A speculative mind

Sorry, I was sick last week. So this week will have to be twice as good! How do writers get inspired to come up with a great story? To put it another way: who comes up with this stuff? What is inspiration? According to Merriam-Webster: When  inspire  first came into use in the 14th century it had a meaning it still carries in English today: “to influence, move, or guide by divine or supernatural influence or action.” Inspire came from a Latin root which meant literally to “breathe into” So one can imagine divine or magical influence being breathed into an artist or writer, and then it could all come flowing out. Sounds easy. Just find a supernatural being and get him/her/it to breathe the inspiration into you and you are good to go. But just for the sake of argument, what if you can’t find a supernatural being that is willing to breathe something into you? Well, you could take a page from George R.R. Martin. I cannot say where he came up with all of his i...

In the big field of speculative fiction there are two major genres fantasy and science fiction. Of course there are all their related sub-genres. There are readers who only read science fiction and refuse to read fantasy, and then there are readers who will only read fantasy. Those purists might have trouble with this article, because I want to talk about the stories that are both, the novels that fall into that gray area. There is a gradient that exist between fantasy and science fiction. Some stories are 100% science fiction and some are 100% fantasy. But some are maybe 15% science fiction and the rest fantasy. Some are mostly science fiction but have a little fantasy to them. Then there are some where you just don’t know. There is a commonality between science fiction and fantasy. In either case there is some aspect of the story that is not to be found in our world as we currently know it. This is why both fall under the heading of ‘speculative fiction’. Consider Game of Thron...

Sometime in 1978 my roommates and I started watching a highly anticipated new TV show: Battlestar Galactica (BSG). This was just post Star Wars and it was the first science fiction television show to use digital effects. Everybody I knew was watching this show. The effects were amazing. They had a good solid cast: Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, Ray Miland, Lew Ayers. Unfortunately, the stories were aimed at a younger audience, and compared with Star Wars, the villains were somewhat cartoon caricatures.   The plots did not lend themselves to getting me emotionally involved. Then there was the problem of them zooming around the galaxy from planet to planet like they were just popping by the local grocery store. There was no mention that I recall of faster-than-light technology or how they were accomplishing these jaunts between the stars. This is a problem for me. I like my science fiction to be plausible, or at least with a plausible explanation. They were not the f...

A few years ago Harry Harrison died. I was lamenting over this fact and I was surprised to learn that most of the people I talked to had never heard of him. That is a shame because Harry Harrison was a fixture of printed science fiction in the 1960’s and 70’s and continued into the 2000’s. By the way, there is one of his works that most people do know about . . .   but I will get to that in a moment. My college roommate was a fan of Harrison and turned me on to the Stainless Steel Rat series, which I thoroughly enjoyed.   The main character, The Stainless Steel Rat himself, is a scoundrel. He is a master criminal whose name is James Bolivar DiGriz, but is often referred to as Slippery Jim DiGriz. Early in the first novel DiGriz gets caught and winds up being forced to work for the good guys. As I said, DiGriz is a scoundrel, but a likable scoundrel that we have no problem rooting for. He is funny and charming. The first novel was so much fun that he wrote a sequel, and...