All literature began with mythology. The literature of the world is still steeped in it. I came to the genre early, as my parents had books on myth and legend that I devoured as soon as I could read. Science fiction and fantasy is particularly beholden to it, as am I. The Earthborn Men was specifically inspired by the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes in the Third Century BC, not to mention Ray Harryhausen’s brilliant Jason and the Argonauts film. The Sirens’ Voices was written specifically because of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I loved Homer’s epic so deeply that I was determined to write a similar homage, but using all the incidents in the original order. I thought only SF could do justice to Odysseus’s fantastic voyage. Later, I used the Iliad for my Martian Rebellion novella, The Topless Towers.