We have a friend who is doing some commuting and has asked me for science fiction and fantasy recommendations -- specifically for someone who has not read a lot of speculative fiction.

Here are some of mine. They are not a top ten list or a best of or anything like that. They are just ones I have loved or found interesting or even ones that I think are "important" to the genres. In no particular order:

1. Dune (Herbert)
2. The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)
3. Stranger in a Strange Land (my hero, Heinlein)
4. Ender's Game/Speaker for the Dead (Card)
5. The Gate to Women's Country (Tepper)
6. Cryptonomicon (Neil Stephenson)
7. A Spell for Chameleon (Anthony) (yeah, yeah, but you don't have to read the OTHER 57)
8. Foundation (Asimov) is probably important enough to give a read -- I have not read it in forever, but it is part of my brain DNA.
9. Harry Potter (Rowling)
10. The Hobbit, LOTR, Tolkien. Egad, I temporarily forgot Tolkien.
11. The Liveship trilogy (Hobb)
12. A Wrinkle in Time
13. Doomsday Book (Willis) is always in my top 20 or so. I have read it many times.

I will add others as I think of them. Recommendations/reminders are welcome.

Edited to add: Anything after number 9.

Everything on this list has been read at least twice by me; several have been read many more times than that.

The same ideas come up in my stories over and over again:

1. Things are never as they seem, or Nothing is as it seems.

2. You can't replace a person/child. (This one comes up more recently, and it was one of the hearts of the story I just turned in. Yes, my stories are many-hearted creatures.)

3. Good people do bad things. Evil people do good things.

I don't want to get stuck in a rut, but it seems like two and three could give me enough material for a lifetime. Number one is fun.

Eighteen hours after deadline is approximately the time that I decide that all the work I have ever done in my life is utter crap and that I hope it got lost in the mail/internet so that no one will ever see it and that I should take up another career, preferably hard physical labor.

Manna

John, from his computer across the room: Marsh, you have to get back to getting your stuff out there.

For a moment I thought he was looking at a budget sheet or something. I considered reminding him that most of the stuff I'm writing will pay for a happy meal and a toy, and that won't change for a while.

But actually he was reading a critters (online critique group) story. "A line edit wouldn't really turn up much, but..." There are a whole lot of folks out there writing perfectly grammatical sentences, but they have no spark, no soul, no... reason to read them. (And how on earth do you say THAT in a critique, by the way? No grammatical errors, man, but I really don't care about the characters or what happens to them or really anything about this story.) This is why he wants me sending more work out. John thinks the world needs MY stories.

Obligatory aw-shucks aside, having one's partner get one's work -- GET it, really get it -- and think it is what the world needs... I can't imagine being richer than this.

Pick your heroes carefully

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

- Douglas Adams

How science is not like literature

You won't hear neurologists say (often): "well, you have to learn how to do brain surgery correctly before you are allowed to break the rules."

Why do I write science fiction?

This is the important question for me this week. I worry that what I'm creating is nonsense, is just flat genre crap, paper dolls with lightsabers. The second TNEO deadline looming ominously might have something to do with this. My insomnia, also, although the TNEO deadline did not have anything to do with me imitating a banshee at three in the morning when I discovered that my very wonderful daughter was giggling loudly on the phone with her male friend from out of state. That was just my maternal madness. Maternal madness explains many things, including most ridiculous threats, i.e., if you don't hang up this second I will throw that phone AWAY. In the light of day, this is not much of a threat, since, a., the phone belongs to me, b., there are many more phones in the house, and c., I don't throw things away. At worst, I would have freecycled it.

Anyway, if I have a point, it is this: I am still after all these many years struggling to find my way. I want to laugh hollowly when my 20-year-olds say they don't know what they are doing with their lives. "Wait until you are 40!" I do say. But who does know their way? Stock brokers? Physicists? (I think physicists know that none of us actually know anything.)

Which brings me back to science fiction or, as I like to call it, odd little stories. The stories of people who seem to be monsters, who turn out to be misunderstood, or people who seem to be monsters who really are monsters, albeit misunderstood. The stories of the ends of the worlds, all of them. My own childhood, as tragic and hilarious as every other person's (except for stockbrokers), dressed up in scary masks and hats. But this is part of all fiction, right? So why science fiction? Maybe because I adore it so very much. I adore the great what-ifs. It is fun for me, and if I enjoy what I'm doing, it is better. It approaches art. Once in a great while, it IS art.

All the people in my life are out doing important things: working, errands, whatever Emmy does when she is out, thinking of traveling home from college "sometime soon", and so forth. The dog is nowhere to be seen.

I stayed home from errands to work on TNEO stuff. My work style is chaotic and baffling to people outside my brain, I'm sure. I have to do things in a certain way: that certain way is to follow my brain where it leads, even if it leads to running upstairs to look up a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Muses aren't will o' wisps, I guess, but usually they feel like that. I jump around the internet and go for agitated walks. Eventually, my brain says, "aha, found it!" and then it comes. It ALWAYS works this way.

But when I say to my adoring family-fans, "don't interrupt me, I'm working", what are they to think? Oh, working. That's what she calls it.