Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (S)

I think maybe because I seemed to have so many favourites that started with A and B that I thought other letters would follow suit, so I'm little bit surprised when it doesn't work out that way, so for S I only came up with 2 and a half. I'll explain how the half works later on.

Robert Silverberg is the elder statesman of the SFF world these days and he's been greatly awarded for his craft (although has never won the Hugo for best novel). He looks rather like a distinguished Shakespearean actor, and having been fortunate enough to meet him once and hear him speak a few times, he has the voice to match the image, he also gives some of the funniest speeches at the Hugos.

He's best known and recognised for science fiction, which makes up the vast majority of his extensive catalog, and although his Majipoor series takes place on another planet, so could possibly be classified as planetary romance, most people regard it as fantasy.

In some ways Robert Silverberg is also responsible for giving the world George RR Martin's Dunk and Egg stories. The first of those 'The Hedge Knight' first appeared in the Silverberg edited Legends anthology and the second was in Legends II.  The Legends anthologies were as much as anything the idea behind the recent anthologies Warriors, Dangerous Women and Rogues, edited by George RR Martin and his good friend Gardner Dozois.

Robert Silverberg still regularly appears at conventions and the like, but is not as active or as prolific as before. His last publication was a collection of short fiction in 2014.

A friend loaned me Lord Valentine's Castle when I was a teen and I found it one of the most interesting fantasies I'd ever read. This was adult fantasy that was unlike anything I had encountered before. It takes place on a planet that has apparently been conquered a long time ago by humans and other space faring races. As colonists tend to do they've paid scant regard to the original inhabitants and those chickens are going to go home to roost. It's quite a swashbuckler, too and owes more than a passing nod to things like Sabatini's Scaramouche. The titular character has had his memory wiped and doesn't know that he's supposed to be the ruler of the planet, for much of the book he thinks that he's exactly what he appears to be; an itinerant juggler. It's wonderful melding of science fiction and fantasy, it delves into mind control, the evils of colonisation and imperialism, yet it never flags or preaches and moves along at the sort of clip befitting any good old fashioned adventure story.

Further and related reading: there's Silverberg's back catalog, which just in terms of novels along numbers in excess of 70, before including the Majipoor novels, those number at 8 with the publication of Tales of Majipoor in 2013. Like I said Lord Valentine's Castle at times put me in mind of Scaramouche, which is not fantasy. Valentine is a performer and travels across Majipoor with a troupe of jugglers. That element may have been homaged by Robert Jordan in some of his Wheel of Time novels where a handful of characters take refuge with a travelling show.

The lady above is Caroline Stevermer, and she's my half. Along with fellow writer Patricia C. Wrede

she was responsible for a delightfully daffy little book called Sorcery & Cecelia.

As well as that particular series she's also done a Ruritanian fantasy romance the Galazon series, and done historical work for the young adult market. She doesn't publish a lot, but she does try to change things up frequently.

Sorcery & Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot is the first of the Cecy and Kate books, about a pair of cousins living in an alternate Regency world where magic works. The book began life as a version of the letter game, with the two authors taking on a character and writing letters back and forth as if they were those characters. As a result the book is told in an epistolary form. It's probably aimed at a YA audience, but it is so delightfully done that it's hard for audiences of any age to not get something out of it. Possibly because of this epistolary approach I never found any of the faux Austenish language at all gimmicky or forced, it came across as very natural. There were further books in the series. The sequel was written in the form of the two cousins diaries as they went on the Grand Tour and the 3rd readopted the epistolary approach and included extra viewpoint characters. It's a lovely vision of a world not all that different from our own, and it is a delight to read.

Further and related reading: Caroline Stevermer is quite well regarded for the Galazon series, which is not all that dissimilar in theme to the Cecy and Kate books. Regency themed books with fantasy are all the rage these days and this was one of the first of them. Mary Robinette Kowal has just completed her Glamourist Histories, which are on that theme and one half of Emma Newman's Split Worlds series is set in a world inhabited by faeries who never seem to have progressed past the late 18th century. Susannah Clarke's award winning Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is also set in an alternate Regency England with magic, but I found the language of the time in that forced and gimmicky, which was not the case at any time with the Cecy and Kate books.

