Stealing from the Best
A Few Remarks Concerning the Literary (and other) Antecedents of The Klaatu Diskos
Like all novelists, I am frequently asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”
I respond to that question in many different ways, depending on the context, and who’s asking, and my mood at the moment. I might say, “I don’t know—they just come to me.” Sometimes, if I’m feeling snippy, I say, “I steal them from other writers.” Which is often true.
One of the reasons for my reticence is similar to a magician’s unwillingness to reveal the secrets behind a trick, what Jonathan Lethem calls “…the classical obfuscation of sourcing in art.” The secrets always turn out to mundane—they erode the sense of wonder that drives the magic. But I’m a fan of Penn and Teller, who have made a career of pulling back the curtain, so here goes.
My time-travel trilogy, The Klaatu Diskos, incorporates a large number of unoriginal concepts, techniques, and characters. Science fiction and fantasy fans will recognize many of them, but not all. So I made a list.
1. The most conspicuous device in The Klaatu Diskos is the disko, a sort of time-and-space portal. I have always loved “magic door stories,” or “portal fantasies,” foremost among them being Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Magic door stories make up their own subgenre that crosses from sci-fi to fantasy to religious fiction. Examples include The Chronicles of Narnia, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the space operas of Peter F. Hamilton, and time-travel stories by Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Connie Willis, and many, many others. Magic doors are especially common on TV: Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, and Lost, for example.
Magic door stories are often time travel stories, and vice versa. The two sets are nearly congruent—most time travel stories use a simple portal as their time travel device. The earliest literary time-travel I can find is from the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit text written sometime between 800 and 400 BCE. In modern literature we have Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court--essentially a magic door story, although the “door” in that case is a blow to the head. My first magic door story was Mr. Was (1996), based on a recurring dream from my childhood. Certain concepts and characters in Mr. Was are reprised and extended in The Klaatu Diskos.
Magic doors can be treated as science fiction (The Time Machine) or fantasy (Narnia). Often, they are both. In The Klaatu Diskos, the science behind the portals is fantasy, really. But the surrounding events are purely sci-fi, in the same way that space operas employ fantasy technology to move characters from one star system to another. The FTL device is not usually science-based, and must be taken with a large dose of Suspension of Disbelief, but all subsequent events are somewhat plausible.
2. The name of the future city Romelas is a nod to “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” by Ursula K. LeGuin, a meditation on scapegoating. I always loved that story, which pulls off sci-fi preachiness with remarkable grace. Her somewhat related short, “The Day Before the Revolution,” is even more elegant. I suspect that Lois Lowry (The Giver) read those stories, along with “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson. As did I. And, of course, the word scapegoat comes from the Bible. The story of Jesus Christ can be framed as an example of—even an argument for—scapegoating.
3. Pippi, et al. I love spunky, tough, resourceful young women. It started for me with Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. Other early examples include Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, Anne of Green Gables, and Scarlet O’Hara from Gone With the Wind. A more modern archetype is Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In Klaatu, the character Lahlia is cartoonishly archetypical, though not so cartoonish as Uma Thurman’s “The Bride,” from the Kill Bill movies.
4. The Bible. I spent a lot of time reading various translations of the Bible while writing Klaatu, particularly the gospels. Of course, citing the Bible as a Western “literary antecedent” is akin to citing “soil” as a prerequisite for “grass.” Same goes for Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, an early precursor to the time travel story, and an example of two of the greatest themes in fiction: “Who am I?” and, “Beware your desires!” We have been reprising Sophocles for the past 2400 years.
5. The Wizard of Oz. The movie more than the books. Another magic door classic, with the door taking the form of a tornado and, later, magic slippers. In Klaatu, I stole one of Dorothy’s lines from the movie. No flying monkeys—sorry.
6. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the granddaddy of SFF trilogies, and writers have been using that structure ever since—essentially, set up a quest, establish a group of adventurers, break up the group, and spend the next thousand pages describing their struggles to reunite and save the day. That was the basic map I used for structuring The Klaatu Diskos trilogy.
7. Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin, and several other books and articles about autism, helped me construct the future history of the highly functional autistics known as Medicants. My first draft of Klaatu (back in 2003) contained a smattering of ideas about autism that I thought to be original. I now find that many of these ideas—such as wearable electronic appliances that help autistics deal with social interaction—have become reality.
8. Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock is a brilliantly conceived SF novella that fascinated me when I first read it in 1969. I now find it to be a difficult read (I am a less patient and forgiving reader these days), but the core concept of the book is so compelling that I still recommend it. To say more here would be to give away a plot point in both Moorcock’s book and in Klaatu. Suffice to say, I stole.
9. Doctor Who, and Lost. Without those two series to provide a sort of cultural groundwork—mostly in terms of making freewheeling, out-of-sequence, self-reflexive storytelling acceptable to a popular audience--The Klaatu Diskos might not have been publishable in its present form, and certainly not as Young Adult fiction. The television series Babylon 5 also deserves mention here, if only because it supplied a name for one of the characters in Klaatu—that of Tucker Feye’s uncle, Kosh.
10. Another recent influence was Kathleen Duey’s A Resurrection of Magic trilogy, in which she did things I did not know one could do in a YA novel. She also gave me the courage—or hubris—to complete and publish the first book of an intertwined trilogy when I had not yet figured out what would happen in books two and three. Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go opened similar doors.
11. Everything I have ever written contains echoes of Philip K. Dick, who was a master of writing himself into and out of dead ends. He was perfectly capable of mistyping a word and, instead of going back and correcting it, building the typo into his story. Some of my favorite parts of The Klaatu Diskos happened when I made a “wrong” turn in the story, then had to figure out how to make sense of what I had written.
12. “Gubble gubble” is lifted from a childhood favorite, I Can Fly, a 1951 “Little Golden Book,” in which the following lines appear: “Gubble gubble gubble/I’m a mubble in a pubble/I can play/I’m anything that’s anything. That’s my way.” To me, it describes the childlike state of the early Klaatu. Philip K. Dick also appropriated the phrase “gubble gubble” in his novel Martian Time-Slip.
13. Mark Twain was at his best when he wrote about kids being kids. One of the scenes in Book 2 of The Klaatu Diskos is a rather heavy-handed homage—or if you prefer, outright theft—from an episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In fact, the original working title of The Klaatu Diskos was “The Adventures of Tucker Feye.”
14. The trilogy’s title, The Klaatu Diskos, comes from The Day the Earth Stood Still, the 1951 movie based on the 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. In the movie, Klaatu, an extraterrestrial played by Michael Rennie, speaks the immortal words, “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” Gort is the name of Klaatu’s giant robot associate. Barada nikto means something along the lines of “please do not destroy this planet.” Diskos is the Eastern Orthodox term for the round plate used to hold the Eucharistic bread.
15. The “Cydonian Pyramid” in Romelas comes from the “D&M Pyramid,” a five-sided pyramidal feature found on the Cydonia region of Mars. Crackpot theories abound, and I am fond of crackpot theories. The planet Mars plays a small role in Book 3, The Klaatu Terminus.
16. One other film source I should mention: In The Klaatu Terminus, Lah Lia steals a Sarah Connor line from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
17. Of course, I am indebted to some extent to every author of every book, movie, play, and campfire story I’ve ever experienced. A few I haven’t mentioned, but who influenced me stylistically and in other ways, include P.G. Wodehouse, Jack Vance, James Branch Cabell, and Elmore Leonard, four authors who have more in common than one might think.
Speaking of Jack Vance (who died recently, at age 96), it is impossible for me to read his work without some of his stylistic quirks leaking into my own prose. You may notice this in the character Shem Whorsch-Boggs, who appears in The Klaatu Terminus.
As I was writing this, I came across an interview with Jonathan Lethem in which he discusses his literary (and other) influences: http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2011/gresko.html
I steal from him, too.
