eSpecs Books Focus #4: David Lee Summers
What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer?
I was a fan of the original Star Trek when I was a kid and one of my favorite episodes was “The Trouble With Tribbles.” One Day, I saw a book with that title in my local bookstore and asked my parents to buy it for me. The book was David Gerrold’s account of how he wrote and sold the famous episode and the book really gave me my first glimpse of what it meant to be a working writer and I decided right then that it was something I wanted to do.
Later, in high school, I had the good fortune of meeting Ray Bradbury. We had the opportunity to talk and I told him I’d written a few stories and was working on a novel with a friend. He looked me in the eye and said, “Send your stories to a magazine right now!” That sealed the deal. I’ve been sending stories out for publication ever since then. Perhaps it’s no surprise that none of those very first stories sold. Still, Bradbury’s belief that I would keep writing and keep trying spurred me on and eventually I did sell some stories. When I made my first professional sale to Realms of Fantasy in 2001, Bradbury wrote me a letter to say it was a fine story and that he was proud that I had persevered.
What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?
A lot of my fiction has what might be described as a retro-futuristic tone. I set many of my speculative stories in the last century or two as a way of exploring how we arrived at the place where we are now. One of my goals is to shine a light on some of the bright spots of the past. It’s easy to look back at the past and point fingers at the terrible things like slavery, colonialism, and class inequity. To me, it’s more interesting to look at those people who didn’t give in to their baser selves and tried to overcome those terrible things. Of course, a person fighting against their baser nature will still create conflict both within themselves and with their neighbors.
In this context, I find culture fascinating, especially in a place like the United States where it doesn’t always follow racial or geographic lines and where cultures have a way of melding with one another and reshaping themselves. I can imagine this process becoming even more pronounced if humans actually do move into space. In my futuristic stories, I like looking at how humans use their backgrounds as a way to find solutions to problems.
Read more:
https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2021/08/especs-books-focus-4-david-lee-summers.html
