Dave’s panicked face inside a space pod, with lights from the recalcitrant and homicidal HAL playing over his helpless form, stayed with me for years. Haunted me, in fact, along with Frank’s body drifting into the void of space. I was fourteen years old when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in the spring of 1969, in London. It was an experience that stuck.
My dad was a film lover, and filmmaker in a modest way, and we lived in a small town in Indiana where the number and variety of films that played in the theaters was also small. So when we traveled to larger and more cosmopolitan cities, Dad always went to see every movie he could. And he took my mother, brother, and me with him.
When it first came out, Kubrick’s masterpiece played at the Casino Cinerama in London, where my Dad was teaching. I had never seen a movie in Cinerama before, never been in a theater like that. It was an astounding experience and I remember leaving the theater wide-eyed and feeling as though I had really been someplace.
I still love space movies; I even like bad ones. I just want to go out there.
So when Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote this week about being the girl who confused the local librarian by loving science fiction, both in films and literature, I could relate. The first science fiction novels I remember reading were The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, both of which I read when my chief competitor, my brother, did. But I loved them, too. The big draw for me was a ticket to a life of adventure in unknown realms: unknown to me, anyway.
Kris turned her affection for sci-fi into a lifelong love affair by creating her own. She writes, “I started writing stories in the Diving Universe because I wanted to live in space and have adventures, and writing about it is the next best thing.” So she invented Boss, her alter ego and the heroine of Diving Into the Wreck, and the Diving Universe was born.
Many fans follow Boss and her colleagues, and it was with them in mind that the Diving Universe Kickstarter campaign was created. Read all about it here. You can get the latest Diving novel, The Renegat (truly a magnum opus), in June, months before it is available to the general public, as well as print and ebook editions of the whole series, and a whole lot more just by backing this limited time campaign. Come on and dive in; you’ll be in good company!
Gwyneth Gibby is Associate Publisher of WMG Publishing.