Yes. I guess people ask me because it sounds like the perfect pseudonym for a writer of fantasy. However it is my real name!
Will you ever write a sequel/prequel to Shade’s Children?
I have no plans to write a sequel and no notes about possible storylines. However, I never know when a story will rise up out of my subconscious. A sequel is at least theoretically possible, as I always envisaged that the Overlords in Shade’s Children had taken over a single continent (basically Australia) and nowhere else, and the rest of the world was unable to intervene. So maybe the Overlords could try and establish themselves elsewhere …
books remembered
Garth Nix’s favourite books from childhood
There were several false starts to this list, which I originally wrote for the journal of the Children’s Book Council, USA. I began writing it in a hotel in Vancouver. I did a little more in a hotel in Washington D.C. A bit more got done during the long flight home to Sydney. Then I junked what I’d written, because I didn’t like how it was coming out.
The problems were many. First of all, I couldn’t possibly fit in all the significant books and authors of my childhood. The first dredging of the deep sludge of my mind made it clear I was also unable to organise the books in any meaningful way. All the books I wanted to mention I remembered because they were great books. All were and are important to me in many different ways and for many different reasons.
I couldn’t order them chronologically from when I read them because I mostly couldn’t remember when I did. Most of them I read in that space of true discovery, from the age of nine or so to maybe seventeen or eighteen. I didn’t think there was much point to ordering them by publication date either. They were new when I discovered them, regardless of whether they had been discovered by other readers days, months, years or even decades before.
Ultimately, I was left with one of the simplest organisational methods of all for this piece. A cunning structure, beloved of librarian, booksellers and highly-motivated book owners. Alphabetical by author.
So this is my own personal reading alphabet, the highlights of the years when I read six or seven or a dozen books a week. An annotated alphabet, with my comments and some rough notes as to what kind of books they are. I focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy, but others crept in. Many others had to be left out, for reasons of alphabetical, spatial or mental failure.
I’m sure there will be many old friends of yours here, dear reader, but I hope there will some new (and old) discoveries as well.
A is for Lloyd Alexander, Joan Aiken, and Poul Anderson
I remember reading Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain completely out of order, but it didn’t matter. I loved the combination of humour and adventure, and as I got older, my favourite book in the series changed from one to another and back again. I suspect this is because the careful mix of the serious and the light-hearted is different in each book, so they appeal to different moods and times. Taran Wanderer probably retains pole position to this day, but I love all the books.
Joan Aiken’s short stories are wonderfully imaginative and inventive as are her novels. My particular favourites are her short story collections, such as All You Ever Wanted and the ‘unhistorical’ novels set in a 19th century that never happened, from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea to The Cuckoo Tree. The later sequels (read with childhood long behind) never quite connected so well with me. Midnight Is A Place, the tale of two orphans forced to live by their wits in a horrendous 19th century industrial town, is another one I come back to re-read every now and again.
Poul Anderson was one of my ‘must-read’ SF writers as a teenager. I particularly devoured his Dominic Flandry books, tales of a naval intelligence officer in a decaying galactic empire, fighting the good fight while also cynically looking after himself. The books became more complex over time, as did Flandry himself. A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the standout, but all of them are good. Start with the first, Agent of the Terran Empire.
B is for John Brunner and Barbara Ninde Byfield
John Brunner’s Traveller in Black had a major impact upon me. I loved everything about it, from the bizarre, elemental characters of a chaotic, magical past to the dreadful fates of many of the selfish people who unwisely wished for something when the Traveller was nearby. Brunner plays with ideas of fate, self-will, time, creation and much else with baroque mastery.
Barbara Ninde Byfield’s book The Glass Harmonica (reissued a few years ago as The Book of Weird) is paradoxically not a book remembered from my childhood. It is a book I wanted desperately to get after I read a reference to it in The Book of Andre Norton. If memory serves me correctly, Norton referred to it as the book you need to have to find out what a ‘castellan’ is and the difference between a wizard and sorceror. But I didn’t get my hands on a copy until many years later, only to discover that it was worth the wait. Delightfully illustrated by the author, its subtitle hints at its contents: ‘A Lexicon of the Fantastical, in which it is determined that: wizards see best with their eyes closed; Torturers reek of mutton, cold sweat and rust; It is Unwise to take a Herald on a Picnic ...’ and much more. If only I’d got hold of a copy when I was 10, instead of 36! In minor tribute, I named one of the four main characters in my book Shade’s Children Ninde.
C is for Susan Cooper and Joy Chant
I am sure The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper needs no further introduction here. I read The Dark is Rising first. I didn’t know Over Sea, Under Stone existed and had to wait for the others since I got to the series early on. On cold, wintry days I used to imagine that I was about to slip into that other, magical world concurrent with our own, the one inhabited by the Light and the Dark and the Old Ones.
Red Moon, Black Mountain by Joy Chant is what I would call ‘harder-edged Narnia’. This is a novel in which children are transported to a fantasy world and take part in a great struggle against evil. Grittier and tougher than Narnia, it was unjustly neglected, probably because it was way ahead of its time. There is a sequel of sorts, but I never took to it.
D is for Dumas
The Three Musketeers is not SF or Fantasy, but it has much in common with them. History, after all, is another world to which we cannot travel except in the mind. This is a great adventure story, a great love story, and a great portal to what is, in effect, another world. Be sure to find a good translation, one that captures the humour and energy of the original (from memory the Bantam Classics paperback is a good one). And be sure to watch the best films made from the book, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, directed by Richard Lester and adapted by George MacDonald Fraser.
E is for Edward Eager
Where do you go after reading all the way through E. Nesbit? This was a particularly good question in the early 1970s when there wasn’t an awful lot of fantasy around. Eager was Nesbit’s natural successor and, to an Australian, his American children and settings were of interest in themselves, even apart from the fantasy elements. Knight’s Castle is still my favourite. I bought them all again recently, in their clean white newness, as reissued by Harcourt/Odyssey with lovely Quentin Blake covers (but also thankfully with the original N. M. Bodecker internal illustrations).