I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, books were an easy way to disappear somewhere else for a while. Sometimes that meant another planet. Sometimes thousands of years into the future. Other times it meant a world with hobbits, wizards, dragons, and places that felt every bit as real as the one outside my window.
I read Isaac Asimov.
Arthur C. Clarke.
Piers Anthony.
Ursula K. Le Guin.
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Later came other writers, but those were some of the ones who got me started.
They were all very different writers, but they had one thing in common.
They made me wonder.
What else is out there?
What happened before us?
Where are we going?
And what if everything we think we know isn’t quite right?
I didn’t know it at the time, but those questions stuck with me.
Years later, when I finally started creating worlds of my own, I realized how much of that early reading was still there.
I have to start with Tolkien.
I loved The Hobbit.
It had everything I wanted in a story when I was younger. Adventure, strange creatures, danger, treasure, and, of course, a dragon.
Then I read The Lord of the Rings.
Middle-earth suddenly felt much bigger.
What I loved wasn’t just what was happening to Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf, and the others.
It was everything that had already happened.
There were ruined kingdoms.
Old wars.
Dead kings.
Forgotten languages.
Places where something important had happened thousands of years earlier.
Characters would mention some person or event from the distant past and Tolkien didn’t always stop to explain the whole thing.
I liked that.
It made Middle-earth feel like it existed before I opened the book.
The characters had arrived in the middle of a story that had already been going on for thousands of years.
That’s something I’ve carried into my own writing.
I don’t want a world to feel like it started on page one.
There should be history.
Things happened before the characters arrived.
Civilizations existed.
People made mistakes.
Wars were fought.
Things were forgotten.
Maybe something was buried that should have stayed buried.
The characters don’t know all of it.
Neither does the reader.
I like discovering it along with them.
Isaac Asimov did something completely different for me.
He made everything feel enormous.
Not just space.
Time.
Especially in the Foundation books.
A hundred years seems like a long time to us.
A thousand years seems almost impossible to imagine.
Asimov could move across huge stretches of time and make you think about civilization itself as part of the story.
People live.
They make decisions.
They die.
The consequences keep going.
Governments rise.
Empires collapse.
Someone living hundreds of years later has to deal with decisions made by people they never knew.
That idea stuck with me.
It also made me realize that the biggest character in a story doesn’t always have to be a person.
It can be a civilization.
A planet.
A species.
Maybe even history itself.
That’s something that eventually became important when I started thinking about the Archive Series.
The people in the story matter.
Darla matters.
Dane matters.
The choices they make matter.
But they’re standing in the middle of something that started long before any of them were born.
A lot longer.
Arthur C. Clarke made me look at the universe differently.
He made it feel ancient.
That’s probably the best way I can describe it.
I loved the idea that humanity could discover evidence of something so old and so far beyond us that we wouldn’t immediately understand what we were looking at.
2001: A Space Odyssey did that especially well.
Something is found.
We know it shouldn’t be there.
We don’t completely understand what it is.
Then we start asking questions.
That’s the kind of science fiction I’ve always liked.
I don’t want someone to walk into the room on page ten and explain everything.
Let me wonder for a while.
Find the object.
Find the signal.
Find the pattern.
Then try to figure out what the hell it means.
Who made it?
How long has it been there?
Why did they leave it?
And what haven’t we figured out yet?
Sometimes the mystery is more interesting than the answer.
Clarke understood that.
Explain everything too quickly and the universe suddenly becomes smaller.
Leave a little darkness around the edges and you keep wondering what’s out there.
Ursula K. Le Guin approached science fiction differently.
Her stories weren’t just about spaceships and technology.
They were about people.
Culture.
Language.
Politics.
The assumptions people make about each other.
That was important because it’s really easy to create an alien civilization that’s basically human.
Give them different skin.
Change their eyes.
Put them in a spaceship.
They’re still people from Earth wearing an alien costume.
But why would another civilization think like us?
Why would they have the same values?
The same family structures?
The same politics?
The same fears?
The same idea of right and wrong?
They wouldn’t.
At least, I don’t think they would.
A civilization that developed somewhere else would have its own history.
And that history would shape everything.
First contact wouldn’t simply be a matter of translating words.
You could understand every word another species says and still have absolutely no idea what they mean.
I find that much more interesting than figuring out how fast their spaceship goes.
Then there was Piers Anthony.
I read the Xanth books when I was younger, and they were completely different from Asimov, Clarke, or Le Guin.
They were strange.
Funny.
Sometimes ridiculous.
And they went wherever the idea took them.
I liked that.
Not every idea has to start with someone deciding whether it’s serious enough to become a story.
Sometimes you just ask:
What if?
Then see where it goes.
What if robots could think?
What if humanity spread throughout the galaxy?
What if somebody visited Earth before humans existed?
What if magic was real?
What if everything we believe about our history is wrong?
You don’t need to know the answer before you ask the question.
Sometimes the question is the beginning of the story.
Obviously, Star Trek isn’t a book.
But there’s no way I can talk about what influenced my science fiction without including it.
I’ve watched every series and every movie.
