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SF and Fantasy Writers Day
Jun. 23rd, 2009 08:50 pmI am slowly gathering that this is not just one person's random post, but a meme: thank the authors who got you started in fantasy and SF.
Need I mention that most of my favorite children's authors are fantasy? The beginning readers' books of Dr. Seuss (my favorite remains One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish) and P.D. Eastman (the immortal Are You My Mother? and Go Dog Go). Followed shortly chronologically by A.A. Milne, then Edward Eager's Half Magic, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the original edition, in which the Oompa-Loompas were African).
Was there SF? There were the marvelous machines in William Pene du Bois's The Three Policemen and The 21 Balloons. There was Oliver Butterworth's The Enormous Egg.
So I was already well-equipped before I was handed J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit at the age of eleven. It wasn't until late in high school that I seriously explored other fantasy authors and formed my canon: after Tolkien, Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake for their elegant prose and vivid imaginations, and Ursula K. Le Guin whose maps in A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan saw into my soul. The special pleasures of Richard Adams's Watership Down and, some years later on, Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock. Continuing down the years, Patricia A. McKillip, Neil Gaiman ...
SF I was dumped into with a splash in high school also. Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Roger Zelazny - an odd trio, perhaps - have to take top place, but so much more by Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Michael Bishop, L. Sprague de Camp, Le Guin (again), Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn, James Tiptree, Jack Vance ... glancing through shelves here ... and that's just the ones who were already around when I started reading.
Thank you all so much.
Need I mention that most of my favorite children's authors are fantasy? The beginning readers' books of Dr. Seuss (my favorite remains One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish) and P.D. Eastman (the immortal Are You My Mother? and Go Dog Go). Followed shortly chronologically by A.A. Milne, then Edward Eager's Half Magic, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the original edition, in which the Oompa-Loompas were African).
Was there SF? There were the marvelous machines in William Pene du Bois's The Three Policemen and The 21 Balloons. There was Oliver Butterworth's The Enormous Egg.
So I was already well-equipped before I was handed J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit at the age of eleven. It wasn't until late in high school that I seriously explored other fantasy authors and formed my canon: after Tolkien, Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake for their elegant prose and vivid imaginations, and Ursula K. Le Guin whose maps in A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan saw into my soul. The special pleasures of Richard Adams's Watership Down and, some years later on, Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock. Continuing down the years, Patricia A. McKillip, Neil Gaiman ...
SF I was dumped into with a splash in high school also. Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Roger Zelazny - an odd trio, perhaps - have to take top place, but so much more by Poul Anderson, Gregory Benford, Michael Bishop, L. Sprague de Camp, Le Guin (again), Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn, James Tiptree, Jack Vance ... glancing through shelves here ... and that's just the ones who were already around when I started reading.
Thank you all so much.
