Recently found an interview <PERSON> did with a comic book publishing house. It covers exactly where Sumito came from and where it is derived from. It is a pretty in depth interview. Check it out. It is also spread into two parts in that magazine. Which is free btw.
Here's the transcript for the short answer if you're feeling lazy and don't want to read through the magazine.
Q: I remember reading through a grizzled, hard sci-fi title called "The 97th Step." ( (<PERSON>) It touches on many subjects like: warfare, love, race, gender, identity, politics etc and I believe was a book that was sincerely ahead of its time. What style(s) of martial arts were your inspiration for Sumito? As a martial artist myself, I'd say it had elements of a Kung-Fu/Karate hybrid, but can't be sure. 322
Did your experience with Silat come into play here?
A: The 97th Step was part of a series about interstellar bodyguards who wind up leading a revolution against a repressive confederation, basic space-opera stuff, somewhere between <PERSON> and Star Wars. I was — still am — a long-time martial artist, and that comes out in my work more often than not.
Over the years, as a dojo bum, I studied whatever was available to me locally, and the initial version of my made-up art, Sumito (the “sum of it all …”) had elements of them. Some Karate, some Kung-Fu, a little Aikido, some Gymnastics, stuff like that.
I didn’t start training in Silat until after the bulk of the series was out, and when I did, it was because a lot of what I thought I had had up for Sumito was in Silat. Patterns on the floor, black steel, combinations of striking and grappling. The most recent published book look deeper into the origins of the art, and has a lot more Silat material in it.
The techno-thriller novels I did for <PERSON>’s Net Force had a lot of Silat in them, probably reached the widest audience in English with that as a core martial art. Those books began in the mid-to-late nineties, and I was only just starting my training in the art. <PERSON> <PERSON>, for the full title of the style in which I am still training. 504