The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey

I consumed the magazines I could find every month - Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and (if I was lucky) Twilight Zone. Martin’s very early work reminded me of the sweeping romanticism the genre was capable of expressing, and he had a certain lyricism in his prose that appealed to me. Robert Silverbergtaught me to aspire to whatever literary quality lay within my grasp. Lewis, whom my father introduced me to before I was really old enough to understand exactly what I was reading. I still look for that kind of hit when I open a novel: it’s like mainlining pure narrative heroin. I remember reading halfway through The Stand in a single night and standing up bleary-eyed in the dawn, feeling like I’d been transported to some place both wonderful and terrible. The sheer narrative drive of King’s work seized me, and I tore through everything he’d written as quickly as I could. I discovered Stephen King not long afterward, and his early books spoke to me in much the same way. And Bradbury, especially, taught me to care about the prose. Simak were others.) Together, these writers empowered me to use the world I had come to know growing up in rural West Virginia as fodder for my own short fiction. He married rural settings to the tropes of science fiction and fantasy, which so few writers do. I stumbled onto his work in sixth grade and consumed everything I could find by him for years thereafter. RECURSOR: Who are the biggest sci-fi/fantasy influences on your writing?īAILEY: By far the most important influence on my work was Ray Bradbury.

We chatted with him about his sci-fi inspirations and his writing. His “ Teenagers from Outer Space” earned a mention in our review of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017because we loved its powerful social commentary on emotional abusiveness by human beings, contrasted with the peaceful behavior of aliens in an alternative 1950s Ohio. Award-winning horror and science fiction author Dale Bailey is known for creating sympathetic characters, deft prose, and emotionally impactful tales.

The End of the End of Everything by Dale Bailey