Today I have a fantastic
post from one of my favourite authors, Scott Westerfeld, and his partners in crime
for Zeroes, Deborah Biancotti and
Margo Lanagan on their favourite YA from when they were young adults.
YA wasn't a clearly defined thing when we were
growing up, so we had to make do with what we could find.
Deborah Biancotti
I read Tanith Lee's The Birthgrave
as a teen and loved its imaginative visual world and weird mysticism. The story
of a woman who wears a mask because she's so hideous (she thinks) and who goes
on a quest across a damaged and occasionally brutal landscape, The
Birthgrave defined the next decade of reading for me.
One of the few high school-prescribed
books that I actually enjoyed was To Kill a Mockingbird. That opening
sequence is stamped on my brain. I loved Scout, but most importantly, I loved
her dad, and the sense of justice they both shared. And yes, I'm afraid of
reading the "new" Harper Lee release in case all my memories are
ruined.
Margo Lanagan
Paul Zindel, The Pigman. Two
teens, Lorraine and John, accidentally befriend lonely old Mr Pignati, who
charms them with his openhearted hospitality and his eccentric house and
habits. Their friendship grows until by a series of naive bad decisions, they
damage and destroy everything he holds dear. Wikipedia tells me that this book
is often set for schools, but I’m glad I never had to ruin it by writing
tedious essays about its themes—I just enjoyed the two entirely believable
narrators and the fun they had on the way to the slow car crash of the climax.
Mervyn Peake, the Gormenghast trilogy.
A big, weird, baroque monster-work about Titus Groan, heir to Gormenghast, a
fantastical, mouldering stronghold inhabited by the Groans and their grotesque
entourage. Go read the opening paragraph—it’s online in a million places—for a
taste of the mad Gothic overwriting that Peake sustains for three hefty volumes.
I loved immersing myself in the swamp of this prose when I was thirteen or
fourteen.
Scott Westerfeld
Joanna Russ, "We Who Are About To
. . ." is a (non-YA) novel about survivors of a starship crash on an
unknown planet. You'd think this would be pretty standard science fiction
stuff: survival, problem solving, eventual rescue! The problem is, one of the
characters doesn't want to be in that kind of story. She figures that life on
this unknown planet, cut off from the rest of humanity except for a handful of
people she despises, isn't really worth living. The others won't let her give
up, so she kills them one by one. This novel taught me that no direction is too
weird for a story to go in.
Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions.
Not a novel and not YA, this anthology of stories was way beyond of the usual
range of science fiction in the 1960s. The stories dealt with sexuality, class,
and social sciences, and were often written in experimental styles. But they
all made perfect sense to me, and made me want to write about Big Ideas in
Unusual Ways, using the classic tropes of SF. (For an example of stories in the
anthology, you can probably dig up Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah .
. . " on the internet, a tale about third-sex space workers.)
Thank you
so much! I’ve definitely added some books to my wishlist…
Sophie