Although Jonathan Stroud has been writing work for young adults and younger readers since the mid 90's, he really came to prominence with the publication of The Amulet of Samarkand, the first of his Bartimaeus series in 2003. Two further Bartimaeus books followed that, and then he moved into the world of standalones before returning to add a fourth Bartimaeus book in 2010. His early work as an editor taught him a lot about structure and the industry in general. He's currently working on the Lockwood and Co series, which is a group of horror influenced mysteries aimed at younger readers. That's already had 2 books out and a 3rd is due this year.

The Amulet of Samarkand was an intriguing book. It was aimed at younger readers, but it drew in a wider audience. It too was set in an alternate England where magic worked, the people with the power were magicians. It had two main characters, the young apprentice wizard Nathaniel and the 5,000 year old djinn Bartimaeus, who Nathaniel summons to help him out with his studies. The style is very interesting. It's written in both 3rd and 1st person from two PoV's, all of Nathaniel's chapters are written in 3rd person and Bartimaeus' chapters are in 1st person, which allows the author to use the genie's highly sarcastic and often amusing viewpoint. It was done so seamlessly that I was more than halfway through the book before I even really picked up on it. Nathaniel's story is covered in the first 3 books, which is why they're called a trilogy, and he later wrote a standalone story about Bartimaeus alone before he came into Nathaniel's service. Funny, suspenseful and clever, can't recommend this highly enough.

Further and related reading: there are the other 3 Bartimaeus books, but for some reason the two sequels in the original trilogy never quite hit the heights of the first one for me, and I felt the 4th was an attempt to milk a concept that was largely done and didn't need to be revisited. Aside from the 4 Bartimaeus books Jonathan Stroud has Lockwood and Co (currently up to 3 books) and 17 other books, some aimed at very young readers, and seems to have largely confined himself to the YA and middle grade market since The Amulet of Samarkand. Again parts of this series put me in mind Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as well as the Cecy and Kate books. The whole idea of using a genie as a major character summons up the Arabian Nights and that in turn made me think of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis' Rose of the Prophet series.

Next week T and when you use the letter T and fantasy authors in conjunction we all know what that means.

Fremantle V Richmond Domain Stadium 05/06/2015

This one didn't go at all to script. Fremantle won their first 9 games on the trot and were tipped to win this one. One of their champions Michael Johnson was playing his 200th game, they were going to set a record of consecutive club wins. Nat Fyfe was in Brownlow medal winning form and giant ruck man Aaron Sandilands was unbeatable in the middle of the ground. It was also being played at their home ground of Domain Stadium, the so called House of Pain.

That's not to say the Tigers were without hope. They were on a 3 match winning streak. No significant injuries, a ton of belief, a fairly good recent record against Fremantle and no fear of the venue, plus they had a break afterwards with the bye. Others have also observed that Richmond tend to be at their best when they have nothing to lose, and this was one of those games.

I actually like Friday night games because they get it all over and done with early. You know right from the start whether you're going to be happy over the weekend with the win or rather solemn after a loss. The downside is that there's a whole weekend of football to come, especially this weekend, with the Queens Birthday Monday public holiday, and your game tends to get lost in the shuffle when they review everything after the round.

The opening term from Richmond was about as astonishing a thing as I could ever hope to see. From the opening bounce the Tigers went on a rampage, and they had 6 goals on the board before the Dockers had even blinked, they did manage to score 3 for the term, but it looked pretty poor against our 8. Plus the 200 gamer Michael Johnson was on the bench and wearing the red vest with a leg injury.

As expected the Dockers did hit back hard, but we held them at bay for the second quarter, the lead got out to 8 goals at one point. The 3rd was, as has become common, our worst for the game, but the first quarter had set us up for a big one in the last and we held Fremantle when they came at us, running out with a 27 point upset.

