If You Like Android Karenina...

...and I hope you do, you might want to check out some of this other stuff, all of which was influential in one way or another as I was writing it.

 

I, Robot (by Isaac Asimov). You can’t write about robots without owing something to Asimov, and I sure do; the Iron Laws of Robotics that govern the behavior of Android Karenina’s ‘bots are an unapologetic homage to the Master. Besides, both Tolstoy and Asimov (besides both being native Russians) were both fiction writers who cared about big ideas, and nowI’ve got Tolstoy’s characters discussing Asimov’s ideas, a bit of time-space warping I like to think Asimov would have dug. 

 

The Stepford Wives (by Ira Levin) So very creepy and so very fun, and also a great reminder that even someone who looks and acts like a person can turn out to be robots with deadly intentions. Except none of the robots in Android Karenina look and act like people. Right?

 

Battlestar Gallactica (the newer one, created by David Eick and Ronald Moore) A good lesson in how quasi-futuristic people, enacting action-adventure high-tech plots, can remain compelling human characters. Plus, of course, those human-looking-but-secretly-robotic Cylons ain’t nothin’ but super-fancy Stepford wives.

 

Excession (by Iain Banks). A massively fun intergalactic mystery story; plus, the way the characters in Banks’ far-flung-future society commune with their super-sentient outfits, airships, and other mechanized pals informed the relationships in Android Karenina between Class III robots and their owners.

 

Alien (dir. Ridley Scott). Suffice it to say I took this movie’s extremely famous and shocking death scene and recast it in a decrepit provincial Russian hotel. And you thought dying of tuberculosis was bad.

 

The novelization of Star Wars (credited to George Lucas but really by Alan Dean Foster) Rediscovering Star Wars by reading “the book of the movie” helped me understand that Android Karenina was going to be less “hard sci-fi” (emphasis on the complexities of the technologies) and more of a “space opera” (epic scale, focus on characters and drama).

 

The Difference Engine (by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling) The prototypical steampunk novel (if I’m wrong on that, steampunks, drop me a telegraph). It’s the 1850s, and England has the super-computer. Engrossing action/adventure alternate history, with historical personages interacting with entirely fictional ones. 

The Watchmen (by Alan Moore) Among the many reasons this graphic novel is so shatteringly good is Moore’s mastery of writing alternate history: How one significant change from reality then plays out in hundreds of small ways. 

 

From the Earth to the Moon (by Jules Verne). I borrowed most from Verne’s delightful pre-space age vision of how man could get to the moon (think giant cannonball, shot from giant cannon), but the first chapter alone is worth the price of admission. It’s a little satirical masterpiece set in The Gun Club, where al the members are missing at least one limb.   

 

And finally, obviously…

 

Anna Karenina (by Leo Tolstoy and not Ben H. Winters). Similar to Android Karenina in many ways, except minus the Groznium mines, the beloved-companion robots, the slavering lizard-aliens, the lunar colonies, and, well, a lot of other stuff.