When I first started writing my science fiction I reluctantly stopped reading sci-fi. I was concerned about plagiarizing. Of course, I had read so many books in the genre over the years that I already had absorbed thousands of ideas that could not be erased from my mind. My book, The Fifth Prophet, was an inspired idea, and the beginning of a wonderful journey through the land of literature. Subsequent novels were more deliberately constructed. Gradually, I returned to reading sci-fi as I realized similarity of ideas did not mean they were stolen. Of course, I never tried to rewrite Dune with different characters, or change the setting of Middle Earth. My stories are as unique and weird as I am.
Now, I am constantly noticing similarities in the details between what I write and what I read. I just finished Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The review is elsewhere. One of the objects recovered from the Zone is a “spacell”, a mysterious power source that is used like a thumbdrive and powers automobiles when inserted into the dashboard. They have “applied them, discovered conditions when they multiply, can’t create them.” This is also a good description of my “hyperthreads” from The Fifth Prophet, that have fallen to Earth in several places like manna from heaven. The Strugatskys make little use of spacells in their story, whereas hyperthreads are fundamental to the success of my Family of Man.
The similarities and coincidences are not just between my writing and my reading, however. In Perturbations Of The Reality Field I stepped across the line of hard sci-fi, or so I thought. My hero, a young cab driver, and his angelic telepathic border collie, end up fighting to save the Earth’s moon from destruction by the ratpeople. He ‘drives’ his Ford Escape SUV into orbit near the moon, enclosed in a space suit. Trust me, it is embedded into the story in a reasonable fashion. Still, the scene worried me until … a few months after publication I watched Elon Musk’s Tesla and the spaceman!!! Maybe I’m more ‘prophetic’ than I realized?