Hello Readers!

I thought it might be good to share with you all some of my favorite authors who I also consider to be major influences in my own work. Also last week was a really difficult week and I have had very little energy to put toward the platform, but I refuse to miss the first-and-third-Thursdays deadline. For some context, I’d consider all five of these authors equal in influence, so they’re in no particular order despite the numbers.

#1 George Orwell

Like many people 1984 was required reading for me in high school, but it had a bigger impact on me than many of my peers at the time. I read Animal Farm as an adult and still own a copy. I’m pretty psyched for Andy Serkis’s upcoming animated adaptation of the latter. He’s kind of the one who drove me to write sci-fi/speculative fiction that’s highly politically charged.

#2 J.R.R. Tolkien

Where to begin? His use of language is incredible and he paints the full picture of Middle Earth. His world-building is so huge, and it’s something I strive for in my own works. I don’t know if I’ll ever develop linguistic systems as intimately as he did, though it may be a fun challenge someday. I do like to include language variance to some degree in different worlds though, because I think it makes it more interesting and believable.

#3 Victor Hugo

I have only read one work by Victor Hugo, but it’s a biggie and has been monumental in my own works, Les Misérables. The way he weaves all of the characters in that piece together and apart and together is brilliantly done. The musical and movie do as best as they can, but the book really gets into each character’s head and the way their stories all connect to the main story is immense and grandiose.

#4 Michael Crichton

I haven’t read a Crichton book since probably high school, but I was always a fan of how he uses real science to create his stories (at least what I’ve read). My list from him includes Jurassic Park, Sphere, Timeline, Prey, and Next. They’re just plain good reads! As I said it’s the incorporation of real science that I really get from him. Jurassic Park deals with Chaos Theory a lot more intimately than the movie ever could. Timeline gets into quantum mechanics pretty intensely, but the (terrible) movie they made mentions it maybe once.

#5 Mary Shelley

The grandmother of science fiction. Frankenstein is all I’ve read of hers, but I’ve read it around three times now. It is so excellently written, and there are so many interesting interpretations, I catch new things every time I read it. I love her use of language, even though English has evolved pretty significantly. While I was attending the Sigma Tau Delta Convention in April, we had a whole session on Frankenstein. In other words, we’re still talking about this book over two hundred years after it’s original publication.

Honorable mentions: H.G. Wells, Alexandre Dumas, George R.R. Martin, Margaret Atwood.

Thanks for reading my friends! I swear I’ll get a short story for free up here at some point. Any writing time I have spent has gone to Last Ark, which even that has been minimal.

As always, like, comment, subscribe and stay tuned with me.

Yours,

Kathryn