“”Do you know where the past and the present intersect?” Jac asked him.
“Where?”
“In your mind, only.””
Adam Roberts
- Terry Pratchett. Because he’d be funny, yes, but also clever and thoughtful and wise and deeply, deeply interesting to talk to.
- Douglas Adams. For many of the reasons above: he’s always struck me as someone who’d be a good conversationalist, well-informed and funny.
- Adam Roberts. For intellectual discussions about SFF. Hurrah!
- China Mieville. Ditto. Also, I just think he’d be a bit different; I think he’d have a different way of seeing the world.
- Catherynne M. Valente. The woman who invented mythpunk. Again, I think she’d look at the world slightly aslant, and that would be fascinating.
- Frances Hardinge. She studied English at Oxford, as I did, and her novels all have this current of deep thought, while still being eminently accessible.
- Fanny Burney, who published her first novel Evelina entirely in secret and who was a major influence on Jane Austen.
- Mervyn Peake. Mervyn Peake wrote Gormenghast, one of the best Gothic novels ever, and he had a fascinating life: born in China in the last years of Chinese Imperialism, a full-time artist in Britain, sent home from conscription in WWII because they couldn’t find a use for him, and utterly devoted to his wife Maud for basically all his life (which is rare in writers).
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are my ninth and tenth picks: radical feminist critics who wrote The Madwoman in the Attic, which completely tore up the critical narrative about Victorian literature. I imagine they’d stir up some debate around the dinner table.
(The theme for this post was suggested by the Broke and the Bookish’s weekly meme Top Ten Tuesday.)
