The Writers' Greenhouse: recommended reading

Imaginary Worlds ~ suggested reading batch 3 of 4

The reading list for the Imaginary Worlds course is a fantastic cross-section of the imaginary genres, from classic epic fantasy to literary fiction to dystopias to steampunk. Each week on the Facebook page I'm introducing one of the 16 books in more detail, and each month I'm gathering up a cross-section of four of the books here. (By the way, if you think you don't like reading fantasy or sci-fi, you should read this article first: Why you like reading fantasy and science fiction even though you think you don't.) This month, we have The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Fifth Season by NK Jemsin, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before - and survival, for her, is second nature. 'The Hunger Games' is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present. Welcome to the deadliest reality TV show ever...

This is one of the best Young Adult dystopias out there - and that's a broader category than you might realise! The films did the books a real disservice, so if you've only seen the films, get hold of the books immediately. The films were faithful to the books' events, but they completely lost the sense of Katniss's interiority, which is one of the most powerful aspects of the books. Throughout the events of being filmed, hated or adored by the public, dressed up, paraded, etc, Katniss is extremely aware of other people's perceptions of her and plays that with brutal intelligence. This is the flip side of "the male gaze" - the young woman who despises the system and knows exactly how to game it for survival, however reluctant she might be to do that. In the film, all that is shorn away, and all we're left with is Katniss's outward display. I don't know how one would show interiority in a film, but it felt like the most crucial aspect of the book had been stripped out.

What this book does especially well: The political and economic realities of this world play out in every single aspect of these characters' lives, right from the first scene where Katniss illegally goes hunting. It's a masterclass in how to turn politics and economics, which might seem "dry" subjects, into the stuff of story..

The Fifth Season by NK Jemsin

This is the way the world ends ... for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy..

Given the book's unbelievably gloomy blurb, I expected an extremely gloomy and dystopic book, perhaps even verging on grimdark - one of the few speculative-fiction subgenres that I actively avoid. But that's not how the book felt at all. The events, on reflection, are often dark, but the book itself is good at chiaroscuro, and rather than dark it feels absorbing, gripping, fascinating. It also has a powerful moral centre, whereas grimdark is more usually amoral. I'd also call it fantasy rather than dystopia, even if it is about a world ending, because it's set in a world that's not ours, with magic..

What this book does especially well: beautiful literary prose, playing with the language and idiom of its world, and a variety of magic unlike anything I've found in other fantasy.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

'I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me' So begins the tale of Kvothe - currently known as Kote, the unassuming innkeepter - from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, through his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-riddled city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a difficult and dangerous school of magic. In these pages you will come to know Kvothe the notorious magician, the accomplished thief, the masterful musician, the dragon-slayer, the legend-hunter, the lover, the thief and the infamous assassin.

The Name of the Wind is epic fantasy at its best, and rather than centering around castles and people of power, it centres around a more marginal figure, at least politically. It's rich, fascinating, completely absorbing - when you've run out of Robin Hobb and are wandering the house in despair for what else might match up, reach for this. Much of the first book is set in the university, with the particular enjoyment that brings - think of the pleasure of reading about Hogwarts, in Harry Potter. Well, this is the grown-up version of that. It's also a valuable reminder that tension in a book, especially a fantasy book, doesn't have to be from huge brewing wars and dramatic quests, but can be something as seemingly ordinary as a character you care deeply about trying to raise the money for their next term of education.

Money is Rothfuss's particular thing - currency, actually - and he pays close attention to it, and manages to make it equally compelling for the reader. If you ever meet him, ask him about his currency system, and then sit back to enjoy the flow of talk and his burgeoning beard for the next few hours. Make sure to stock up with a bottle or barrel beforehand. Everyone has their particular geekery, and this without doubt is Rothfuss's - though he also has a fabulous line in inventing idioms and figures of speech from within his world, or using our idioms and giving them new origins from his world.

My only criticism is that his female characters can be quite weak - absurdly fey, or, if they're a "strong character", borderline psychotic. I've noticed a few male fantasy authors gamely try to write "strong female characters" and end up creating these erratic psychotic people whose behaviour is completely inexplicable (to the reader as well as the hapless man) and in any man would be recognised as violent, abusive, and manipulative. I wouldn't mind if the book seemed to recognise that she's mad as a bag of rats and behaves inexcusably, but she always seems to get a pass. That's the main love interest, alas, but some of the secondary female characters seem quite normal, so that's good.

What this book does especially well: economics, plot tension through small-scale events building, and playing with language.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

It's almost impossible to say anything about this book without committing massive spoilers, or just plumping for adjectives like "extraordinary" and "thought-provoking", so for this, I'm just going to have to say, READ IT. Don't even look at the back-cover blurb, just READ IT. You have to trust me on this. I'm not going to be the one who spoils it for you.

What this book does especially well: JUST READ IT. Sorry, I can't say more.

The Imaginary Worlds course starts on 9 Feburary 2017 - email me at megan@thewritersgreenhouse.co.uk to book or read more about it below.

Develop your world-building to improve or invent your own imaginary worlds: the Imaginary Worlds course is an eight-week evening course on writing the genres of imaginary worlds, starting February 2017, and covering... • the many genres • how to constrain magic • making unlikely stuff convincing • your world's physical detail • why your world matters • ripple-through effects • names and language • your characters' political and economic realities • techniques for exposition. Read more about it and book here.

