Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Some Author/Reader Musings

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, , Day 1707:

The subtitle I put on today’s newsletter is Author/Reader musings. I wanted something that would alert you all to the fact that, in addition to my usual recitation of my day (my daily diversions,) I would be noodling on about some thoughts I had related to being an author. In this case, what went through my head as I made my choice of my next kindle read.

I probably have this sort of internal dialog most days, especially when I experience a spike in pleasure in my recreational reading (or listening.) But I am especially cognizant of these sorts of thoughts when I am writing—since I that is when I am most likely to consider how my own likes and dislikes as a reader affects the decisions I make as an author.

Anyhow, first a brief description of yesterday afternoon’s diversions. Yesterday I took my second walk before lunch. I was glad I started on the walk earlier than usual (wanting to make sure I missed the threatened rain) because I ran into a neighbor I hadn’t seen for awhile. We had a twenty-minute catch-up conversation, which would have put me seriously behind my lunch schedule! Then after lunch I finished the Chanur book because I could tell I was on the last chapter, and that meant I needed to decide what to read next.

And here comes my musings! I had so enjoyed rereading one of Cherryh’s earliest series, starting with The Pride of Chanur, I decided to do the same thing with William Gibson (who probably is right up there with Cherryh as one of my favorite science fiction writers.) So I located his first book, Neuromancer, on my kindle. As is true for Cherryh, this is an author where I used to own all their books in print, but when downsizing, I steadily replaced the dusty falling apart or too heavy to hold print versions by getting their books for my kindle.)

These authors are both award winning science fiction authors, of a similar age, and like myself, raised in the post war baby boom generation. Yet they are so very different, which is what started my musing—and some research into them both.

William Gibson was born in 1948 (I was born 1950) and is only six years younger than Cherryh (born in 1942.) Both of them started writing at about the same age. Cherry’s first published book came out when she was 34 and Gibson’s first full-length novel, Neuromancer, was published when Gibson was 36. (At that age I was starting on my career as a history professor, and was three years away from writing the first draft of my first book, Maids of Misfortune—although unlike them, this book didn’t get published until I was 60!

However, despite them really taking off as writers about the same time, their books are very different kinds of science fiction.

Cherryh’s work is most often characterized as space opera/colonization, or fantasy, and her books are always set somewhere else other than Earth, often in either very distant places or a very distant future. This actually made her part of the mainstream, albeit with out a good deal of the sexism and racism or much of that mainstream science fiction of the period.

On the other hand, Gibson’s books are primarily set on Earth in the very near future and he is credited for helping start two new sub-genre’s of science fiction. They are cyberpunk, which Neuromancer is definitely an example, and steampunk which is seen in his collaboration with Bruce Sterling in the book, The Difference Machine.

As I read Neuromancer, I am going to be thinking about the ways in which Cherryh and Gibson differ in these early books of theirs, but also why both of them appeal so much to me.

As for the rest of today. I have cleaned, I wrote this post, I will take two walks (it is cloudy but no rain predicted), try to get a little more than 500 words written since I only got 300 yesterday, and before my afternoon scheduled phone call, I will certainly take some time to start on Neuromancer.

And of course, enjoy the flowers on my walks.

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