Angry teenage time travelers, unite!

[mrissa]

This morning I sold a story, “The Stuff We Don’t Do,” to the Futures department at Nature Physics. I am always pleased to be in Nature Physics because it reaches the professors who did so much for me in college.

This story has two positive inspirations and one negative one, among authors whose work I enjoyed in my teens and early twenties. We’ll see if anybody recognizes the other two when the story comes out, but the positive one I want to call out specifically today is Diane Duane. Her Wizard books remain humane as well as clever; she armored them against the suck fairy, and I am as grateful for them now as I was in younger days. (And if you’re puzzled at how a fantasy series could help inspire something SF enough to make it into Nature Physics, possibly it’s time for you to give the Wizard books a look.)

Of course, I have counted wrong; Timprov is an author whose work I enjoyed in that period, and he was at least as much an inspiration for this story (also positive). I wrote it for him, sparked by a conversation we had in the car once. Sometimes it still amazes me that not only do I get to tell stories inspired by crazy conversations I have with the Prov, but I get to do it as my job.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Comments

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

I was so surprised and pleased to reread So You Want to Be a Wizard a couple years ago and find it just as wonderful as it was when I read (and re-read) it growing up. In addition to being an excellent story, I always appreciated its sense that its magic had an internal logic, even if the equations and constants weren't ever spelled out exactly.

[between4walls.livejournal.com]

The "let there be light"/"the universe stopped expanding" bit of High Wizardry is just the perfect intersection of science and fantasy and religion and literature. Wow.