My biggest literary (and nerd) inspirations

I enjoyed all manners of science fiction and adventure novels when growing up in the 90’s. I found myself fascinated by the fantasy writings of JR Tolkien, much to the merit of my Middle School English teachers. Later in my teenage years, my love of science fiction and adventure cinema from the 1980’s movies I’d loved as a boy, resulted in me being a voracious reader of books that were adapted from or serialized from their source material. The books of Alan Dean Foster and Michael A Stackpole being chief among those that I would read late at night and carry around with me at school, temporarily storing them in my locker until I could escape to read them again.

From this 1980’s cinema-focused beginning, I expanded into more of the classics of Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. Though no book would be as impactful to me as Herbert’s ‘Dune’, which did more than create a fascinating world for the reader to experience through the characters, but bolstered that setting with concepts of economics, sociology, and ecology that were wholly new to me as a reader.

Other writers who I greatly admire and have improved my dreary days on this earth include Mark Z. Danielewski, Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, and David Wong.