Everyone is now wondering what happened at the start of the season when Richmond lost games to the likes of the Western Bulldogs (fallen in an enormous hole, as I expected them to) and Melbourne (playing like the rabble that they are). They're also asking is this the real deal? It's gone on for 4 consecutive matches I suspect it may be.

As a closer I'd like to discuss clash jumpers. This is ours:

It could be worse I guess, it's just our colours reversed. It could be Essendon's which is horrible, or we could be like St Kilda, who can't seem to decide which version they like the most and seem to change it all the time. My main issue is why do we need a clash strip? Who exactly do we clash with? The only two teams that realistically clash in the AFL are Collingwood and North Melbourne. Clash strips are a giant rort by the AFL to gouge cash out of people for alternative jumpers. Years ago no one had any difficulty telling the teams apart on the field, not even the Pies and the Roos, that was because one wore black shorts and one wore white shorts, but you can't make a lot of money out of selling black and white shorts. We were told it would only be when there was a genuine clash, maybe once a year. We've worn it against Port Adelaide and now Fremantle. I fail to see how no one can tell the difference between teal, white and black and yellow and black or purple and white and yellow and black. I give it a few years and we'll be wearing it every other game.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (R)

Q defeated me, I admit it. In our library we have one book written by a Q author, and it's not a fantasy. So, I decided to move straight onto R. Curiously enough I could only locate two R authors I wanted to include here, which was surprising.

Laura Resnick is the daughter of the prolific and popular science fiction author Mike Resnick. While not as well known as her father, Laura has won awards for her own work. As well as writing, she's studied acting, taught languages and spent time working on a kibbutz in Israel, which is where I think the above picture comes from.

Her original break through into writing was under the pseudonym of Laura Leone and was in the romance genre. When she started to use her own name, she published a well regarded, but little known high fantasy series.

More recently she's written a successful urban fantasy series about the supernatural misadventures of struggling New York based actress Esther Diamond. 

Laura keeps a website at lauraresnick.com and tweets under the name @laresnick.

Because of the publishing history of the Esther Diamond novels I kind of came to them in a roundabout way. The first book I saw in the series was the second one Doppelgangster. I'd read that and it's sequel Unsympathetic Magic, before I even knew that there was a book before Doppelgangster. While they can be read as standalones and Laura Resnick does a good enough job of catching new readers up the story so far, I always knew that there was a story before Doppelgangster, and I wanted to read it. A bit of research led me to Disappearing Nightly. The book was originally published by Luna, an imprint of Harlequin. It didn't do as well as the publisher had hoped, and actually became kind of hard to find. After acquiring the series, new publisher DAW did eventually reissue Disappearing Nightly, with one of the cool and eye catching Daniel Dos Santos covers that suit the series so well. The names in themselves are quite a lot of fun, as well as the three I've mentioned we've got Vamparazzi, Polterheist, The Misfortune Cookie and Abracadaver.

The Esther Diamond series is one of the most fun urban fantasy series out there, and it deftly mixes romance with police procedural and out and out comedy. Esther is a struggling actress, who accidentally hooks herself up with a 250 year old Hungarian wizard Maximilian Zadok, a handsome Irish Cuban detective Conor Lopez and an assortment of others, including her agent (later revealed to be a vampire) and semi retired wiseguy Lucky Battistuzzi. Esther really just wants to get regular employment as an actress and maybe have a relationship with Conor, but dead bodies and Max keep popping up when they're not wanted and drawing her into the investigations.

If Janet Evanovich had set her books in New York, and made Stephanie Plum into an actress rather than a bounty hunter, and used some supernatural elements she would have written the Esther Diamond series. Every time I read one of these I'm struck by the strong cinematic element to them and can't believe that someone in the TV industry hasn't taken the option to try and make them into a series.

Further and related reading: there is Laura Resnick's high fantasy series; The Silerian Trilogy, and if anyone could track them down her romances under the name of Laura Leone may still be available.

