Appendix M for Michael

Illustration for The Tombs of Atuan by Charles Vess (from The Books of Earthsea)

All the creative works that influenced me and my own creativity, I realized as I tried to organize my thoughts for this most auspicious of blog bandwagon occasions, have accumulated in distinct layers, like the stages of a decades-long construction project—the building of my mind palace, if you will, floor by floor. Its foundations were dug in elementary school, its ground floor went up in my teen years, it sprawled out in various directions in my twenties, and in the last decade or so, its shape pretty firmly established, it's seen some fairly minor renovations, a new coat of paint, some interior redecoration.

Let’s take a tour.

Earliest Foundations

• My Side of the Mountain
• Redwall
• The Land Before Time (1988)
• The Adventures of Tintin
• The Diamond in the Window
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• The Tripods
• The Earthsea Cycle, particularly The Tombs of Atuan
• The Hobbit
• Aladdin (1992)
• Star Wars (1977)
• Doom
• Magic: The Gathering

The lowest level has a pretty strong thematic orientation, one that’s stuck with me my whole life and in many ways guided me to D&D and thus eventually to this very blog. If you can’t see the pattern, or can’t see how it connects all of these things, know that my favorite parts of the Redwall series always involved old ruins and ancient mysteries (the word “Loamhenge” still excites my inner eight-year-old), and likewise my favorite Tintin adventures; that nothing in Star Wars appealed to me as much (or ever has) as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age”; that as much as I enjoyed blasting demons and zombies in Doom, I at least equally enjoyed looking out at the misty grey mountains of the Knee Deep in the Dead skybox, wondering what other inscrutable alien relics were buried beyond the horizon; and that my chief interest in MTG, as an elementary school kid, was in art and flavor text. I loved Fallen Empires.

Lost cities? Dead languages? Antediluvian relics? Quests for rumored things or places that the skeptical dismiss as the stuff of rumor and legend? Secret worlds, secret pasts, secret passages? I couldn’t get enough. I still can’t.

Ground Floor

• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• The Postman (the novel)
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (the books, not that the film isn't great)
• The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea
• The Hainish Cycle, particularly The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness
• Dune
• “Guest Law” (John C. Wright)
• Seven Samurai
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Alien (1979)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise
• Akira (1988)
• The Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• Fallout (1997)
• Homeworld (1999)
• The Longest Journey (1999)
• Quake (1996)
• Half-Life (1998)
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
• Planescape: Torment
• Anachronox
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

You can see how what I loved as a little kid led straight into what I loved as a teenager, even as I churned through vast swathes of culture and went through my most breakneck-paced period of construction. A lot of this is just one permutation or another of the romance of lost worlds and ancient treasures. We’ve got the post-apocalyptic angle: What if our civilization became some future person’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone”? We’ve got the space opera angle, in novels, short stories, and PC games. We’ve got a little historico-mythological revisionism, in Mary Renault’s reimagining of the Theseus myth as historical fiction, based on the best archaeology and anthropology the late 1950s had to offer. There’s Raiders, which is basically the ur-adventure narrative, inextricably racist warts and all.

But I started to pick up on other things, too. I fell hard for cyberpunk and for the charms of a science fiction that focuses relentlessly on verisimilitude and realistic detail: The exhaustively researched and carefully considered alternate-history material culture of Royal Space Force, the gorgeous, tactile production design of Alien and Blade Runner, the shocking viscerality of Akira and Ghost in the Shell. I got way into PC games, too, and in addition to buttressing a lot of my existing fixations, those brought me into the world of mods and custom maps, especially for Quake and Half-Life, which was my first brush with DIY gaming. (I’ve written a bunch about Quake here before, of course.)

Some of these stories and worlds also got me thinking, in an inchoate kind of way, about the course of history, about contingency, about the paths that could lead us to these imagined futures or could have led us into a different present. Royal Space Force, again, was formative, and so in a sillier and much more direct way was Red Alert, but digging into what was by then older science fiction was instructive too. Why didn’t the future turn out this way? Where are the robots? What happened to the Soviet Union? This stuff probably primed me to be a Marxist (and I did first read the Communist Manifesto around this time, although I didn’t really understand what I was reading yet), but it also made me think more deeply about the rules and patterns and, yeah, material forces that drive history, culture, political geography—all the key ingredients in any worldbuilding stew.

Later Extensions

• The Blue Sword
• Roadside Picnic
• The Incal and The World of Edena
• Hyperion
• The Lathe of Heaven
• The Fall
• Lonesome Dove
• Firefly

Some of these offered new ways of looking at old fascinations—Roadside Picnic is a kind of dark mirror of portal fantasy like Narnia; Firefly offered a blueprint for turning the roguish charm of Han Solo into an entire universe—and others just proved to be indelible. The orange groves of The Blue Sword, the Nesters of Edena, the cruciform from Hyperion, the Augmentor from The Lathe of Heaven, and the whole fantasy setting of The Fall live rent-free on the upper stories and mother-in-law apartments of my mind palace, always popping up in one form or another when I put pen to paper. And Lonesome Dove, well, you’ve gotta have a little room in your heart (and your imaginary mansion) for the greatest Western ever written, even if you’re not really a big fan of Westerns in general. (Likewise Seven Samurai, which I didn’t touch on above; it doesn’t really connect to anything else here, but it’s such a damn good story and framework for RPG adventures, and it’s just printed onto my brain at this point.)

Recent Renovations

• Machineries of Empire
• Always Coming Home
• Woman on the Edge of Time
• The Book of the New Sun
• The Employees
• Brigador
• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• Heaven's Vault
• Disco Elysium

These too showed me a bunch of new perspectives, cynosures that point toward more interesting science fiction settings and fresher ideas. The Brazilian- and Korean-inflected futures of Brigador and Machineries of Empire; the fragile, imperiled utopias of Always Coming Home and Woman on the Edge of Time; the workaday zero-G labor of Shipbreaker. Wolfe and Ravn are beautiful, challenging, uncompromising writers and authored irresistible images (and Wolfe expanded my vocabulary like nobody else). Disco Elysium and Heaven’s Vault are inspiring realizations of a whole bunch of my favorite stuff at once: Dead languages, ancient ruins, class conflict, wildly inventive alternate material cultures, beautiful writing, paths not taken, hope in the dark.

I still remember the day I found The Tombs of Atuan on the bookshelf in my sixth-grade classroom (I read the series out of order). Nothing else, before or since, ever fired my imagination or rewired my brain to quite the same extent. A few things have come close, though, Always Coming Home not least among them. It is pretty wonderful that Le Guin has been with me at every step, from Earthsea to Anarres to Portland to the Valley of the Na. You could do a lot worse, as mind-palace architects go.