Not gonna quoteskeet what made me think of this (it's not bad, just, minimizing quoteskeeting is probably a good idea generally). BUT. I feel sometimes like SFF as a genre fetishizes "originality" in a way that isn't always helpful. 1/n

Agreed. It's okay, though, to want to be surprised (I especially want this at the level of the sentence).

This story uses gravity! Rip-off!

First off, NO art is going to be both totally original and also comprehensible to its audience. All art builds on previous art. That's just how it is. And SFF very definitely, in many cases consciously, builds on previous SFF. 2/n

Says one of the more original writers around...😀

I was gonna write a story about people taking rocket ships into space, but I was afraid people would think I swiped the idea from Hermann Oberth.