F is for C. S. Forester
I’m a sucker for Napoleonic nautical adventures, and C. S. Forester started it all with his Hornblower books. They’re more accessible than Patrick O’Brian of Master and Commander film fame (though I very much like his books too). Again, these are historical novels that have much of the same appeal as fantasy. Adventures in another time and place. Hornblower is a strangely likeable unlikeable character with much more to him than you might expect, and there are many personal, human stories in addition to running out the guns, climbing to the topmast, hoisting all sail and so forth.
G is for Nicholas Stuart Gray, Alan Garner and Robert Graves
Nicholas Stuart Gray wrote charming, clever English children’s fantasies, sometimes drawing on fairy tales like Rapunzel as he does in The Stone Cage, where the story is observed from the point of view of the witch’s cat. I’m also very fond of Grimbold’s Other World and The Apple Stone. Some of his books are rather too dated now, and self-conscious, but the good ones have not aged.
Like other authors on this list, Alan Garner probably needs no introduction. Suffice to say that if I could write three pages that were as good as the last three pages of The Owl Service I would be a very happy author. Like many, I love Garner’s earlier work more than the later books, though I always admire what he does. My favourites are The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, its sequel The Moon of Gomrath, and The Owl Service. When I was nineteen, and travelling around the UK in my beat-up Austin, I went to Cheshire and climbed Alderley Edge. But I couldn’t find Fundindelve . . .
Robert Graves was important to me for three very different books. I, Claudius and Claudius the God seemed to me not to be novels so much as actual accounts given by the real Claudius. As I was fascinated by Roman history (particularly Roman Britain, thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff) I was deeply interested in an actual Emperor’s real story – or so I assumed at the age of twelve or thirteen. The third book was Goodbye To All That, Graves’s autobiographical account of his experiences in World War One. One of my great-great-uncles died in that war, at Flers. My mother’s father, a young subaltern in 1916, died in the 1960s from emphysema that was a result of being gassed. Every little town in Australia has a memorial to the dead, a whole generation of young men lost from a country with only a tiny population. Graves really brought the First World War into sharp, personal focus for me for the first time. I believe there are two versions of the book, and one is considerably more complete than the other.
H is for Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer
Robert Heinlein was probably my favourite science fiction writer through my teenage years. With books like Red Planet, Between Planets, Starman Jones, Have Space Suit Will Travel, Space Cadet (not a perjorative term when it first came out), Tunnel in the Sky, Farmer in the Sky, Starship Troopers, and Citizen of the Galaxy how could he not be a favourite? All great stories, told with such surety that they seemed real to me, to be almost true tales from far futures, somehow sent back. He lost some of his sense of story, I think, after The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a book I loved in my later teens. I can still re-read all the titles I’ve mentioned, which illustrates my high esteem for the books both then and now.
I came to Georgette Heyer in my late teens. I don’t like her murder mysteries and her ‘serious’ historical novels like Lord John don’t interest me either. But I love her Regency Romances. Some are better than others, but the best are enormously entertaining, historically accurate, and very funny adventure stories. Oh, and there’ll be some romance in there somewhere. I heartily recommend Friday’s Child, Uncommon Ajax, Sylvester, These Old Shades, Devil’s Cub, The Toll Gate and . . . in fact any of her Regency novels are well worth reading.
I is for Incomplete
I couldn’t think of any authors whose surnames begin with I. Naturally a dozen of them will fall off my shelves as soon as i stop looking, and I will be e-mailed hundreds more names. Regardless, at this point, ‘I’ is for Incomplete, as in The Incomplete Enchanter by L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Either of these authors could have appeared here on their own, De Camp for Lest Darkness Fall (modern engineer falls back in time to the late Roman period) and Pratt for The Blue Star (a fantasy set in a kind of 18th century pre-revolutionary France). Both authors were way ahead of the fantasy pack, beginning their work in the 1940s.
J is for Tove Jansson
Moomintrolls! I still want to live in a Moomin House on an island somewhere. These books are for any age, but I loved them most ferociously from the age of eight or so to ten or thereabouts (I’ve never stopped loving them, of course; now I just spread my affections among more books). My mother made puppets of the entire cast of Moominland Midwinter and put the book on as a puppet play when I was eight. Sadly, only the Groke survives, as no silverfish or mouse would dare eat that cold personage. For no other reason than the fact that it was the first one I read myself, I suggest starting with Moominsummer Madness, or perhaps Comet in Moominland. Chronology is not really important to the Moomin books, though the later ones are tinged with melancholy, perhaps from the long Northern nights.
K is for Rudyard Kipling
Captains Courageous introduced me to Kipling. A great sea adventure and a sharp insight into the relationships between boys, between sons and fathers, and between husbands and wives. It was contemporary when Kipling wrote it, so I’m not sure if can be called a historical novel, though now of course it is. For other Kipling, my favourites are (of course) Kim and the Just So Stories. And I liked The Jungle Book as a child, before every shred of its narrative power was used and re-used and turned to dust by Disney.
L is for Ursula Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea was a fantasy that, like The Lord of the Rings, seemed to me to be a true tale from somewhere else. Not a made-up story, but something real. I read and re-read it, and wished I knew the true names of the world around me. I felt the same with the two sequels The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore (the later sequels came out when I was in my twenties and thirties). I also found this sense of truth or reality in Le Guin’s science fiction, particularly The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
M is for John Masefield and Arthur Mee
The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights by John Masefield (the English poet) are two little-known fantasies. They are full of invention, connection to myth, legend and folklore, and fascinating characters. They have their faults, mainly (I think) because of some assumptions about how children’s books were supposed to be written in the 1920s. But they are still excellent fantasy novels of normal children slipping into marvellous realms that co-exist with our own world. Be sure to get unabridged versions.