Other writers' visions

I'm attending Dysprosium, the annual Eastercon science fiction convention, this weekend.  One of the things I've booked onto is a writing workshop, and I've been hard at work this last week critiquing my fellow writers' stories. It always intrigues me what visions others writers come up with.  One of the stories is fantasy with gender role reversals.  A second concerned a scientific project to create hyoergate technology. The third concerned a genetic researcher who seems to have a lot of secrets.  All of the stories were intriguing, and the writers really drew me into their worlds.

Other writers' visions have often inspired my own work. Anne McCaffrey's 'the Ship who Sang' and 'The Ship Who Searched' inspired me to write my novel Eyemind.  Anne's brain and brawn became my Mind and Mobile, and the spaceship became a land-based Supercruiser.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War inspired my novel Starfire.  But my heroine remains a civilian trading captain, even though she gets kidnapped by aliens and ends up helping them to find a valuable artefact.

I also love CJ Cherry's 'The Pride of Chanur', and this also influenced Starfire.  Carolyn challenged me to be specific in describing my starship's operating procedures.  She does that brilliantly, bringing The Pride alive.  But there's no way I can do the tangled web of interstellar politics in the way she does.

Sarah Crossan's YA novels Breathe and Resist are about a world where air is sold.  The privileged live within domes, the lowlifes outside them.  EJ Swift's Osiris also uses the privileged/non-privileged split to drive its plot.  I've picked this up In my current rewrite, Genehunter.  One of the bad guys is an Outlander, someone forced to live outside the city and starve.

I love the idea of Anne McCaffrey's dragons, so I reinvented them as bioengineered Goldeagles that were ridden by couriers.  I ended up with my novella The Goldeagle Courier Service, which is an exploration of the stupidity of war.  

Writers have always drawn on other writers' work, and I'm looking forward to discovering what else inspires me over the Easter weekend.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story  collection Otherlives.  Find out more about her at www.wendymetcalfe.com