I’ve already given some credit to Alan Sugar and the Amstrad computer, for giving me the idea of Dark Eden. Here are some other, perhaps more obvious, influences:
- William Golding (Lord of the Flies)
- Brian Aldiss (Helliconia)
- Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker)
- J R R Tolkein (Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit).
- The countless unnamed storytellers responsible for the stories that ended up being written down in the books of Genesis and Exodus.
- David Attenborough etc, from whom I learnt about the sunless depths of the sea, where there really are both luminous life-forms, and whole ecosystems powered by geothermal energy.
- Whoever it was that taught me about the lakes that exist under the Antarctic ice, melted by geothermal heat. (That’s the sort of place that life on Eden first evolved).
- I think maybe, too, the Norse creation myth is in there somewhere, in which the world emerged from under ice.
- Whoever invented the literary device of faster than light space travel. Say what you like about its plausibility in practice, it allowed authors to travel on to planets beyond the solar system, when we had learnt too much about our neighbouring planets to be able to endow them any more with forests and animals and breathable air.