All fiction writers owe a great debt to the fiction writers who they in turn have read. As authors, great stories we’ve read have inspired us to create the worlds we invent — perhaps not directly, but at the very least because the imaginations of older writers have sparked our own creativity.
I was a voracious reader as a child growing up in England (and I still am — sometimes nothing ever changes), and I loved books by the likes of C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and H. Rider Haggard — stories filled with magic and adventure and far-off, exotic lands. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I love my own invented worlds of the Diadem — filled with magic, adventure and very far-off lands. I’ve been busily creating new versions of the sort of stories I always loved to read. I’ve never taken anything directly from any of these authors, of course, with one exception.
In Book of Doom, the tenth volume of the Diadem series, I deliberately created a world as a tribute to one man, Terry Nation. I owe him a great deal, because he helped me to launch my writing career, initially quite indirectly, but later, when I met him, very directly.
As a child in England, I grew up watching a science fiction TV series called Doctor Who. It’s about a group of travelers who can go anywhere in time and space, and they got into all sorts of wild adventures on the way. Terry wrote their very second story, introducing a race of aliens called the Daleks. The Daleks were hideous mutations who lived inside machines that basically made them into mobile tanks. The Daleks became wildly popular — the Harry Potter phenomenon of their day — and I was one of the people who fell under the spell. As a youngster, some of the very first stories I ever wrote were new adventures of the Daleks. Terry’s monsters had helped to spark my creativity.
Over 20 years later, my first published book was about the Daleks, and I got to meet and work with Terry. He was an amazingly generous and helpful man who encouraged my writing career and offered me very good advice. (My favorite was: “If an editor asks you if you can write anything, always say yes, no matter what it is. Then go away and panic. And then — write it.” He followed that advice himself, and I’ve had some fascinating experiences in taking the advice to heart.) If you check out my Web site, www.john-peel.com, you’ll see that I’ve written several novels based on the Daleks, thanks to Terry. I grew up and wrote as an adult what I had written as a child. So I owed Terry a great deal, and it seemed to me that it would be fun to include an homage to him in one of the Diadem novels.
One thing that Terry seemed to enjoy tremendously was the idea of a living jungle, where the plants act like animals. They can move about, sometimes quickly, and be quite aggressive and lethal. The idea turned up time and time again in his stories. If you think about it, it is quite scary — everyone expects animals to be fast and filled with teeth and so on, but to have plants that can do that? We have Venus Flytraps, which eat insects, but the idea of ones big enough to attack and eat people is frightening. More than one horror story has featured such plants. It seemed to me, then, that having a planet where the plants are the hunters would be a nice tribute to Terry.
Therefore, in Book of Doom, poor Score finds himself betrayed by the people he trusted, stranded on a jungle world where everything eats everything else, and he becomes the menu for all of the local plants. And it’s all thanks to Terry Nation! I’m sure Score will be really grateful to my mentor for that!
The only sad part about the story is that it is the final volume of the Diadem series. I’ve tried to tie up some of the on-going storylines in this book, but there’s still a lot left to explore. But that’s for another time, and who knows? Maybe Diadem will inspire some younger readers out there to sit down and write their own adventures of Score, Helaine, Pixel and Jenna. And perhaps, when they grow up, I’ll be their influence! It would be rather appropriate, wouldn’t it?
Plants With Appetite
On this planet, any insects or birds wouldn’t be pollinating — they’d be eaten. So there was no need for flowers. Score found himself wishing for just a splash of color to relieve the unending shades of green.
Green … Plants were green because they contained chlorophyll. And that made food for the plant from sunlight. So the plants here still made their own food … Yet they also ate anything that came within reach. Then he understood why — because chlorophyll made energy slowly. And these plants all seemed to move pretty fast — so they needed a quicker source of energy, which generally meant eating other living things.
It sounded like a circular sort of reasoning — the plants here were fast because they need to catch food — and the food they caught enabled them to move fast. It was a hellish world. And one he’d been deliberately sent to by people he’d always believed were his friends.