However for things similar to Esther Diamond, there are any number of police procedural urban fantasies out there. Top of the list, but with less romance and a lot harder edge there's Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series and Paul Cornell's Shadow Police series. Seanan McGuire's October Daye books are urban fantasy mysteries, but mainly operate on the fringes of our world and a lot in the faery kingdoms around it. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files is similar as well, but it's started to veer more out of our world over recent books. The closest thing to Esther is Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, but that's not fantasy at all. Very little can get the mix of romance and action with fantasy quite right and Laura Resnick does that with Esther Diamond.

The woman above needs no introduction. For those that don't recognise her, her first names are Joanne Kathleen and she's better known by her initials J.K, because her publisher didn't think boys would buy novels about a young wizard if they thought they were written by a female author. This was of course an unfounded and ridiculous fear.

I don't think I really need to repeat the well known story about J.K Rowling being a young mother, who spent her days writing in a cafe, and found the dream of every aspiring author, by writing a series that caught the public's imagination and turned her into one of the wealthiest and most successful writers ever.

After Harry Potter she turned her talents to more adult fare and has written the drama A Casual Vacancy as well as two mysteries under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. While all three have sold well on the author's name, they haven't been as well received as Harry Potter, and it's unlikely that anything will ever replicate the phenomenon that was the Harry Potter series.

Again I probably can't add a lot to the multitude of words that have spoken at length about the series as a whole. A lot of people tend to pooh pooh those who admit to liking this series now. It seems to be popular to simply bag anything popular because it was popular. A bit of research shows that Rowling went to great lengths to put meaning behind what an initial or cursory look shows that a lot of thought went into what seems at first glance to be fairly simple concepts.

Harry Potter made reading cool again and introduced an entire generation to reading and to fantasy. It's what is now called a 'gateway drug' to the genre. It's become a springboard, and I think it's encouraged plenty of people to dream and to write, because their idea can too be just what everyone wants to read. For that alone it deserves all the praise that it has received.

Further and related reading: there are the other 3 books Rowling wrote outside of the fantasy genre. She has actually never seen herself as a fantasy writer, she wrote children's books, they just happened to feature magic as the focus. She also wrote a few companion pieces: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through The Ages and The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Her influences ranged from Enid Blyton's Malory Towers school books to other 'girls own' fiction like Elinor Brent Dyer's Chalet School books and even things like Rudyard Kipling's Stalky and Co or Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings books, but all of those are set in rather idealised versions of the real world. There's a lot of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series about Hogwarts, especially the first book. Patrick Rothfuss also used elements of that in The Name of the Wind. The most similar, though is Lev Grossman's Magicians. His magical university of Brakebills is largely a tertiary version of Hogwarts.

So next week I have the S authors, and hopefully I can find more than 2.

Richmond V Essendon 30/05/2015 (MCG)

Every year the AFL has an Indigenous Round. It celebrates the role that indigenous players have played in the game and in wider society. Every team features an indigenous component in their playing strip as well. The showpiece of the round is a match between the two old rivals Essendon and Richmond. It's generally played on the Saturday night, and has been called Dreamtime at the G. The Dreamtime game was the brainchild of former Richmond premiership player and Essendon premiership coach Kevin Sheedy. Sheedy was a great champion of indigenous players.

Just like last week against Port Adelaide this game was also a tribute to a great player from the opposition. It was defender Dustin Fletcher's 400th game. He's only the 3rd player in history (the other two are Richmond's Kevin Bartlett and Hawthorn's Michael Tuck) to reach this milestone, so it's quite an achievement and worthy of celebration.

Unlike the Port Adelaide game Richmond were favourites to win. In some ways that's actually a disadvantage. For some reason the Tigers seem to get nervous when they're favourites to win and play accordingly.

This night was somehow different. The team was quite settled. The only change was the injured Ty Vickery out for the tall, young forward Liam McBean. Conor Menadue also started on the ground and Corey Ellis donned the sub's vest.

Richmond started well and scored 3 goals for the quarter, 2 of them from skipper Trent Cotchin. The Bombers had gone down their end plenty of times, but weren't hitting the scoreboard, they'd kicked more points than goals.