A Few Remarks Concerning the Literary (and other) Antecedents of The Klaatu Diskos
Like all novelists, I am frequently asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”
I respond to that question in many different ways, depending on the context, and who’s asking, and my mood at the moment. I might say, “I don’t know—they just come to me.” Sometimes, if I’m feeling snippy, I say, “I steal them from other writers.” Which is often true.
One of the reasons for my reticence is similar to a magician’s unwillingness to reveal the secrets behind a trick, what Jonathan Lethem calls “…the classical obfuscation of sourcing in art.” The secrets always turn out to mundane—they erode the sense of wonder that drives the magic. But I’m a fan of Penn and Teller, who have made a career of pulling back the curtain, so here goes.
My time-travel trilogy, The Klaatu Diskos, incorporates a large number of unoriginal concepts, techniques, and characters. Science fiction and fantasy fans will recognize many of them, but not all. So I made a list.
1. The most conspicuous device in The Klaatu Diskos is the disko, a sort of time-and-space portal. I have always loved “magic door stories,” or “portal fantasies,” foremost among them being Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Magic door stories make up their own subgenre that crosses from sci-fi to fantasy to religious fiction. Examples include The Chronicles of Narnia, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the space operas of Peter F. Hamilton, and time-travel stories by Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Connie Willis, and many, many others. Magic doors are especially common on TV: Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, and Lost, for example.
Magic door stories are often time travel stories, and vice versa. The two sets are nearly congruent—most time travel stories use a simple portal as their time travel device. The earliest literary time-travel I can find is from the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit text written sometime between 800 and 400 BCE. In modern literature we have Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court--essentially a magic door story, although the “door” in that case is a blow to the head. My first magic door story was Mr. Was (1996), based on a recurring dream from my childhood. Certain concepts and characters in Mr. Was are reprised and extended in The Klaatu Diskos.
Magic doors can be treated as science fiction (The Time Machine) or fantasy (Narnia). Often, they are both. In The Klaatu Diskos, the science behind the portals is fantasy, really. But the surrounding events are purely sci-fi, in the same way that space operas employ fantasy technology to move characters from one star system to another. The FTL device is not usually science-based, and must be taken with a large dose of Suspension of Disbelief, but all subsequent events are somewhat plausible.
2. The name of the future city Romelas is a nod to “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” by Ursula K. LeGuin, a meditation on scapegoating. I always loved that story, which pulls off sci-fi preachiness with remarkable grace. Her somewhat related short, “The Day Before the Revolution,” is even more elegant. I suspect that Lois Lowry (The Giver) read those stories, along with “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson. As did I. And, of course, the word scapegoat comes from the Bible. The story of Jesus Christ can be framed as an example of—even an argument for—scapegoating.
3. Pippi, et al. I love spunky, tough, resourceful young women. It started for me with Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. Other early examples include Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, Anne of Green Gables, and Scarlet O’Hara from Gone With the Wind. A more modern archetype is Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In Klaatu, the character Lahlia is cartoonishly archetypical, though not so cartoonish as Uma Thurman’s “The Bride,” from the Kill Bill movies.
4. The Bible. I spent a lot of time reading various translations of the Bible while writing Klaatu, particularly the gospels. Of course, citing the Bible as a Western “literary antecedent” is akin to citing “soil” as a prerequisite for “grass.” Same goes for Oedipus the King, by Sophocles, an early precursor to the time travel story, and an example of two of the greatest themes in fiction: “Who am I?” and, “Beware your desires!” We have been reprising Sophocles for the past 2400 years.
5. The Wizard of Oz. The movie more than the books. Another magic door classic, with the door taking the form of a tornado and, later, magic slippers. In Klaatu, I stole one of Dorothy’s lines from the movie. No flying monkeys—sorry.
6. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the granddaddy of SFF trilogies, and writers have been using that structure ever since—essentially, set up a quest, establish a group of adventurers, break up the group, and spend the next thousand pages describing their struggles to reunite and save the day. That was the basic map I used for structuring The Klaatu Diskos trilogy.
7. Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin, and several other books and articles about autism, helped me construct the future history of the highly functional autistics known as Medicants. My first draft of Klaatu (back in 2003) contained a smattering of ideas about autism that I thought to be original. I now find that many of these ideas—such as wearable electronic appliances that help autistics deal with social interaction—have become reality.
8. Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock is a brilliantly conceived SF novella that fascinated me when I first read it in 1969. I now find it to be a difficult read (I am a less patient and forgiving reader these days), but the core concept of the book is so compelling that I still recommend it. To say more here would be to give away a plot point in both Moorcock’s book and in Klaatu. Suffice to say, I stole.
9. Doctor Who, and Lost. Without those two series to provide a sort of cultural groundwork—mostly in terms of making freewheeling, out-of-sequence, self-reflexive storytelling acceptable to a popular audience--The Klaatu Diskos might not have been publishable in its present form, and certainly not as Young Adult fiction. The television series Babylon 5 also deserves mention here, if only because it supplied a name for one of the characters in Klaatu—that of Tucker Feye’s uncle, Kosh.
10. Another recent influence was Kathleen Duey’s A Resurrection of Magic trilogy, in which she did things I did not know one could do in a YA novel. She also gave me the courage—or hubris—to complete and publish the first book of an intertwined trilogy when I had not yet figured out what would happen in books two and three. Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go opened similar doors.
11. Everything I have ever written contains echoes of Philip K. Dick, who was a master of writing himself into and out of dead ends. He was perfectly capable of mistyping a word and, instead of going back and correcting it, building the typo into his story. Some of my favorite parts of The Klaatu Diskos happened when I made a “wrong” turn in the story, then had to figure out how to make sense of what I had written.
12. “Gubble gubble” is lifted from a childhood favorite, I Can Fly, a 1951 “Little Golden Book,” in which the following lines appear: “Gubble gubble gubble/I’m a mubble in a pubble/I can play/I’m anything that’s anything. That’s my way.” To me, it describes the childlike state of the early Klaatu. Philip K. Dick also appropriated the phrase “gubble gubble” in his novel Martian Time-Slip.
13. Mark Twain was at his best when he wrote about kids being kids. One of the scenes in Book 2 of The Klaatu Diskos is a rather heavy-handed homage—or if you prefer, outright theft—from an episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In fact, the original working title of The Klaatu Diskos was “The Adventures of Tucker Feye.”
14. The trilogy’s title, The Klaatu Diskos, comes from The Day the Earth Stood Still, the 1951 movie based on the 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. In the movie, Klaatu, an extraterrestrial played by Michael Rennie, speaks the immortal words, “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!” Gort is the name of Klaatu’s giant robot associate. Barada nikto means something along the lines of “please do not destroy this planet.” Diskos is the Eastern Orthodox term for the round plate used to hold the Eucharistic bread.
15. The “Cydonian Pyramid” in Romelas comes from the “D&M Pyramid,” a five-sided pyramidal feature found on the Cydonia region of Mars. Crackpot theories abound, and I am fond of crackpot theories. The planet Mars plays a small role in Book 3, The Klaatu Terminus.
16. One other film source I should mention: In The Klaatu Terminus, Lah Lia steals a Sarah Connor line from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
17. Of course, I am indebted to some extent to every author of every book, movie, play, and campfire story I’ve ever experienced. A few I haven’t mentioned, but who influenced me stylistically and in other ways, include P.G. Wodehouse, Jack Vance, James Branch Cabell, and Elmore Leonard, four authors who have more in common than one might think.
Speaking of Jack Vance (who died recently, at age 96), it is impossible for me to read his work without some of his stylistic quirks leaking into my own prose. You may notice this in the character Shem Whorsch-Boggs, who appears in The Klaatu Terminus.
As I was writing this, I came across an interview with Jonathan Lethem in which he discusses his literary (and other) influences: http://www.bu.edu/agni/interviews/online/2011/gresko.html
I steal from him, too.