This weekend, friend-of-inflatable Cheryl Ossola tagged me on Facebook. That makes me sound very social-networky, I realize, but there you are, that’s what happened. The game is to name 15 authors who influenced you, and to think and write fast so that your response is as true as possible. Then you tag 15 other people and task them with the same mission.
I threw out my first list. It was a good list, too. It graced Brecht (for defamiliarization, and other Frankfurt School goodness), and Italo Calvino (for If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller…). There was Willa Cather, and Joseph Conrad. Hey there Henry Fielding! A tip of the hat to Joyce, who was joined inevitably in the Irish French quarter by fellow expat Becket. Behan and Thomas drank rowdily in a slow, black, crow black corner of the list. Eliot looked on, measuring out sobriety with a coffee spoon. Plath and Woolf wept.
True, all these are and were influences, but in the truth the list was mainly designed to make me look good. So I started again, and went for authors who wrote novels that obsessed me at one time or another. Here’s the list, with notes for each.
Iain Banks
For the Culture novels, especially Player of Games. But also for the Wasp Factory, and other dark non-SF titles.
Isaac Asimov
The first properly grown up book I ever read was a copy of The Rest of the Robots, the follow up to I, Robot. I plucked it from my parents’ bookshelf, and I was pretty much hooked.
Margaret Atwood
She had me with The Handmaid’s Tale, but then never let me go.
Ray Bradbury
I consumed Bradbury stories in the school library at lunchtime. I tried to adapt his stories into radio plays. I can still feel the plastic covering and see the yellow glare of the hardback Gollancz editions.
Terry Pratchett
Finely crafted, funny fantasy. Silliness and depth in a perfectly uneasy balance that shouldn’t work. I return to favourites when I’m miserable, and a new Discworld novel is always an occasion in this house.
George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Douglas Adams
I learned the Hitchiker’s Guide radio series by heart, and recited it in the playground. What a geek.
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five was just the start. But what a fantastic literary device the alien capture time travel thing was. Surely only Vonnegut could have made such a dark story so deceptively light and easy. Damn.. that reminds me, I left out Heller.
Martin Millar
Occasionally twee, darkly comic, magical realist tales of sub-cultural life in Brixton. Some great sex too. Look for Ruby and the Stone Age Diet. I notice he’s recently been taken up by the the US market. About time.
Philip K Dick
A Scanner Darkly is a drug culture, police procedural, state conspiracy, paranoia novel. Perfect. Look out for the foreword, in which PKD laments many real lost friends.
David Mitchell
Especially The Cloud Atlas: like Calvino’s Traveller but with all the stories satisfyingly ended.
William Gibson
For cyberpunk and his more recent uber-cool journeys in logo-centric brandland. I’d have Neal Stephenson in the list about here too if there were but room.
John Wyndham
Day of the Triffids, and especially The Chrysalids are still among my favourite post-apocalypse novels.
John Brunner
The Sheep Look Up is an angry eco-thriller, The Shockwave Rider is a dystopian hacker novel. Both were astonishingly ahead of their time.
JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings was more lunchtime library reading. Death to Tom Bombadil, please, and an editor to the endless dreary Mordor march at the end, but it still haunts my dreams.
Joseph Heller
(Ok.. that’s 16. Tough). Catch 22 is a near perfect novel. Funny, absurd, infinitely sad. The structure, scenes, and images of the novel all express and then surrender to the paradox at its core. I loved God Knows, as well.
We have an unofficial rule here at Inflatable. Don’t do list pieces, and don’t end on a question (lazy lazy lazy). But, it’s too tempting… any influences to share?
