Neil Gaiman wrote October In The Chair as an homage to Ray Bradbury. Have you, or are you planning to, write a story that is inspired by another author? By homage, I don't mean it has to be so like that author's work that people are accusing you of stealing it from them. I am currently working on a story that is an homage to Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. My story takes place in a small New England town where the locals are trying to encourage new residents to participate in the bimonthly bingo game, which will "Cost you ten but you could win a thousand."
I know what you mean. Samual R. Delany's Nova is an homage to Alfred Bester's Tiger! Tiger! My WIP isn't as direct an homage as that, but it certainly is an homage to the writing that I found the most fun when I was younger. I was weaned on Anne Mccaffrey's early Pern novels (before they turned into cash-grab) and Marrion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels, which are both set in a world that feels like Fantasy but is actually Science Fiction in disguise. The Pern novels are in disguise even to themselves in that it's not until much later in the books that the people living on Pern discover they are, in fact, the descendents of a long-ago colony ship where the colony failed (in part). In the Darkover novels, we come into the story when the lost colony has already been rediscovered and they've been in contact again with the rest of human society for some time now, though their own society was isolated for a couple thousand years and has diverged wildly. My own story is a lost colony trope, so it's an homage in the sense that it embraces a trope from an earlier time in Science Fiction, from my own youth.