The Tigers led the Bombers on the scoreboard and everywhere around the field for most of the night. The Bombers came back hard in the 3rd quarter, cutting Richmond's lead to 1 point at one stage, but Richmond steadied and extended it to 8 points by the final break.

I think that took a lot of the wind our of Essendon's sails, and they never really looked likely from that point on. They did try, but just didn't have it in them. Richmond were two goals ahead, and there was still time, but when Jack Riewoldt kicked a point to make it 13 points and requiring 3 accurate shots from the Bombers to win the game, that was it. 

As the picture says, Dreamtime is Tiger Time.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (P)

Into the P's and past the halfway mark, well we probably did that last week or the week before, but anyway. I thought there may be a few more P authors than the 3 I came up with, and it's partially my bad for never having read Tamora Pierce, who my wife informs me is excellent and would totally make the list if I had actually read any of her work. For P I've got a universally loved author, one who is very little known even in his own country and another one who is well known and successful, but controversial at the same time.

Terry Pratchett April 28, 1948 - March 15, 2015. He needs no introduction, everyone knows that bearded face with the impish smile. Pratchett wrote and published his first book (The Carpet People) at the tender age of 17. It wasn't all that commercially successful and he moved into journalism as a career, but continued to write, at the time science fiction. The Carpet People came out in 1971 and Dark Side of the Sun in 1976, this was followed by Strata, about the discovery of a strange flat, disc shaped planet, in 1981.

It was Strata that would give him the idea for his greatest success. Discworld. The first Discworld book The Colour of Magic was originally published in 1983, but a wider audience discovered it in 1985 with Transworld's mass market paperback release. Following the release of the 4th Discworld novel Mort, Pratchett was successful enough to be able to write full time. By 1996 Terry Pratchett was the highest selling and earning UK author (he like many others would be eclipsed by J. K Rowling).

While Discworld itself spanned all sorts of types of fantasy across it's flat expanse, Pratchett also ventured over it's edge to write other things out of his most popular work. He collaborated with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens, a humorous spin on the popular Omen books and films.

He wrote the Johnny books for teens and the Bromeliad trilogy for younger readers. There was a rerelease of The Carpet People, in which Terry Pratchett fixed what he saw as problems with it, most of them being caused by the fact that he was 17 years old when he wrote it.

He wrote a few standalones, two of which were the successful Nation and Dodger. He was working on a science fiction series with Steven Baxter at the time of his death. The final book in that series will be completed by Baxter and published later this year, as will the final Discworld book, which follows the character of Tiffany Aching.

Terry Pratchett's contribution to literature and society in general earned him a knighthood, which he treated with the same gentle, slightly mocking sense of humour for which he was rightly famous. He passed away at home, aged only 66. It was a sad day for the world when Sir Terry Pratchett left us.

Terry Pratchett wrote so many books on such a wide number of subjects that it's an impossible task to choose just one, so I decided to go with Discworld as a whole. Discworld is an unmatched feat of world building. Clearly the idea for the setting came to Pratchett when he wrote Strata, which although it's not classified as a Discworld novel, is where the concept was born.

The first official Discworld novel follows the adventures of the inept wizard Rincewind, as he attempts to guide the naive tourist Twoflower around the parts of the planet he is more familiar with. I liked The Colour of Magic, but I didn't love it. I think I picked up the second book The Light Fantastic because of The Luggage, which to this day remains one of my favourite Discworld characters. The Light Fantastic was, in my opinion, a better book than it's predecessor. It was with Equal Rites that I believe Pratchett took everything to a new level. He wasn't the only funny fantasist around at the time, but Equal Rites dealt with a different cast and another part of Discworld that audiences had not yet seen. The others either wrote standalones, or used the same characters over and over, which meant that the jokes quickly became stale and overused. Then with Mort, he threw another curveball. Most people have a favourite Discworld novel, and for me, it's Mort. I found the first three entertaining, but a bit hit and miss, however Mort consistently hit it out of the park. By that stage Terry Pratchett had three separate types of Discworld novel: Rincewind, the Witches and Death. He later developed the City Watch books, the Wizard books, the Tiffany Aching books (which are in part aimed at younger readers, although adults read them and find plenty to like) and the Moist Von Lipwig books. He also wrote the occasional standalone, which doesn't fit in with the other established themes or characters. Things like Pyramids or Small Gods, these tend to be defined as the Discworld Cultures books.

