Still sick, still achy, still in Canada, and still keeping on keeping on. I hope you’re all well and doing better than I am healthwise. (As for non-health? Hey, I’m with my fiancée. I’m golden.
It’s the weekend, and that means it’s open mike day. And I thought today might be fun to discuss influences. If you look at Mythology of the Modern World, you see Neil Gaiman bumping up against Thomas Bulfinch, with a good sized dollop of the Bros. Grimm as filtered through Nobilis and Hitherby Dragons. All of which also owes a moderate amount to Douglas Adams, at least in style. Looking at Justice Wing stuff, there’s a goodly amount of the old Superguy stuff in there, but with big chunks of Tom Wolf and Hunter S. Thompson, alongside some of the potboiler style stuff. And Theftworld is Robert Heinlein and Mike Resnick having a confab with J. Michael Straczynski with DS9 era Ronald Moore offering commentary and drinks.
Which isn’t to say any of this is up to any of their quality. But I’m talking influence.
So what about all of you? What influences do you have in your creative work, your day to day life — whatever, really? Sound off! With sound!
Terry Pratchett, Randall Garrett and the Bob Heinlein who wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. I’d like to add Tim Powers and Ken Hite, but I need to train up a bit more first.
Moe
PS: Oh, yeah: Diane Duane and JMF. Anybody who could turn Star Trek into actual, you know, science fiction is worth emulating.
The internet as a whole.
Which, in retrospect, probably has a lot to say about my sanity.
Yeah, I definitely have a lot of Terry Pratchett in the absurdity of what I write. I also give a fair bit of credit for inspiration to, of all things, Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. I like to focus on what is considered the regular and “less significant” part of life instead of the grand stuff. Probably got a bit of that from Russell T. Davies as well. Even with the big stuff, its the little stuff that makes it interesting to me.
My choice of genre comes from Gene Roddenberry and T.H. White. My humor comes from A.A. Milne, Charles Schulz, Bill Cosby, Groucho Marx, Johnny Hart, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart. My wordiness comes from Richard Hooker and Douglas Adams.
I’d say that Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman are the big two that I tend to emulate (at the very least my friends have compared my style to theirs on numerous occasions).
I also take a lot of inspiration from the folks (all one of them) at Hitherby Dragons, as well as occasionally showing a little bit of Charles Dickens’ influence.
When I look at J. Michael Stracyznski’s stuff, I get the feeling that we’re influenced by the same things, though I’ve never been a huge fan of his and don’t feel much of a direct debt.
Neil Gaiman, on the other hand… I’d be sacrificing oxen to him if I just knew where to send the burnt livers.
My true influences probably go way back to junior high – Piers Anthony, Robert Asperin, Anne McCaffrey, the original Star Trek (we had reruns!), Peter S. Beagle’s Last Unicorn, Jim Henson…
Henson, unsurprisingly, seems to be shaping a ton of stuff in my comics. As are Tex Avery and Chuck Jones.
Really recent are Miyazaki and Neil Gaiman, the Final Fantasy series, Something Positive, Schlock Mercenery, and some guy called Eric Burns.