I’m often asked: what are your influences? So now here is a link I can point people to when they ask.
This is a list of the writers who’ve most influenced me, or at least the ones that came to mind in the last two hours. I’ll expand it if I think of anyone else interesting. I’ve limited myself to one book per writer to keep the list manageable.
This is not a list of recommendations, although I would also recommend nearly everything on here. Nor is it remotely representative of Important Works in the Field. It’s just things that stuck, and some of those things are just things a teenager in the eighties happened to read.
Jack Vance wrote everything, resplendently, and I read most of it with delight, but it’s theLyonessebooks whose impact I think you can see most obviously in my work.
I learnt from Hammett that you can have a third-person narrative without ever describing or referencing anything that occurs inside the protagonist’s head. Basic, right? never occurred to me, though. He got me into Chandler, too.
3.Raymond Chandler 雷蒙德 钱德勒, The Simple Art of Murder《简单的谋杀艺术》
AK:
This is his (enormously influential) essay on detective fiction. I can’t honestly remember all the plots of his novels and I suspect neither could he, but his metaphors do to sentences what skilled wrestlers do to unskilled wrestlers. He was a poet turned oilman turned novelist. Like TS Eliot, he was born in 1888, the year that Jack the Ripper and the Order of the Golden Dawn got going, and the year that I elected as the start date of Fallen London. He was born in Nebraska, moved to Croydon when he was 12, went to the same school as PG Wodehouse, and spent time in the British Civil Service before he moved to San Francisco. People are more complicated than we think.这是他关于侦探小说的(影响巨大的)文章。老实说,我记不住
I can’t include this because it’s not fiction, so I haven’t. Keep it between us.
我不能把这个放进去,因为这不是小说,所以我没有。这是我们俩之间的秘密。
T S 艾略特和他的《荒原》,这个应该不用做什么介绍了。
5.Sylvia Plath 西尔维娅·普拉斯, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
AK:
“Dream about these long enough and your hands and feet shrivel away when you look at them too closely. The sun shrinks to the size of an orange, only chillier…”
“如果你长时间地梦见这些,当你看得太近时,你的手脚就会萎缩。太阳会缩小到橙子大小,只是更冷……”
西尔维娅·普拉斯,美国自白派诗人,31岁自杀身亡。这本书是她的短片故事的合集,其中的第一篇小说就是Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams。这部小说讲的是发生在一个属于Johnny Panic的“机构”里的故事,主角为这家机构工作,并越来越为Johnny Panic而着迷并试图让自己在各个方面都变得更像他。
6.Tanith Lee 塔妮丝·李, Night’s Sorceries
AK:
Lee is prolific, pulpy, elegant, and lush, not unlike Jack Vance with more feminism and a lot more sex.Night’s Sorceriesis the last book in herFlat Earthseries, but the first one I read, and I’m glad because it frames the rest beautifully.
7.Christopher Marlowe 克里斯托弗·马洛, Dr Faustus 《浮士德博士》
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This was one of my A-level set texts. Thirty years later I still can’t stop quoting it. (Marlowe was stabbed to death down the road from where I live now.)
This was another A-level set text. I hated it when I first read it, for reasons that I realised a couple of years later were stupid reasons.
这是另一本 A 级教材。我第一次读到它时很讨厌它,但几年后我才意识到我讨厌它的理由很蠢。
莎翁的《暴风雨》,勿须多言。
9.Arkady and Boris Strugatsky阿卡迪·斯特鲁伽茨基与鲍里斯·斯特鲁伽茨基, Roadside Picnic 《路边野餐》
AK:
I’m cheating a little here. You probably know that this is the novel on which Tarkovsky’sStalkerwas based. I sawStalkerat the age of eighteen, by accident, very late at night, and I was asleep for the first ten minutes, which include a very slightly explanatory text crawl. I woke up for the train scene and pretty much watched the rest of it with my mouth open. Then it sank into the bottom of my mind like a bomb into mud and I forgot about it for twenty years.
12.James Lee Burke詹姆斯·李·伯克, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
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I read this on the strength of its title when I was on one of my noir jags. Every so often I read two or three of his other Dave Robicheaux books and then they start to blur into each other, because there is something of a formula, but good Lord he writes up a storm.