Because of the diversity, its hard to actually have a reading order for them, and if a reader encounters a particular stream that they don't like, they're bound to find another that they do. The books are more satire than out and out comedy, although that is also present, and it's a hard grim person who can't get at least one good belly laugh out of each novel in the series. I read them as they were published, and despite that, and it was the 4th in a series that totalled over 40 books I still regard Mort as my favourite.

I can't speak about Discworld without also mentioning the two best known cover artists. Josh Kirby was the original cover artist, and his chaotic, cartoony style just suited Terry Pratchett's writing about Discworld. Kirby was so beloved and so successful that the author and artist actually released a lavishly illustrated Discworld book called Eric. It was later published as a mass market paperback without all of Kirby's art work, and it suffers for that, it needs the artwork to work properly. When Josh Kirby died in 2001, the covers were taken over by Paul Kidby. Kidby's style is totally different to Kirby's. He often uses an iconic image or painting to match the story, but it still suits the books perfectly.

Further and related reading: I covered most of what Terry Pratchett wrote besides Discworld, but just Discworld is enough to satisfy most readers and it covered all sorts of subjects and territory. Pratchett's earlier science fiction is very reminiscent of Douglas Adams, especially Dark Side of the Sun. Funny fantasy was a thing in the early 80's, so Pratchett wasn't alone there. However not much of it was as good. I remember authors like Craig Shaw Gardner as well as Robert Asprin and Tom Holt and Robert Rankin. Gardner and Asprin in particular got hold of an idea and ran it right into the ground. The influences for a lot of the other Discworld work came from everywhere, Shakespeare was a popular source, but Jane Austen and the Brontes came into play, as did Charles Dickens, and he regularly poked fun at the sword and sorcery genre, one character was even called Cohen the Barbarian.

Otfried Preussler - October 20, 1923 - February 18, 2013. I did promise a not so well known author, and that is Otfried Preussler. While I say he's not that well known, he's been quite successful, selling over 15 million copies of his works in German and being translated into 55 languages. He's best known for The Robber Hotzenplotz books and The Satanic Mill (also known as Krabat). He spent five years as a POW during WW 2, and most of his working life after the war as a primary school teacher and school principal. The majority of his work was children's books, although he had plans for a memoir of his experiences as a POW to be published after his death.

I've only read one Pruessler, and it's the one above. I found it as a preteen in a library and took a chance on it. I read it multiple times before I had to return it, and then tracked down a paperback copy, with the same cover as above in a second hand store. It's largely an old fairy tale featuring mills, evil millers, the dark arts, boys being turned into crows and young love triumphing. It was also called Krabat in Germany, because let's face it not too many kids are going to be attracted by a book called The Satanic Mill. I read it many years ago, more than once and it's stayed with me ever since.

Further and related reading: as well as The Satanic Mill, Preussler also wrote the much lighter hearted The Robber Hotzenplotz series, which had three books in it, and 10 other children's books, although he remains best known for The Satanic Mill. It's actually an old Wendish legend, so if someone liked The Satanic Mill they may want to look up the original folk lore and go onto many of the other fairytale and legend retellings that have become very popular of late.

Philip Pullman is best known for His Dark Materials trilogy, but has quite a body of work behind him both before and after that trilogy. He, like a number of authors who write for children, was a teacher originally. His first successful series about the young female detective Sally Lockhart was as much historical fiction as anything. It was later made into  TV series starring former Doctor Who companion Billie Piper as Sally. That same series also featured actor Matt Smith, who would later become the 11th TV incarnation of Doctor Who. 

In 1995 the first book of His Dark Materials, Northern Lights hit the market and things really took off. This book and the series as a whole captured imaginations and got people talking and thinking about the themes in it. The first book was filmed in 2007, but didn't achieve the success that the film makers had hoped for, and it's unlikely that any of the other books will be filmed.

