As there was so much ground covered (and that was just the 63 bus route), this short post merely notes Roz's mention of the three classic fantasy-plot templates:
- the education of the king
- the reconciliation of the faerie and mundane worlds
- the search for a solution to the world's pain
and her recommended reads in both science fiction and fantasy (these certainly move some of these texts up my notional 'to-read' pile):
fantasy
- Gene Wolfe (despite his politics)
- John Crowley's Little Big
- Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist
- Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
science Fiction
- John Varley (especially his early work)
- Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory ('one of the cleverest books written in the last five years', and recommended despite being military SF)
- Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (despite its 1950s hipster sexism)
- Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War ('unlike anything else')
- Fritz Leiber's The Big Time (with reservations)
- William Gibson's Neuromancer and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy as classic texts largely immune to the depradations of the Suck Fairy (see this Jo Walton explainer).
Roz also talked of poetry (her own, Catullus's, Sappho's) and read some, themed around love and death (what else is there?). She quoted Keats who said, on his death bed, that "I hope I will be among the English poets when I die" - adding, "you and me both, boy..!"
(Addicted to bathos, I noted - walking to the bus station - a pub advertising "£4 pints, £6 margs*, 3am license [*5 to 9 only]": an imagined big night out tersely conjured in 'numbers' of another kind...).
