The Giant Becomes A Smaller Part of the Landscape

First, this is what Heinlein means to me. I have read every single one of his novels. Including THAT one that gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. And THAT one that does the same. I am not blind to the troublesome aspects of either. (Or of the three or four other Heinlein novels with elements to give a modern mentality pause.)

I still find him a terrifically fun storyteller and a fine purveyor of brain grease.

What’s more, I recognize his direct influence in many other authors whose work I enjoy, including Scalzi himself, David Gerrold, John Varley, Spider Robinson, and Joe Haldeman, among others. I stroll through their work and I see Heinlein’s footprints, in addition to the qualities that each of those worthies bring to the table, qualities that render their work the product of individuals and not clones. I am actually amused, sometimes, by the resonances certain works of those authors have with Heinlein’s, because I know what it’s like to internalize a favorite author’s voice as part of your own.

You will not find Heinlein’s voice anywhere in my own fiction. At least, I don’t think so. There are a few places where you will find Isaac Asimov’s, a few places where you’ll find Robert Silverberg’s and Robert Sheckley’s and Richard Matheson’s, a story where you’ll find Ursula K. Le Guin’s, a bunch of places where you will find Donald Westlake’s and Ed McBain’s, certainly places where you will find Stephen King’s and Joe R. Lansdale’s, two or three stories that owe every goddamned thing to Barry Malzberg. And an absolute raging shitload of places, including some entire stories, where you will find the voice of mad harlequin of Sherman Oaks.

And Mark Twain’s. And Ellery Queen’s.

There’s nothing about my work that strikes me as resonating with Heinlein’s.

In not a single place do my bells chime alongside his.

And that’s okay with me.

The problem is only that to a certain vocal sub-section of this community, Heinlein is not just the one true master but the one true model.

And that I find hurtful.

You see, I am not a science fiction writer.

Nor am I a horror writer.

Nor am I a writer of funny stories.

Nor am I a writer of dark and violent ones.

Nor am I a writer for children.

I write stories.

I have written a lot of science fiction, and a lot of horror, and recently a series of books for kids, but one of the reasons I have not become more well known and commercially successful than I am is that I do not write just one thing. There is no animal known as a typical Adam-Troy Castro story. I hop around from light fantasy to ultra-violet horror, depending on what occurs to me at any given moment, and I change voices from the most transparent prose to the most dense, and it is hard to fit it all into a given box, and that is not just because I get easily bored but because my influences come from all over an imaginative-fiction landscape that is not a single focal point, but a spectrum: a sky full of stars.

I’ve gotten creeped out when I am told, in as many words, that unless something adheres to a certain classical model, it is not “true” science fiction. (And yes, some people have actually told me this, sometimes as direct attack: you have strayed outside the reservation, except for this small handful of stories we like over here, you should write more of those.) Because that strikes me as less literary appreciation than literary fetishization.

Heinlein was a towering figure. He was such a towering figure that we can still see him looming in our rear-view mirror. It’s practically like he’s still in the car with us. Many of us internalized his map. But there’s a reason why even the most impressive objects get smaller as we travel a distance from them, and that’s because it is more helpful at such distances to see more of the landscape. And, if you accommodate the entire breadth of imaginative fiction, this is a sprawling, impressive landscape, to be sure: the place that can accommodate a Heinlein and an Octavia Butler, a Stephen King and a Thomas Ligotti, a Christopher Moore and a C.M. Kornbluth and a John Brunner and a China Mieville and a Nnedi Okorafor. It’s a HUGE country with lots to see and it makes no sense to keep obsessively returning to the same monument, or even to hail it as the only monument, even it remains one of our favorites.

There’s a reason why in “The Last Robot,” a story I wrote to eulogize Isaac Asimov in 1993, I had a figure who you could call the ghost of the Good Doctor cry, “You stayed? All those years, you stayed? I didn’t want you to do that! That’s not why I gave you free will! I wanted you to see all the places I’d dreamed of but wouldn’t have a chance to see! I wanted you to learn everything there was to know, and then come up with new questions to ask! I wanted you to leave me far behind! I didn’t want you to spend your future frightened and paralyzed, watching over the spot where you saw me last!”

Asimov was one of the two or three most important authors of my youth and I wrote that paragraph two days after he died. Two days.

I think Heinlein, for all the strength of his own aesthetic preferences, would have certainly said something similar.