Bubble and Squeek for 12 April 2023

Today, David talks about story inspiration and goes on to prove that anything and everything can be an inspiration. In this case, it is a line from a movie. —When someone asks you about the inspiration of your novel, you are expected to talk about that one thing that struck you like a lightning bolt. For me, that’s not so simple. But each part of my novel has an inspiration somewhere. I’m going to talk about a single line and how it completely changed the fate of mankind in my book. That line is a simple one. And it is stolen from my second favorite movie of all time, Terminator 2. John Conner and the Terminator are going to a mental asylum to rescue Sarah Conner. The Terminator has been ordered by John to not kill anyone, but the first thing he does is pull out his gun and blow...

I know Cat from conventions and the local coffeshop. I also know her writing and love it. I’m completely biased and I really enjoyed the Near + Far collection. — My favorite thing about Near + Far is that I was worried at one point that I couldn’t write SF. I’ve never been a sciencey person. I like reading about it, but when it comes to numbers and metals and periodic weights, a little part of my head goes wandering off into the forest, gathering daisies, until the numbers have gone away. But one of the cool things about science fiction is that it’s social science too, and that’s an area that interests me greatly. Some of my favorite books fall into this view, like Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, Kay Kenyon’s The Braided World, or Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan. That’s where I went when I wrote...