Hellooo!!

It’s always interesting what influences authors as they go through life. Simon Stephenson has written Set My Heart To Five about a humanoid robot called Jared who suddenly finds he may be having emotions sending him on a journey he was not expecting. Simon kindly agreed to talk about which pieces of SF influenced him

What science fiction influenced you the most?

Great question! And even more so because I now feel like an under-prepared junior government minister that just got ambushed on the Today programme, because this is the question that always terrifies me!

I say that because - while I do love the genre, and have undeniably written a pretty scifi book - I am not nearly as well-read in scifi as I’d like to be. No doubt it’s a stereotype, but I tend to think of true science fiction fans as all being incredibly knowledgeable in the genre, and able to debate the finer points of Philp K Dick’s Valis at the drop of a hat. I have nothing but admiration for that, and only wish I could too.

Still, the question was ‘which science fiction influence you the most?’, and that one even I should be able to answer. My novel, ‘Set My Heart To Five’ is set in 2054, and it is about an android who wants to become a screenwriter. So, it sits in that small but perfectly-formed genre of science fiction comedy. (I think all the best science fiction tends to have a sense of humour, but the out-and-out comedies are a little rarer.) Douglas Adams of course is our colossus, but I was ten years old when Red Dwarf first came on television in 1988, and I just couldn’t believe that anything so brilliant existed in any galaxy.

A couple of years after that, I found my way to Asimov. I don’t think I’ve picked it up since, but I was a junior chess obsessive and I adored the merciless logic with which he wrote. And then technically this one is mostly fantasy rather than sci fi, but I was hugely into Terry Pratchett in my formative years, to the point of going and queueing up on release days. In fact, I think if you cross Asimov with Pratchett, you might get something a little close to Set My Heart To Five. If nothing else, I have made my ten year old self proud.

I am Scottish, so Iain M Banks will always hold a special place on my personal sci-fi shelf. More recently, I think Cory Doctorow does incredible things. He has such in-depth knowledge of the issues he writes about it, that as well as being brilliantly entertaining his writing is always also terrifyingly informative about things that are either already going on in our world, likely going on, or about to go on. His most recent book ‘Attack Surface’ does all of this and is a strong recommendation. (It’s technically the third in the Little Brother trilogy, but works as a standalone book too.)

Nowadays, I probably get most of my sci-fi fix from movies. I’m pretty agnostic about the format I consume things in. I think movies are great for big ideas and never get tired of seeing a spaceship blasting off, but I do love the nuance of the prose and quite like to be able to concentrate on the subtleties without having to wonder about what is going to happen in the end. So sometimes I will watch the movie first and then read the book. I did that with things like Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life and Andy Weir’s The Martian. I’m planning to do it next with Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight, which was recently released as The Midnight Sky. I enjoyed the movie but I love going back to the source.