My ideal life based on my favourite writers

My choice of favourite authors reflects my interests (duh), mainly science and politics. But they each appeal for different reasons. Some writers I would aspire to write like, and some I just want to steal bits of the fictional worlds they create and live them.

I want to be friends with Howard Roark, rogue architect of Ayn Rand’s creation.

I want to write like George Orwell, with clarity and brevity, and have the courage to defend unfashionable political views (but I don’t want to be a socialist).

I want to think like Asimov and Arthur C Clarke – wild ideas that make you gasp.

I want to write novels like Steven Baxter – wild ideas that make you gasp but with a bit more novelistic oomph than Messrs Asimov and Clarke.

I want to live a life and in a world as described by Kim Stanley Robinson – probably some kind of peripatetic scientist in the mix of great events but still taking time out to appreciate the wild and the rocks and the sky.

George Orwell – Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Money, always money

Gordon Comstock is obsessed with money, despite having renounced it.  About to turn 30 in 1930′s London, he has left his “good” job with “prospects” and now scrapes a living working in a bookshop.  He chooses this because he refuses to worship the “money god” and so wants a job with no chance of advancement.  He also writes poetry.  He had a book published a couple of years ago (unknown to him, mainly down to a sympathetic publishing friend rather than much in the way of merit).  Since then he has been working and re-working an extended piece, with little enthusiasm and a certainty that it will never be finished.

Gordon’s obsession with money had been sharpened by his lack of it.  He can barely afford a horrible room in a horrible boarding house, his clothes are tired, his food poor, and his tobacco rarely lasts the week.  Inexplicably he has a sort-of girlfriend, but because neither his nor her boarding house allow guests of the opposite sex, they have to meet elsewhere.  But he can never afford to take her anywhere – the cinema, a pub, a cafe – so they roam the streets.  He and his rich friend Ravelston have developed an elaborate protocol to avoid the glaring fact that Gordon is skint and Ravelston loaded.

But the material poverty has blunted his creativity, despite the cliche of the starving artist/writer.  It isn’t true.  Living at the edge of poverty (1930′s poverty) means he has neither the physical nor mental energy to create anything – surviving is effort enough.

As with all Orwell, the writing is simple and excellent, and the descriptions of poverty rather exhausting to read.  Comstock though, is a complete arse.  Although I don’t agree with him I sympathised “in principle” (as his friends and girlfriend do, before urging him not to be so stupid) but he was cutting off his nose to spite is face and making everyone around him miserable.  The utter unlovability of the main character means that I preferred (the non-fiction) Down and Out in Paris and London for Orwell’s take on poverty.