Had a long interesting conversation with Gary Wolfe today. We touched on what, if any, influence Robert Heinlein continues to have on the science fiction field today. My own thought is that his last influential novel (not good, just influential) was Starship Troopers. That puppy smacked the field around, and the amount of stuff written because of it is phenomenal. I also think the reason that he looks like he isn’t influential any longer is that his influence has been absorbed into the very fabric of the field itself.

That lead on to thinking about writers who are proving to be surprisingly influential today, like Jack Vance and Philip Jose Farmer. I think you can readily and increasingly see their influence on the field, but I wonder if that’s because their influence is sufficiently smaller that you can actually detect it against the backdrop of other SF being written. And, as a follow-on, is Steven Erikson the new Phil Farmer? I wonder.

From there we wandered on to discussing what has influenced the field, what hasn’t, and who is likely to have a long term impact. I think I surprised Gary by suggesting that Vernor Vinge may be forgotten, but we agreed about a lot of other stuff. One thing we went around about for a while was whether there had been any really defining or influential novel since Neuromancer, one that the whole field had responded to. I can’t think of one. Can you guys? There have been a lot of fine novels, and many that deserve a lot of respect, but none that grabbed the zeitgeist the same way.

Welcome, readers, to this most disused of blog spaces. I looked back at my old posts from 2004 and 2005, and I was much more active then. You could rely on me to say something. Now, it’s ‘check out my book review’, or ‘this is what I’ve been doing lately’. Blech.

And is nothing happening to me?

Well, no. Things are happening. I’m planning a trip. Yay. I received a kind and generous invitation to do something which provoked all sorts of odd thoughts and reactions, not the least my unofficial advice to writers, and what I do or don’t have to offer to writers as advice.

And I’m also reading. I bought Frances Hardinge’s Verdigris Deep yesterday, which looks good. I read a very odd Steven Erikson story too. It’s either very, very good, or not very good at all, and I can’t decide which. I’ll probably have to re-read it to be sure. It has pirates and gods and postmodern trickery. I bet Phil Farmer would have loved it.

I also bought the very first story for next year’s years best, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 2, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.

What else? I’m getting all ‘seventies’ with my musical tastes, for reasons I can’t quite fathom. I actually bought a best of Peter Frampton yesterday (why?) and Stephen Stills’ Manassas, which I’d never heard before. Every week day I get up at 5am, and head off to work at around 6am. By 7am, I’m sitting at my desk getting ready to work, and for some reason the sound of the 70s gets the day going better than anything else for me. I don’t know why, except that I was in my early teens, which might mean something.

I also watched Torchwood, which started out poorly, but ended well (except for some visual silliness). I also think Dr Who Season 3 worked out pretty well, though the quality of episodes was vastly uneven.

Hmm. All I need now is, stupid work stuff aside, to find a social life (hi fellow caballeros), plan two trips (one to Canberra and one to the US), and get on with things. More soon!

…and John Clute has gone before us to point the way. Curiously, he says “I think Spook Country makes us shiver because we are waiting for the world to tell us volume three.”  Volume 3? Gibson remains the most interesting writer to emerge from science fiction during the 1980s. He’ll be sixty next year.

Eclipse is an original anthology series. This became very clear to me this morning. I was in touch with the publisher, Jason Williams, who is currently reading Eclipse 1, and seems to like it a lot. That was very encouraging. When you’ve been the only person working on something, you always wonder how other people will receive it. I’m now even more confident that the world will like it. Anyway, while I’m awaiting copy-edits and stuff for Eclipse 1, I’m already turning my attention to Eclipse 2. I just sent out the very first invitation, and will send out more in the next week. This is one of the real fun parts of doing a project like this. And, I might even have a short open submission period for this one. Hmm.

Well, this was disappointing.