Pullman has continued to write since the trilogy, and is still writing, he recently adapted classic fairytales for a modern audience, and he speaks out on a number of social, cultural and religious issues. He's become known for his controversial stance on religion, being a committed atheist and one of the themes in His Dark Materials dealt with religious beliefs and faith.

The opening line from Northern Lights ('Lrya and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.') is to my mind an absolute classic. It immediately hooks the reader and it's the word daemon, that jumps out smacks them in the face. Lyra and her daemon'. What is a daemon and why does Lyra have one? That line hooked me and made me buy the book, then of course once I'd read the first story I had to read the rest. It's a great adventure and how can anyone not love Lyra's daemon Pantalaimon? In fact the whole idea of daemons is just brilliant. Consciences or souls given physical form. Able to change to almost any form when the host is young, but then taking on a permanent form once the host becomes an adult and loses the wonder of childhood. Lyra's also a wonderful heroine and great role model for children. The books are aimed at younger readers, although there's plenty for adults to enjoy and ponder on. Because of the author's religious beliefs or non beliefs they have copped some criticism, and I'm sure someone somewhere wants them banned, but I think beliefs are there to be challenged and should be, blind faith is simply that blind.

Further and related reading: As I said Philip Pullman has written across genres. His Sally Lockhart books, while not fantastical, are good rollicking historicals, and Sally is another great heroine and role model in the Lyra mould. It sounds odd, but I'd recommend reading the Narnia Chronicles, because many see His Dark Materials as a direct rebuttal to C.S Lewis' classic series. There is also elements of Paradise Lost in the trilogy, again with that atheist viewpoint of Pullman's. The idea of a conscience taking on a physical form was also something that Carlo Collodi explored briefly in Pinocchio, but the Jiminy Cricket in the book as opposed to Disney's film version is very different, he dies fairly early and is more of an actual cricket, than the dapper, singing anthropomorphised version that Walt Disney imagined.

I may have to move directly from P to R. I can't think of a Q author at present, but we'll see what I can dig up over the week.

Port Adelaide V Richmond 24/05/2015 (Adelaide Oval)

Despite Port Adelaide being one of the newer AFL clubs (last to enter before the expansion teams of Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney. The SANFL outfit it grew out of have over a century of history, but that's another story altogether) there's still some history between it and Richmond.

I don't think I'll ever forgive Mark Williams who was coaching them when Jack Dyer passed away. They didn't wear black armbands to honour him and they beat us one time that season and he wouldn't even let the players sing the song (it sucks anyway) because it was 'only Richmond'. He is now an assistant coach at Richmond, and two of the players who played in that game: Damien Hardwick and Brendon Lade are our coach and assistant. Football, it's a weird game at times.

Despite the win against Collingwood the previous week, I still didn't think we had a lot of chance against Port. Yes, we won and they lost, but that to me was only fuel for the fire. Let's look at what the Tigers were up against: Port have been a contender since Ken Hinkley arrived at the club, they've gone from zero to hero in that time, we got absolutely poleaxed in the elimination final by them last year, they were stinging from the loss to Brisbane, it was at their home ground, which some call the Portress, they can play a lot better than that game, they beat Hawthorn, it was Kane Cornes' (a favourite son of the club) 300th and final game.

On the other hand Richmond obviously wanted to win. The changes we made to the team weren't forced. We had a good style going. The 2014 elimination final aside, we actually have a good record against the Power in Adelaide. Damien Hardwick has a superior record to Ken Hinkley in head to head contests. Our players were in form, theirs weren't.

We were expecting them to throw everything at us and to be honest they didn't. They did go hard, but they were all over the shop. We outscored them easily, it was almost the reverse of the elimination final. They didn't score a goal in the first quarter.

They started the second with a goal and I thought here we go, but we didn't buckle and kept them on the hop, plus continued to score. We lost Ty Vickery to a leg injury early in that quarter, which altered our 3 pronged forward attack and forced us to use the sub earlier than we wanted, but to Damien Hardwick's credit, he didn't panic and continued to pressure Port.