13.Roger Zelazny 罗杰·泽拉兹尼, A Night in the Lonesome October
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Zelazny is the master. This isn’t his best, but it’s the one I would be buried with. It’s also the one with by far the most direct and visible influence onCultist Simulator.
14.A.A. Attanasio A.A.阿塔纳西奥, The Last Legends of Earth
AK:
Below is what I wrote in a fan email to Attanasio. In case it makes the book sound worthy and dull, let me be clear that this is a seven-thousand-year-epic about (approximately) an alien from the centre of the universe resurrecting humanity as bait for intelligent flying spiders who ate people. It’s wildly inventive and readable and also the most poignant book about flying spiders who eat people ever written.“I mentioned that I loved the sincerity ofyour work. Sincerity, and earnestness, are unfashionable and difficult virtues. Particularly if one happens to be British. They’re also quite rare virtues to find wedded to thoughtfulness and perceptiveness. I just dug up an old interview with Tracey Thorn, the singer, who said:‘It would be fascinating to do a studyofwhen irony took over completely, because I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m sure someone clever could analyse culture and politics and music and define the moment when irony stopped being an option and became the default option. I think it’s really problematic that everything is now seen through an ironic tinge; it just makes it very difficult for people within the arts to be entirely sincere about things without looking like they just haven’t thought it through properly. The problem with irony is it assumes the positionofbeing the end result, from having looked at it from both sides and having a very sophisticated take on everything, so the dangerofeschewing irony is you look as though you just haven’t thought hard enough about it, and are just being a bit simplistic.’I think she’s right, and it’s rare and heartening to read writers, like you, who are unironic without being remotely simplistic.”
A.A.阿塔纳西奥,美国科幻小说家。他的《基元》获得过幸运奖提名。之后他又创作了三部小说,和基元一起被合称位《基元四部曲》。这本The last Legend of Earth是《基元四部曲》的最后一部。这本同样没有译本,豆瓣只有孤零零一个页面https://book.douban.com/subject/4609463/
15.Barbara Hambly 芭芭拉·汉柏莉, The Silent Tower
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I loved Hambly so much when I was growing up that I genuinely can’t tell how good she is and I suspect she might be pulpier than I would prefer. But her characters are impossibly likeable, her plotting is meticulous and gripping and her prose descriptions of the play and light and shade are uniquely good. There’s a bit she writes about lamplight through a cracked-open door looking like ‘a dropped scarf on the parquet’ that I can’t forget.
Hilary Mantel wrote an introduction to Renault’s The Praise Singer, and this is what she wrote: “More than almost any novelist, Renault understood the deliciousness of mundane and technical details […] and just as we know exactly the feeling of turning on a light-switch or ordering a sandwich, from her reading of anecdotal accounts and linguistic analysis, and her own study of vases and friezes, Mary Renault could describe perfectly Greek daily life: the pattern of scarring ‘you see’ on the arms of a cavalryman and the shock of seeing bare-faced Etruscan actors […] the practicalities of acting in an eighteen-thousand-seater Corinthian theatre where ‘in the top row they can hear you sigh’; the way mourning women have to stop for a chat when they’re tired out with wailing; and how men yawn as they bleed to death.” So now you know. And I want to add that Renault’s ironic, affectionate sense of the shape of the human heart still warms me. But for the purposes of this post, I’ll just say that Stone, Storm and Salt inSunless Seawould be very different if I hadn’t readThe King Must Die.
A retelling of the Matter of Britain from Merlin’s point of view, in a persuasively Dark Ages setting. I loved it as a kid and then for years thought that it was by Mary Renault, until to my chagrin I found out that, no, it was a different Mary. To my intense relief I reread it last year and found that their prose styles are actually strikingly similar and a lot of their preoccupations overlap, so I wasn’t being a total eejit. Anyway, read it and you’ll see the relevance to my stuff.
It’s about the terraforming of Mars, sort of. I’ve loved it for years and it was the first book I recommended to Lottie. As it happens, Mr Jericho in Desolation Road is the kernel of an idea for a thing called Exilewhich you’ll hear about at some point.
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