Imaginary Worlds ~ Suggested reading batch 2 of 4

The reading list for the Imaginary Worlds course is a fantastic cross-section of the imaginary genres, from classic epic fantasy to literary fiction to dystopias to steampunk. Each week on the Facebook page I'm introducing one of the 16 books in more detail, and each month I'm gathering up a cross-section of four of the books here. (By the way, if you think you don't like reading fantasy or sci-fi, you should read this article first: Why you like reading fantasy and science fiction even though you think you don't.) This month, we have The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, and Ash by Malinda Lo.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.

The Handmaid's Tale is an absolute classic dystopia - first published in 1985, it still feels chilling and prescient today. Although it's set in the future and definitely a dystopia, it's usually counted as "literary fiction" rather than sci-fi / fantasy. There's an unfortunate snobbery at work, where some circles refuse to consider that any sci-fi or fantasy could be literary, and if something is clearly literary as well, then it somehow gets elevated to "not sci-fi / fantasy" even though it clearly is. The same happens with Atwood's other books (in fact even she says they're not SFF) and with Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let me Go. It's a shame that people insist on this snobbery and these silos - but if anything, it goes to show how very vast the genres of "imaginary worlds" actually are.

What this book does especially well: Atwood's prose is beautiful, pure and resonant as a crystal chiming (hence the literary accolades, which she certainly deserves) and its theme is strikingly powerful.

A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

Winter can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne has begun. As Warden of the north, Lord Eddard Stark counts it a curse when King Robert bestows on him the office of the Hand. His honour weighs him down at court where a true man does what he will, not what he must ...and a dead enemy is a thing of beauty. The old gods have no power in the south, Stark's family is split and there is treachery at court. Worse, the vengeance-mad heir of the deposed Dragon King has grown to maturity in exile in the Free Cities.

A Game of Thrones barely needs any introduction any more, though you may not know that that's the name of the first book only, and the full book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire. And if you're feeling impatient for the next instalment of the HBO series, spare a thought for readers who started the books when the first one came out in 1996!

If you only know the story from the TV series, or were put off the TV series by the excess breastage, then I highly recommend the books. The TV series has done a fantastic job of condensing and adapting the story, and the casting is particularly rich, but there's a wealth more detail in the books, and they are absolutely not sexist at all. Everyone suffers, and the forces of war and patriarchy play out exactly as they genuinely would, but this is in no way misogynistically done, and if anything it's an extensive critique of our feudal-fantasy dreams, where we fill fantasy books with castles and wars, not thinking carefully about how that would actually work. These books take it seriously.

Also, while the TV series is all about the sex, the books are much more obsessed with food. Seriously: lay in plenty of food before you start reading. In particular, you'll need roast chickens, wheels of cheese, vegetables drowned in butter, stuffed chillies, and loaves of fresh bread. For starters.

What this book does especially well: George RR Martin's world is exceptionally well realised, with vast detail in every aspect of culture and people's lives, and close attention to the ripple-out effects of every choice.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredicatable interaction of its three suns. This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.

This is hardcore hard sci-fi, taking particular scientific principles and exploring them fully. If you're happy reading A Brief History of Time and the like, you'll love this - it's chokka with genuine science, fascinating extrapolations, and physics dilemmas. But if physics isn't completely your thing, you might find this hard going, because lengthy passages are devoted solely to the physics, and the story wouldn't make sense if you skimmed them - the science is the story. A Marmite book, then! Incidentally, it was translated from Chinese by Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings, who's also on the recommended list.

What this book does especially well: it uses meticulous science to develop an idea that would otherwise seem outlandish and even cliched, it embeds the political realities in its characters' lives, in the future it imagines as well as in the historical past, and its theme - whether or not humans even should be saved - feels painfully relevant at the moment.

Ash by Malinda Lo

In the world of Ash, fairies are an older race of people who walk the line between life and death, reality and magic. As orphaned Ash grows up, a servant in her stepmother's home, she begans to realise that her beloved mother, Elinor, was very much in tune with these underworld folk, and that she herself has the power to see them too. Against the sheer misery of her stepmother's cruelty, greed and ambition in preparing her two charmless daughters for presentation at court, and hopefully royal or aristocratic marriage, Ash befriends one of these fairies - a mysterious, handsome man who grants her wishes and restores hope to Ash's existence, even though she knows there will be a price to pay. But most important of all, she also meets Kaisa, a huntress employed by the king, and it is Kaisa who truly awakens Ash's desires for both love and self-respect... Ash is a fairy tale about possibility and recognizing the opportunities for change. From the deepest grief comes the chance for transformation.

Ash is a children's book (shelved in the 9-12 range) retelling the story of Cinderella, with a few twists - most significantly, in dismissing the traditional trajectory. If you've read Angela Carter's fairytale retellings in The Bloody Chamber, then the "twists" in Ash might seem tame in comparison, but remember who the book's readers are: as an intro to feminist fairytale retelling, this is captivating, and reminds you that you're always allowed to rewrite the stories yourself. Its world-building is light, in keeping with it being fairytale rather than epic fantasy, but the description is still vivid and its use of magic is deft, interesting, and well-described.

What this book does especially well: overturning the usual familiar tropes of its genre and the obvious choices for an unexpected approach.

The Imaginary Worlds course starts in Feburary 2017 - email me to book or read more about it below.

The Bloggery