The 3rd quarter was where they might have pinched it. We didn't score, it was barely inside 50. Port peppered their own, but were only able to produce one major. This was largely due to Richmond pressure forcing them to take hard shots.

Sometime in the last quarter we broke their back, and fittingly local Adelaide boy Shane Edwards kicked the sealer, which put us 32 points up (we won by 33) and finished the game before the final siren.

I don't really feel sorry for Kane Cornes. He had a good career and he's never been the nicest of opponents.

I was just bloody wrapped to see the boys sing the best song in the league again.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (O)

Some letters are just difficult, I know I'm going to struggle with X and Z, O is some such letter, but I did manage to find someone, although I'm not all sure that people will agree with me here.

Eric Arthur Blair June 25, 1903 - January 21, 1950. He's better known as George Orwell, and will be forever known for two works, one which is here and was a social commentary and the other has become one of the most celebrated, studied and quoted works of science fiction in history.

Despite being quite intelligent and seeming to prefer writing to most other things he did, Eric Blair joined the Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. After contracting dengue fever, he took advantage of a leave of absence back to England, resigned from the Imperial Police and decided to become a writer. He used his Burmese experiences to write a novel and two essays.

His family wasn't poor, but Blair seemed to enjoy living amongst and studying those that did live in abject poverty. He even wrote a book about those experiences in both London and Paris (Down and Out in Paris and London).

He drifted into teaching and continued to write as he did so. He seemed to have trouble settling and found himself working at a second hand bookstore owned by friends. He left that job and was prompted by friend and publisher Victor Gollancz to investigate social conditions in economically depressed northern England. This eventually turned into The Road to Wigan Pier, which outside of Animal Farm and 1984 is one of his best known works.

Not long after this he took part in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat during that conflict. Back in England his views on the war (he fought for the Republicans) were wildly out of favour. He and his wife spent time living in France, but returned to England in 1939.

The reviews that he had been writing for many years got him more journalistic work during the war. He wrote Animal Farm towards the end of the war and it's success got him more journalism work and he wrote 1984 after the war, it was published in 1949.

George Orwell, as the world now knew him, had struggled with health for many years and he was rarely in the best of health from the time that he returned to England after his time in Burma. The amount of time he spent living rough and his wounding in the Spanish Civil War didn't help. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1947 and his health declined steadily from that point onwards. He passed away in his sleep in early 1950.

His two most famous works have earned him undying fame and a place amongst the most highly regarded literary figures.

I know Animal Farm is an allegory for the decline of Marx's communistic ideal under Joseph Stalin in Russia, but it is also a fantasy. Unless that is of course there really is a farm somewhere that is run by pigs who keep the rest of the animals under iron control and lie to them about their actual intentions. It's a wonderfully written book, and despite the very serious message in it's text, it can also be looked at as a fantasy about anthropomorphic animals. It's not uncommon for authors to use animals to illustrate very human events, people have been doing it since the days of Aesop and his fables. While it can be read as just a book about anthromorphised animals, and I'm sure plenty of people do (the cartoon version I had to watch in high school certainly seemed to see it that way, it even had an annoyingly cute little duckling and changed ending to feature a 'peasants revolt' let by Benjamin the donkey), it's a brilliantly told look at one person's view of the communist revolution in Russia and it's rather tragic aftermath.

Further reading and related work: If you read Animal Farm, you should also read 1984. Totally different, but at the same time going over similar ground. Orwell based his future on what he saw happening around him in England following the war. It didn't turn out that way, but to a certain extent 1984 is the real version of what happens after Animal Farm. There's also the non fiction Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in London and Paris, as well as numerous essays, reviews and articles.

Along the same lines as Animal Farm there's Richard Adams' Watership Down. Adams doesn't look at political views with his rabbits, but one of the final battles is based on the Battle of Arnhem, a WW II action in which Adams served. At times I almost felt Orwell was using the style of Beatrix Potter with his farm animals to reach as wide an audience as possible and make his story easier to understand.

Next week the P's. Should be a few more of them and far less controversial.