Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: The Dawn of the Network Age
October 17, 2012 By 7 Comments
I grew up as part of the last generation that can remember computers being something that only Scientists and Universities and Governments had – arcane hunks of metal with das blinkenlights and whirr-whirr-whirr tape drives and big, washing-machine sized magnetic disk drives (which held orders of magnitude less than your USB thumb drive does today). So while ARPANet/the Internet was born when I was considerably younger, I was part of the first generation who had the opportunity to see and operate a computer when we [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: Kathleen Moffre-Spoor
October 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
How can I talk about influences without mentioning the greatest influence in my life (in some ways,even more so than my parents), Kathleen? I originally met Kathleen through her best friend, Dana. I had befriended Dana at the local community college and was at the time starting to date her. One of the primary connections between us was our gaming interests – both of us played RPGs of various types. So I ended up running a D&D game for Dana and her friend Kathleen. At the time, I was… not [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Laura Ingalls Wilder
October 8, 2012 By 8 Comments
Most of the great influences on my life and writing have been science, science fiction, and fantasy. I've been the quintessential "geek" since I was very little. But there was one set of books which were tremendously important to me and my family, the story of a world that seemed both familiar and alien, told through the eyes of a child who was roughly my age when they were first read to me: the "Little House" books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. (ONLY the books; the less said of the TV show, the better) Laura grew [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Danny Dunn
June 27, 2012 By 10 Comments
When I was young, I read books of SF and of fantasy as well as science fact voraciously. One thing I noticed was that there were commonly books that had children as protagonists – such as Edward Eager's Half Magic, or Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It, or the much more famous Narnia chronicles by C. S. Lewis – but often if anything fantastic or wondrous happened to the children, it was something treated as a secret – something that couldn't be told to the adults. This didn't exactly fit with my mindset. My [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Steven J. Reed
June 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
"Who?" I hear everyone asking. "Never heard of him." No, you never did, almost certainly, unless you read a post I made on my LiveJournal about five years ago. Much of this Under the Influence post is taken from that tribute post. Steve was my friend -- one of my first "older" friends, someone significantly older than I was who treated me as a full equal (he was about 10 years older than me). From a social point of view, Steve would never impress anyone. He was very intelligent, but never ended up in a job or [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Roleplaying Games (RPGs)
June 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment
1977 was the most transformational year ever in my life, with the possible exception of 1995 (the year I married Kathleen). 1977 saw the release of Star Wars, of the first Shannara book and the first Thomas Covenant novel. In 1977, I first began going by the name of "Sea Wasp" online. And in 1977, I first encountered a game called "Dungeons and Dragons". In a very real sense, I had been doing roleplaying games long before that, just as had children from the dawn of time: making up characters and [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: E. E. “DOC” Smith
June 1, 2012 By 15 Comments
I deliberately waited for a while before posting this one. This essay is very similar to the one posted on my original website for Grand Central Arena, and I wanted to have time for other influences to be posted before returning to Doc Smith. I first encountered the work of E.E. "Doc" Smith in sixth grade, in Shaker Junior High School. My homeroom and English teacher, Mr. Dickinson, knew I was a reader of science fiction, and was responsible for introducing me to two great SF writers of the old days. The first happened [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: The Chronicles of Amber
May 30, 2012 By 4 Comments
Roger Zelazny was one of the true masters of fantasy writing. At least one of his works is included in most people's lists of "best ever fantasy" -- and sometimes, people argue, science fiction, as he did very much like to bend the definitions and skewer them. Zelazny produced a number of top-notch books and short stories, but two of them consistently outpace the others in mentions: Lord of Light, and the Chronicles of Amber (especially the original five-book Amber sequence). While Lord of Light is indeed an excellent [ Continue reading... ]
Under The Influence: A.E. Van Vogt
May 28, 2012 By 5 Comments
Alfred Elton Van Vogt is much less well known today than he was in my youth, let alone in his heyday in the 40s-50s. However, he had an immense influence on my writing, or at least my writing design process, because he knew, perhaps better than anyone, how to create a sense of wonder and build it into an adventure – perhaps with only the most tenuous logic holding it together. Van Vogt was the quintessential writer of, for lack of a better word, spectacle-based adventures. His characters were often fairly narrow in [ Continue reading... ]
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