Inspiration (Part One)

Compensation is 99% inspiration, or so they say.

(No they don't.)

But what exactly is inspiration?  For me, at least, it is certainly not wholesale lifting from other sources.

Most often, an character's arc, or a fantastical element, in one piece of fiction will lead me - stepping-stone-like - to a somewhat related idea that I flesh out on my own to create something brand new.

Sometimes (very rarely) it will be about stealing an idea someone else had.  But in these cases, it's more like turning a throwaway comment into a full-blown novel.  Like reading an offhand remark about 'a YouTube comment by a man who never existed', and then creating from that an entire story about someone who was erased from reality, but gained a second life as a sentient online footprint.

It's not about stealing.  It's about great works of fiction stirring your imagination to create your own (hopefully very different) art.

For this post, I want to talk about my series of pulp science-fiction e-novellas: "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe".

I've talked before about the origins of this series, but basically I wrote an unsolicited spec for a defunct series of pulp e-novellas set in 1970s North America.  At the time, a paperback collected edition was being mooted, but as the project was put on hold, my story (which was strongly being considered for inclusion in the book) went to limbo.

But the experience prompted me to realize that I could write (and would have fun writing) my own series of pulp adventures, of a similar length.  At the time, I thought I could bang them out one a month at a decent quality (provided I went into the thing with a sufficient number of ideas) and because of my love of Victorian-era pulp SF, I immediately conceived the story of a gentleman of the era finding himself on a journey through outer space, becoming an unlikely hero as he floundered his way through the cosmos to make it back to Earth.

The action-adventure pulp series I had written for was a main inspiration - but only for tone and format.  The content of my novellas would be quite different.

So what inspired me beyond them?  HG Wells, of course, was a main inspiration, and I sought ought some of his books I had not read up to that point, to immerse myself in the right tone.

Also - and quite in opposition to the staid pacing of late 19th Century literature - I was greatly inspired by (and wanted to emulate) the flow, rhythm, and structure of the Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe.  Not the newspaper strips (which I liked as well) but the cinematic serialized adaptations.

If I could somehow evoke the fun of those serials, with their frequent cliffhangers, while also emulating the style and content of early SF works that I loved, then I would be onto a winner (as far as creating what I intended to - I never expected, nor received, financial success from those books).

My main influence, though, was a little loved book called "A Honeymoon in Space" by George Griffith.  First published in 1901 (the same year my Victorian gentleman set out on his celestial adventure) this book describes a dashing man who rescues his old flame from an unwanted marriage in his newly-invented spacecraft.  Together the two take to the stars to see what wonders the solar system has to offer.

In its light-hearted and adventurous tone, its fascination with bizarre alien life and how such societies would evolve, and its utter lack of concern for real-life science, I found something I wanted to emulate in spirit - though not in content.  Its resonances with the concerns of the novel "The Time Machine" gave me much fuel for the fires of my creative writing.

Throw this all together with my love of Sherlock Holmes, adventure serials, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books, and with just a whiff of steampunk about the whole thing, and you have a series I was very proud to more or less succeed at producing once a month (for the six months it endured).

If you want to, you can buy the collected e-books for Kindle for $5.99.  "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe" - one of my favorite things I have ever had the pleasure of writing.