The Big Idea: Wole Talabi

Big ideas don’t always have to start out as grand bursts of inspiration. Sometimes a big idea is made up of smaller ideas over a long period of time that all snowball together in perfect harmony. Author Wole Talabi explores this idea as he talks about his newest novel, The Fist of Memory, and cites some other great authors that lent some of those small ideas to him. WOLE TALABI: When I look back at the process of writing The Fist of Memory, I don’t see a single big idea that anchored me through it. I see many small ideas orbiting a glowing spark of motivation like a protoplanetary disk that eventually coalesced into a novel. So yes, I could tell you that its inspired largely by a lot of the action media I had consumed growing up, woven together with my deep and endless fascination with first contact SF narratives like some weird Nigerian lovechild of John Woo’s The Killer and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. I could tell you it features assassins with direct neural interfaces and…