Shores of Night

It's Robert Jordan's fault really. Let me explain. I discovered fantasy fiction at the tender age of six, when my Grampy leant me his copy of the Hobbit. Two  years later I read Lord of the Rings, in a weekend, and I was pretty much lost to the world of realism from that point on. I'd already devoured books of myths and, as I come from a family of readers, trips to the library were common. I worked my way through the Green Smoke books, Rosemary Sutcliffe's historical novels and other books, but I always returned to fantasy and science fiction. This early deluge may be why, when my other Grandfather, who lived further away and seldom saw us, gave me Ladybird versions of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Hound of the Baskervilles they were digested and found to be somewhat disappointing. In retrospect it was the fact he told me my spine would break free of my body crawl across the floor... which it didn't, because they were Ladybird books. This may be why I have a s...

I think we all have them, books we love that nobody else seems to have read, or even heard of. I was honestly taken aback to see a friend mention the White Crow books by Mary Gentle on Twitter the other day, if only because most people don't even seem to know who she is, let alone remember gems like Rats and Gargoyles. It got me thinking, what other books are there that nobody else I know seems to have read? And so I made a little list... 1 Silk by Caitlin R Kiernan Kiernan's first novel was a heady mixture of Lovecraftian horror and the Goth scene and established her voice as a genuine outsider, something that shoots through her work. I came to read it as a result of her her work on the Dreaming, and the chronicle of Spider Baxter's strange transformation and the legacy it left seemed strange and wonderful. 2 The White Crow novels by Mary Gentle Beautifully written and esoteric, the first of the books, Rats and Gargoyles introduced me to a completely different ...

Something that's been rolling about in my head for a while is how weird communication is. We live in a world that's replete with ways to talk to each other but it only seems to make it more tenuous. Most of us have probably sent emails that we feel are urgent, only to receive the inbox version of a tumble weed. We do it with texts too, letting them sit on our phones, unanswered. I suppose we do it because they lack the immediacy of a phone call; they're static things that don't complain they're neglected, in direct contrast to the nagging tone of the telephone. Even if the person who sent them is going frantic because the lack of response looks and feels galling, we can just ignore them: the object is divorced from emotion, and from time. Social media seems to have the same timeless feeling. Something I tweeted ages ago (which went through to Facebook) sat untouched on my feed for ages. I expect that sort of  reaction with Twitter because, to be honest, I barely...

This isn't the snappiest title in the shop, and I'm shamelessly stealing the idea from one of Juliet E Mckenna's recent tweets, where she said she'd love to see something like this in print (well, what else are you going to do?). With my act of daring theft done, I started to put this list together. It feels a bit odd, I'm conscious that I'm a man, and as such this may seem patronising, which isn't my intent here at all. I'm trying to approach it as a reader rather than being defined by anything else. I don't know that there's a particular order to the books, mostly I've just put them down as they occurred to me. 1) Storm Constantine: The Monstrous Regiment One of the Constantine's first novels, Monstrous Regiment depicts a matriarchy on an alien planet and it pulls no punches. It strips the fairytale or golden age elements from the idea of this system of government in favour of a full bore assault, reflecting the idea that power ...