Inspiration

Authors draw inspiration from other books all the time. My second novel, The Immortality Game, had two primary sources. First it was the background story for the wizard Xax in my first novel The Shard (Xax from the fantasy novel is the Russian scientist Tyoma in The Immortality Game and there is a short story called 'Arrival' in my book of short stories Lord Fish that ties the two books together).

Second was the inspiration I drew from the spectacular cyberpunk novels of Richard K Morgan, starting with Altered Carbon. I highly recommend this series to anyone who loves great sci-fi. I loved them even more the second time I read them.

In these books Morgan uses a version of digital immortality he calls cortical stacks. He didn't invent the idea of digital immortality by any means, but he uses the idea brilliantly, wrapped in an amazing set of stories. The cortical stack is a ball of something like steel that is implanted in the spine near the skull, where it collects everything from the mind as it happens. If the person is killed or dies, as long as the cortical stack wasn't damaged, the person can be 'resleeved' into a cloned body and essentially live again. 

I was intrigued by this idea, mainly because the story treats the characters as if they are the same person no matter how many times they are resleeved, though of course each is just a copy of the person. You can't call it immortality, because the original person dies, and no matter how real the copy is, it isn't the original and thus it isn't real immortality. I started wondering what the technology of cortical stacks might have been like when it was first being developed, and that set off the story-line that grew into The Immortality Game.

I have found it odd that almost no one seems to buy both The Immortality Game and The Shard. I understand that they seem very different, with one being a technothriller and the other an epic fantasy, but they are set in the same 'universe' and share characters, despite not being a traditional series.

What books have served to inspire you in writing your stories?