What I liked most wasn’t the Enterprise.
It wasn’t the phasers.
It wasn’t even the transporter, although I would still like one of those.
It was the idea that humanity made it.
We survived ourselves.
We didn’t become perfect.
We became better.
We eventually got past enough of our wars, divisions, and stupidity to go somewhere else and start exploring.
There was hope in that.
The future didn’t automatically have to be some destroyed world where everyone was fighting over the last can of food.
Human beings could actually learn something.
We could grow up.
And when we found something we didn’t understand, the first response didn’t always have to be to shoot it.
Sometimes you talked.
Sometimes you listened.
Sometimes you realized you were wrong.
I still like that version of the future.
Star Wars gave me something completely different.
It wasn’t really about predicting the future.
It was mythology in space.
Good and evil.
Family.
Power.
Loss.
Redemption.
Old wars.
Ancient orders.
People living with decisions made before they were born.
Again, history mattered.
The galaxy felt old and used.
Ships were dirty.
Buildings had been there for a long time.
Governments existed before the current government.
Nobody had just finished building the universe before Luke Skywalker showed up.
That’s something I appreciate much more now than I probably did when I first watched it.
A fictional world feels more real when you get the sense that life keeps happening even when the main characters aren’t around.
As I got older, I found more writers who made me look at science fiction in different ways.
Andy Weir is one of them.
What I loved about The Martian was that science actually mattered.
The character has a problem.
He has to solve it.
Sometimes he gets it wrong.
Then he has another problem.
There isn’t some magical piece of technology that suddenly fixes everything.
He has to think his way through it.
I like science fiction where the science isn’t just decoration.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time made me think about intelligence differently.
We naturally assume intelligence should look like us.
Why?
Evolution produced humans once.
Change the environment.
Change the starting point.
Give evolution a few hundred million years.
Who knows what you end up with?
James S. A. Corey did something else with The Expanse that I really enjoyed.
Human beings can spread throughout the solar system and we’ll still be human beings.
We’ll take everything with us.
Politics.
Greed.
Families.
Prejudice.
Loyalty.
Love.
Our ability to work together.
And our amazing ability to screw things up.
Technology can change incredibly fast.
People don’t always change with it.
Then there’s Liu Cixin and The Three-Body Problem.
That brought me back to one of the questions I’ve always liked.
What if the universe isn’t waiting for us with open arms?
It doesn’t have to be evil.
It doesn’t have to be good.
Maybe it’s just really big and we aren’t nearly as important as we think we are.
For years, I visited worlds created by other people.
Eventually I decided to create one of my own.
I didn’t sit down and think, I’m going to write something like Asimov or Clarke.
Why would I?
They already wrote those books.
I wanted to write something that made me feel the way their books made me feel.
I wanted to wonder what happened next.
I wanted mysteries that got bigger instead of smaller.
And I wanted questions.
Lots of questions.
Are humans really the first intelligent civilization on Earth?
What if the history of life on this planet is much larger than we think?
What if something artificial has been sitting inside our DNA for more than a billion years?
What if another civilization knows more about Earth than we do?
And one of my favorites:
What happens when humanity discovers that almost everything we believed about our place in the universe was based on incomplete information?
Those questions eventually became The Inheritance War and grew into the Archive Series.
That’s one of the biggest things science fiction taught me.
You don’t have to predict the future.
I don’t think that’s the point.
Ask a good question.
Are we alone?
What makes us human?
Can we survive ourselves?
What happens if we meet something much more intelligent than we are?
What if we’re wrong about our own history?
Then put people in the middle of it.
Because eventually, no matter how big the story becomes, someone has to make a decision.
You can have ancient civilizations.
Billions of stars.
Alien worlds.
Artificial intelligence.
Spaceships crossing the galaxy.
None of it matters very much until somebody has something to lose.
That’s when it becomes a story.
I still read science fiction and fantasy.
I still find books that make me stop and think:
Damn. I wish I’d thought of that.
That’s part of the fun.
But the books you read when you’re young are different.
They were there when you were still figuring out how big the world was.
Then they showed you worlds that were bigger.
Tolkien taught me that a fictional world could have thousands of years of history behind it.
Asimov made me think about civilizations instead of just characters.
Clarke showed me that sometimes not knowing is the best part.
Le Guin made me think about how different another civilization could really be.
Piers Anthony reminded me that sometimes an idea can just be fun.
Star Wars showed me a galaxy that felt like it had been around forever.
And Star Trek made me hope that if humanity ever does make it out among the stars, maybe we’ll be a little smarter by the time we get there.
I didn’t know any of that was going to influence my writing when I first read or watched those stories.
I was just enjoying them.
Maybe that’s what good stories do.
You finish the book.
Put it back on the shelf.
Move on with your life.
Then thirty or forty years later, you sit down to create a world of your own and realize some small piece of those stories has been traveling with you the whole time.
D. M. Bachmann is the author of The Inheritance War and the Archive Series, science-fiction stories exploring humanity’s origins, deep time, first contact, and the question of whether we’re really the first intelligent civilization to call Earth home.
