“”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.)
The English Student 