Meme day #4
4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!
I segued imperceptibly between making up childish games – “you’re King Richard, and you’ve been captured by the Saracens, and we’re your knights and are coming to look for you…” – and writing down stories where the characters did what I thought they ought to, rather than spending two hours squabbling about why they couldn’t be kings too.
My first written stories were pretty much crossovers of everything that I liked at any one time. I don’t remember a lot about them. I know I wrote quite a saga about the Prog Rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer who were space-faring freedom fighters in the tradition of Blake’s 7, saving the galaxy from the forces of evil by the power of music. (And big guns – even at 11, I felt you couldn’t really believe in a revolution that didn’t have big guns in it somewhere.)
The galaxy that they were saving bore a strong resemblance to the galaxy of seedy spaceports and dead planets with wondrous, dangerous history, which I’d read about in Andre Norton’s Forerunner Foray and seen about a hundred times in Star Wars. ELP featured as themselves, as long as that meant “a bit like Han Solo, but cooler because they played music with deep lyrics at the same time.” Keith Emerson was the one who was always right, but whom no one believed, and the other two were his sidekicks.