Homage Sans Fromage — A Look at Homage in Speculative Fiction
Would it count as homage to set Firefly in the Renaissance?
As part of a workshop group I’m in, I recently had the pleasure of critiquing the first chapter of a space opera. (A genre of which I may have a few opinions. Ahem.) Within the first couple of paragraphs I realized that the novel would be a sort of homage to Firefly, and I was not the only member of the workshop group to conclude that. The homage didn’t show in anything overt – and may not even have been intentional on the part of the author – but as a reader I could tell that the author had enjoyed Firefly; it showed through in the story.
The best part about it was that the story worked as an homage in all the best ways. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Firefly fans will enjoy the novel without coming away thinking that the author had ripped off anything. The government is different, the ships are different, the crews are markedly different, as is the storyline, the language, the presence of aliens, and more. And yet, elements of the feel are there; the most obvious influence one could point to lies in the style of the occasional line of dialog.
That got me thinking: if I were to write a speculative fiction homage, what would it be?
I’d have to be careful there. It’s too easy for good intentions to devolve such a story into a cheesy mess that might as well have been fan fiction.* No, I’m not going to name names here. It can’t be anything too intricate or the parallels would show themselves too quickly. In fact, I think that a general similarity of feel would be the way to go: stick to the same genre (perhaps subgenre) and recapture elements that bring to the reader’s mind the other story in a positive way.
Some of you might be thinking of The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After. Those were not homages, they were retellings, moving the essential elements of their stories into the author’s own universe. And they’re marvelously done. If you haven’t read Brust, I recommend everything he’s written.
My first thought would be an homage to Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. I love those books, especially the first five (Corwin’s saga). Before Zelazny died, I half-expected a third set of five books, and I have ideas about what their story would have been (not the time and place to go into that). Heck, I even wrote a twenty-five page treatise on magic in the Amber universe for an RPG campaign, and speculated about the creation of the Logrus, the trumps, and the Courts of Chaos.
The elements I would need: politics, interdimensional travel, and perhaps a philosophical undercurrent. In that light, one could even argue that Charles Stross has already written his own homage to Amber through his Merchant Princes series.
What about you? What sort of homage would interest you, either to write or to read?
*I’m not deriding fan fiction here. I’m deriding something intended to be original that accidentally becomes fan fiction. That would suck.
