Loving Genre Accidentally, by Nik Abnett

I didn’t know I was an SFF fan, and I didn’t identify myself as one until I was an adult. I wasn’t exposed to a whole lot of genre fiction as a child or in my early teens when most fans get the bug. A teacher read The Hobbit to my class when I was eight or nine, but mostly I read adventure stories of the conventional kind in the ’70s: Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome, and Roald Dahl.
I graduated from adventure stories to histories, full of political intrigue, for pleasure, and I read the classics at school. They gave me pleasure too. By the time I was 17, I’d moved on to satire, and was ploughing through Evelyn Waugh’s catalogue.
About that time, I met my high school boyfriend, and that’s when I discovered SF.
I didn’t start reading SFF until I was 17, and I began with Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, Julian May’s The Many Coloured Land novels, and Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert, as recommended by that boyfriend. It was all great stuff. I found all the political intrigue, and epic adventure, and enthralling history I needed, and I found compelling characters, great themes, and engaging plots.
The reading came at a time when animatronics and special effects were developing fast in Hollywood, so I also watched a lot of great movies, from Blade Runner and Terminator to 2001: A Space Odyssey and ET. It was the golden age of genre cinema that gave us Star Wars.

Kids share. I traded the boyfriend Rickie Lee Jones and Suzanne Vega for Isaac Asimov and Robert E Heinlein, and we discovered cinema together. We were both winners.
Of course, as a kid, one of my favourite things to do was watch TV, and it was genre that I gravitated towards there too, with great shows like Thunderbirds, Joe 90 and Doctor Who. I loved The Tomorrow People and Time Tunnel, and, later, Space 1999 and, of course Star Trek. It never crossed my mind that I was watching genre; I was too interested in the characters and the adventures they were having.
I liked lots of other things, too. When it came to reading, Stephen King was simply the modern Charles Dickens; they both knew how to spin a great yarn.
I read Ursula Le Guin and Gregory Benford alongside best sellers by the likes of Colleen McCullough. I never differentiated, I simply looked for the next good read.
I read a lot of genre, though, by accident; they called them classics. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is genre fiction, and so is Du Maurier’s Rebecca. I read Aldous Huxley and HG Wells, and I read Robert Louis Stephenson, Wilkie Collins, and T H White; they were all genre writers. We didn’t call them SF or Horror or Fantasy, but that’s what they were.
Writing is a fuel-in, energy-out system. I was always going to be a writer, but to write, the mind has to be engaged, and for that, it requires stimulus. All I ever wanted to do was write decent stories. I never imagined that I’d write genre fiction, but watching SF TV shows and movies and reading SF novels showed me the scope of storytelling that is at all our fingertips.
Every idea needs the right story form in which to contain it. I’ve written stories in all kinds of ways in all kinds of genres to suit my ideas.
SFF is a great showcase for ideas. So, mostly, I’ve been writing SF, and combat SF, and Urban Fantasy, and supernatural horror… Pick a genre, any genre, but pick the one that fits the idea for the story. It’s what le Guin and Benford, and King and Wells did before us, and those are the stories that stay with us. Those are the stories that I return to.
As it turned out, I had a long apprenticeship in writing. It began when I made my relationship with the then-boyfriend permanent. It began when I became his beta-reader and editor, and moved on through proof-reading and editing jobs. It began with me picking up his slack, being his sounding board and filling the odd gap in his research, and it began with talking about ideas.

The time came when I had to stop talking about ideas and begin writing them down. When that happened, a lot of people had my back; they were the writers of the shows I had watched as a kid, the movies I saw in the ’70s and ’80s, and the novels that were recommended to me by my now-husband, Dan Abnett, who also writes SFF.
I was always going to write, but there’s a bug that gets you, and it gets you bad.
I go back and forth, rereading books like Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes or Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, and I add contemporary writers to my list of favourites.
I like stories full of great ideas, so I like Pat Cadigan and I like Adam Roberts.
Writing genre fiction isn’t about being a nerd, and it isn’t about being a fantasist, although, of course, some of us are one or both of those things. Writing science fiction, writing any genre fiction, allows us to express ideas in new and exciting ways, it allows us to break down conventions and constraints and affords us the opportunity to follow those ideas wherever they may take us.
Nik Abnett’s debut novel, Savant, is available now from Solaris Books.