You’re My Inspiration with Matt Betts

One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a new column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.

This week, we bring you the familiar face of Matt Betts, whose Carson of Venus: The Edge of All Worlds is forthcoming from American Mythology Productions. What inspired Betts to play in Burroughs’ sandbox? Let Matt tell you….

Everybody Loves Ray Guns

I’ve always mixed and mashed things in my books. I like blending genres and influences, and playing with the expectations of genre. I’m also a big pop-culture junkie. That usually makes for a long list of ingredients that I pull from when creating a book. My first novel, Odd Men Out, for example, drew from Dawn of the Dead, Firefly, Star Wars, Men in Black, Jaws, and others.

So when I was given the opportunity to write Carson of Venus: The Edge of all Worlds for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. I dug deep into my favorites to create it.

Here are a few…

Edgar Rice Burroughs: It’s a no-brainer, really. My novel is a continuation of a series that ERB started as a serial in Argosy Magazine in 1934. Those were later printed as the novel Pirates of Venus. The Venus series continued for four books and a novella. So naturally, the first and most important inspiration came from those. I read and reread those books to get a feel for Burroughs’ characters and his version of Venus, or Amtor, as the inhabitants called it. The books followed Carson Napier, an Earthman who builds his own rocket to take him to Mars. Unfortunately, he makes a serious miscalculation and is thrown wildly off course. Fortunately, he finds himself eventually entering the atmosphere of Venus, where he bails out of his craft and plummets into the ensuing adventures. Later he meets his love Duare, and gains the friendship of Nalte and Ero Shan, who become key characters in my book as well.

I loved Burrough’s work from my earliest scifi reading, including John Carter of Mars, Tarzan and others. Some of these were introduced to me via comic books and other by the actual novels. The Marvel Comics run of John Carter: Warlord of Mars was available as my love of intergalactic adventures was just beginning, and they encouraged me to further explore the stories ERB originally wrote with the characters.

Star Wars: I’ve loved space opera and other science fiction types since first seeing Star Wars: A New Hope in theaters when I was young. The idea of a whole universe of stories, characters, and creatures having adventures in a galaxy far, far away thrilled (and kind of terrified) me. The possibility that monsters could be the heroes was something I loved to explore later in my own work. It was my intro to a system of magic, faster than light travel, and a wider continuing series of stories, and the later novels kept that interest alive by exploring minor Star Wars characters and creating new ones.

Star Wars influenced my writing of Edge of all Worlds in my feelings toward the core group of original characters continued from the original books. I wanted to create the same sort of dynamic with my main characters by having them trust and respect each other, but still keep them independent and with their own opinions. They’re able to meet challenges head-on with confidence in everyone else’s abilities.

The Lord of the Rings: Maybe not as overt of an influence, but the Lord of the Rings trilogy was another influential set of books from high school for me. I found that as I was introducing new characters to my novel, I thought somewhat of Tolkien’s amazing fantasy series and how the story was so much about a journey and who they meet. My group of heroes makes their way across Amtor in pursuit of a dangerous new enemy, meeting victims of that enemy’s advance. Some creatures they meet have advice for our heroes, some want to join and others are relatively indifferent. I made sure, however, to make these citizens of Carson’s adopted homeworld into real characters with their own special reasons to trust or hate our main characters.

Krull: Okay, don’t hate me. Not everyone loves Krull. It’s… an acquired taste. Is it a good movie? I’ll let you decide that. It was a movie that hit me at the right time in my childhood, and ticked off a number of boxes of my favorites list: Exotic weapon, weird alien-like enemies, fights, pulpy, swashbuckling, prophecies, and general mayhem. And I loved the insanely addictive arcade game. Again, the mismatched, but effective team banding together to fight evil was a big draw for me and helped shape the dynamics of my own band of protagonists.

Nature: In the course of writing Edge of all Worlds, I had the characters crossing new territories, meeting new species, walking through fresh environments. While Burroughs set up Amtor with great details, exciting political upheaval, and dangerous creatures, he couldn’t create everything. I had so much fun creating and naming new plants and monsters, and I used research from both Amtor’s past and Earth’s present. I wanted the world of Amtor to be a real, believable place. How would new plants grow? What would motivate certain animals to behave in a particular way? Creating the foliage and trees that the adventure takes place in was interesting because I really got to ramp up the ordinary and everyday to dangerous levels. What could potentially kill these characters? Or at the very least, delay them? Nah, let’s stick with potentially kill them. Again, most of these things were brought along from Burroughs’ originals, but occasionally I got to have fun with nature.

The Waring Blender: Not really the actual blender, but the action. All of these things and more went into making this book, some consciously, others just sort of happened and I only noticed in retrospect. They get twisted and chopped, blended and mashed until they’re hard to spot. I don’t think you’d notice any of these in the book overtly, but I think the general vibe is there, at least for me as I wrote it. The challenge was to write a sequel to an Edgar Rice Burroughs series with the feel and atmosphere of his work, but not to try to imitate Burroughs. It had to be a canonical story that could meet the rigorous expectations of his fans and the editors. It was certainly a daunting task, but one I really loved. It was an exciting experience to learn his work and style and then take it in a new direction.

Why a Waring Blender? Thanks to a Warren Zevon song, it was the only brand of blender that came to mind. Sometimes I can’t stop blending things, it just happens.

Matt Betts worked for years in radio as an on-air personality, anchor and reporter. His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His work includes the steampunk novel, Odd Men Out, urban fantasy book Indelible Ink, and his most recent release, White Anvil: Sasquatch Onslaught. Matt’s upcoming 2020 release Carson of Venus: The Edge of all Worlds continues a series begun by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

White Anvil || Carson of Venus || Website || Twitter || Facebook

Author Photo by Catherine Murray

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