10 Authors

A while ago girlfriend sent me an interesting chain Facebook message asking for the 15 authors who had the biggest influence on me.  I never got around to answering it.  I never got around to responding to it, not because I didn't want to answer the question, but because I didn't have 15 friends who wouldn't mind me passing the message on to them.  And obviously I couldn't follow the message's instructions only part way.

Except, screw it, that's what I'll do, and what's more, I'll do it in my own particular idiom.  First of all, this list is of 10 authors, not 15.  That's because some of the names I used to get to 15 were beginning to sound like reaching.  Also, it's not enough for me to claim to have been influenced by these authors.  I intend to explain how.  Because, if nothing else, I'd like to say some nice things about some of the people on this list.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien
This one should be fairly obvious.  As an aspiring author of any kind of fantasy, I sort of owe Tolkien for inventing the high fantasy genre.  In a weird way he both started and ended it at the same time--epic fantasy, Athena-like, reached maturity with The Lord of the Rings and what is left is imitation or deconstruction.  So it seems to me, at least.

I remember in high school picking up a Tolkien encyclopedia at the library.  I had never read anything by him at this point--I liked Rankin and Bass' animated The Hobbit, and that was it.  But the world and characters he created were fascinating.  I confess that I knew and loved Gollum's life story before I knew the plot of The Lord of the Rings.  I would still go back to him to remind anyone that true characters can be created in the exaggerated style of fantasy.  But before I realized the significance of that, Tolkien represented the apex of the time in my artistic development when I considered world building to be crown of the craft.

Ironically, I've been told that Hengist and Undine could have been written without Tolkien to inspire it.  That would have to do with a couple of my other influences...

2. Neil Gaiman
I was unfortunately already grown up when I realized that I wanted to be Neil Gaiman when I grew up.  I'd give up my knees to have his head for mythology.  His Marvel 1602 started me taking comic books more seriously than they probably deserve, again.  I periodically go back to Gaiman just to remind myself what really good fantasy looks like.

3. Robin McKinley
Deerskin might have been the first fantasy novel I read after a long drought in college.  I hadn't seen fairy tales used as grist so effectively before.  Without her I probably would have taken a good bit longer to consider the advantages (and legitimacy) of reworking existing stories.

I sort of imagine Robin McKinley looking over my shoulder and clucking disapprovingly whenever one of my female characters starts to go flat.

4. T.S. Eliot 
I don't get The Waste Land but I've always wanted to, and it's still been able to affect me.  Twice--once in high school and once in college--I tried to write papers on this poem.  They were some of my worst papers, largely because my theses were rubbish.  But this was the first time I really enjoyed art that surpassed me.  Later on I would discover a similar pleasure in watching End of Evangelion half a dozen times before I fully understood what was happening in the second half.

5. Robert Howard
This is the man who created Conan the Barbarian, and probably the genre of "heroic" fantasy.  If I avoid being derivative of Tolkien, it's largely by being derivative of Howard.  I very much had Conan in mind when I created Hengist, who is cut from the same cloth but to a different pattern.  I wanted Hengist to be an answer to Conan's nihilism, striving toward ethics to match the heroic scale of his character.  And in my wizard, I find myself revisiting Howard's perpetual conflict between the human and inhuman, also cast as "sword and sorcery."

6. Orson Scott Card
Ender's Game is on my to-read list.  I've actually never read a novel by Orson Scott Card yet.  So what is he doing here?

Card's How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy was the first book on writing to answer the questions I really wanted answered--questions I had looked unsuccessfully for answers to in several college writing courses.  Card gave me my first broad concept of how to structure a plot, except for an occasional analysis of The Hero's Journey that I had seen.  I always knew there were more stories, but no one had seemed interested in explaining how they were put together.

But I've also been told I really ought to read some of his fiction.


7. Jerry Holkins
a.k.a. Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade.  Penny Arcade is on my list of about a dozen webcomics I keep up with.  I can't quite say it's my favorite webcomic, but my respect for its creative team is all but boundless.  While I was in college I discovered the story of how Penny Arcade got off the ground.  There was something romantic in a neo-Bohemian way about living on donations from one's online readers.  Not that that is a sustainable situation, and they moved on to a legit business model that seems to be bringing in actual money.  But being able to eat every day has not prevented Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik from keeping it more or less real, almost all the time.

But besides the life, I just like the way Holkins writes.  Not the vulgarity, so much, but even that he does with such creative gusto--he has coined new vulgarities capable of stirring my long-stagnant bile.  And generally, om the family-tolerable sphere, he regularly furnishes top-quality hyperbole.

8. G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton had a rare gift polishing ideas to a brilliant gloss.  It helped that they were often good ideas to start with.  Whenever I read one of his polemics, as soon as I set it down my inner monologue spins off into long, proclamative explorations of the most important subjects I can think of.

If we're both very lucky, you'll see echoes of Ballad of the White Horse in my riff on Arthuriana.

9. Ursula K. LeGuin 
I came to the Earthsea trilogy at a time when I was beginning to wonder if any successful fantasy was really character-driven, or under 800 pages.  Altogether the three Earthsea books probably come in shy of 600 pages, and each one is pretty self-contained.  They also got me thinking in new ways about how magic can work, and I look forward to that train of thought coming to fruition.

10. George Eliot
More specifically, Middlemarch.  Middlemarch is, I think, very possibly the best book written in English in the 1800s.  This is not to diminish Dickens, who almost certainly wrote more great books than Eliot, but I don't think he could have written Middlemarch.  And I guess that is diminishing Dickens.

I fell in love with the book when I read it the first time, in college, despite having had to skip a chapter or two to keep up with that class.  That came at an impressionable time, when my ideas on right and wrong, personal integrity, and love were still coalescing.  Middlemarch deals with most of the things I tend to think are most important about being a human being.  You'll notice, if you ever have the chance, that I try to deal with the same issues in Hengist and Undine.