film four times over a weekend in 1976. It was however the second film that made the strongest impression on me.
 

The first and third films in the trilogy are essentially the same film, but this was a different kind of fiction. The big battle takes place at the start, it leads into darkness. No you are not my father. It is in snow not in space. There are sky city.

Television

Blake’s Seven (1978-81)

Photgraph of the original cast by Auz from London, UK (b7cast1) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This was broadcast when I was about 10. It is a gritty and dystopian series and the characters are flawed and sometimes deceptive. A future fascist Earth empire and a group of dissadents and criminals who discover an advanced starship from an unknown civilisation and use it to escape and commit acts of rebellion.

Star Trek was certain an early influence, I probably had seen the entire first incarnation of the 'franchise' as a child more than once over, but it was the non-conformity and rebellion of Blakes 7, its grittiness and the ambiguity of its characters that attracted me more and left a stronger impression upon me. I never much wanted to write stories like Star Trek, but I did want to creat. Some of the images of the show I can still remember today, a giant brain. A lethal virus that reduce people to. Avon and struggling to get a particle of dense matter from a space ship and him considering throwing Darrow off.

The Children of the Stones (1977)

A terrifying (for a kid at least) children's horror series about supernatural forces in a village surrounded by standing stones. Years later I wrote the first third or so of a novel set in the same location.

This is most certainly my earliest encounter with horror. Feeling of something dark in the past but also in the pysche. Horror seems important. One of the under appreciated by most powerful forms. Horror has always been part of my fictions and now I am writing a horror novel.

Dr Who

Yes, guilty, hid behind the sofa watching the Doctor win the day throughout my childhood. I can recall it was broadcast on a Saturday afternoon with the football results read in a droning voice before hand.