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childhood influences meme
We'll call this one The White Rabbit, or, Why I Am Not A Wizard.
**Robin Hood - This gets first mention because it was the single most important and formative story for me, especially between the ages of...let's say six and ten...though I've never really gotten over it as such. I am not sure exactly what about the legend captured me so completely, but I was obsessed. I collected different versions of it - Antonia Fraser's was my favourite, and the version by which I critically assessed all of the others. I had extensive self-insert daydreams. (I was never Marion. I was just, you know, there. Part of the Merry Men. Gender didn't really seem important in this.) I made endless bows out of bent sticks and string, and shot twigs across the backyard with them. The day we visited the Robin Hood museum at Nottingham was the best of my WHOLE LIFE. And it was such a wonderful, wonderful idea, turning outlaw because the laws were not right. Acting by your own moral compass.
**Ronia the Robber's Daughter - by Astrid Lindgreen (who also wrote the Pippi Longstocking books?). Following on from the Robin Hood theme, this was about a girl whose father was a brigand chief or something and who made friends with the son of a rival chief (er, maybe. I am hazy on the details.). It was kind of a Romeo and Juliet story: when the two kids were forbidden from seeing each other, they ran away and lived in a cave together. And their fathers ranted for a while and pleaded with them to come home and then eventually there was some kind of truce made, but it was actually a whole lot less romantic than I'm making it sound. It gave me one very important lesson, and one that I've lived by since: when an authority figure is genuinely wrong about something, they don't deserve your respect and they don't deserve your cooperation. You can just say 'screw you' and run away.
**The Chronicles of Narnia - Like many people, I had no clue that these were about Christianity. To me, they were just another fantasy series, and the natural stepping-stone between Enid Blyton and the world of high fantasy. I always liked The Horse and His Boy best, because it was less about displacement and more about someone who was already familiar with the world. Plus, Shasta and Aravis were so much more interesting than the Pevensies (sorry), and the book turned the Calormenes into something more than just faceless enemies. I'm listing them because the exposure to fantasy themes was very important, but I have never liked them with any extreme or obsessive force. (I never liked Tolkein much, either.)
**Frances Hodgson Burnett - I loved The Secret Garden. I loved it. The characters were so REAL, so flawed; my major problem with A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy was that their protagonists were so infallibly good. Bad things happened to them, but they bore their troubles and waited and refused to stop being good, and eventually they got their reward. Even at the age that one is when one reads Burnett, which is not very old at all, I found this to be infuriating. Nobody is that good all the time! Nobody! Would it have killed them to have lacked some talent, or to have been stubborn or bad-tempered on occasion? Mary was awesome. Mary and Colin's hissy fits at each other were more awesome still.
**Noel Streatfield - I'll mention her next because one of her books, The Painted Garden, was partly about a film production of The Secret Garden and one of the things I still remember about it was the fact that the producers wanted to 'nice-ify' the story and make Colin more timid and Mary sweeter, but the fact that the actors playing them didn't get along (as kids sometimes don't!) encouraged the director to keep the fights and the sourness. I thought that was great. Anyway, Streatfield was probably the second most important influence on me: she wrote about performing children. Acting, singing, circus performing, ice skating (one of the few authors that I found who did, which was important to me as a skater myself) and most especially dancing. Her characters were always flawed, but her clear love of the stage and its associated features (including, tellingly, the texts of Shakespeare) shone through. I ate that up. I wished that I could have been trained to perform from an early age. (I still do!) I read all of her books many many times and never got tired of them.
**Elizabeth Goudge - Third place in influence. The Little White Horse was my absolute favourite book for years and years and years, and Linnets & Valerians was not far behind. I loved them because they were, of a kind, urban fantasy: mostly to do with the real world, but with touches of genuine power that was always, interestingly, a little to do with religion and a little to do with joy and a little to do with curses and earth-magic. All blended seamlessly into the stories about children coming to a place and learning the histories/past tragedies and setting out to put things right. Maria Merryweather was my kind of heroine: she cared about her clothes looking neat, and she liked good food, and she was brave and sharp-tongued and cared about people and got a great love interest in the form of Robin. I had a big crush on Robin. Plus, Elizabeth Gouge always did this fantastic thing where she gave an epilogue telling you what they all did when they grew up and who they married and she pulled this off SO MUCH BETTER than JK Rowling ever could, and it gave me perfect and satisfying closure.
**Willard Price - Okay, so my grandparents owned most of these books and my brother and I got into them at the same time. They all had titles like 'African Adventure' and 'South Sea Adventure' and they were about a pair of brothers who went around the world with their naturalist father, or sometimes by themselves, and collected animals for zoos (in many ways they were EXACTLY like SPN except with animals instead of ghosts. omg. this could explain a lot!). I learned HUGE amounts about zoology and culture from those books. And there'd always be some kind of issue like illegal whaling or (memorably) African wereleopards and voodoo (for serious. it was AWESOME.) to deal with as well as the animals themselves, and the boys were pretty awesome protagonists, and there were probably some large seeds of biological fascination being planted there.
**Catherine Jinks - We're getting a little more recent now, though we still haven't left primary school: I read the Pagan books for the first time when I was ten, and a new one came out LAST YEAR and I bought it immediately. I still reread them. At the time they were the funniest thing I had ever read, and in retrospect I think the reason I liked them so much was that they flatly refused to talk down to me. Jinks is a medieval scholar as well as a writer: she had done SO MUCH research on the Crusades and the politics of the church and Jerusalem and despite the fact that the protagonist was a teenager, nothing was polished up or glossed over. Pagan - smart, irreverent, insulting, fiercely loyal Pagan - remains my favourite narrator of any first-person POV novels (and Isidore and Babylonne are great too). I bought into these books with an emotional intensity that I've never given to any fiction before or since: the bond between Pagan and Roland, the violence and the pride and the misery and the deaths and the black humour. Saladin's honour and the fall of Jerusalem. Esclaramonde and the Cathar heretics. Lord Jordan -- oh, god, Jordan. I have never quite recovered from the emotional wallop that was Jordan's love for Pagan and his jealousy of his brother and his casual cruelty and the way he and Pagan bantered as adults in Carcassone and and and YOU SEE, I get worked up and upset just talking about these books. I love them with an unholy passion.
**Sophie's World - I read this when I was eleven, because my best friend at the time was reading it and she bought it for my birthday. I was a bit too young for it, but I ploughed through anyway because I was at the stage where I was starting to ignore things like the Young Adults section of the library and just read anything I could get my hands on, and the idea that I would let a book defeat me was unthinkable. It's a history of Western philosophy in the form of a highly postmodern novel, and it's fantastic, and I've read it twice since. It opened my mind considerably, and also spurred me to find Jostein Gaarder's other books, which did great things for my concept of the limits of fiction. But the best thing it ever told me was this:
To summarise briefly: A white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. Because it is an extremely large rabbit, the trick takes many billions of years. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.
"Ladies and gentlemen," they yell, "we are floating in space!" But none of the people down there care.
"What a bunch of troublemakers!" they say. And they keep on chatting: Would you pass the butter, please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatoes? Have you heard that Princess Di is expecting again?
**The Dark Is Rising - Also read at age eleven (helpfully!) and notable because a) although not mentioned above, the Arthurian legends were close behind the Robin Hood ones in terms of childhood obsessions, and b) it was probably the first proper fantasy series I read. I really loved these books. But reading everyone else's discussions has made me realise something: never, not once in my life, did I ever confuse any fictional worlds that I read with the real one. I always knew it was fiction. I never thought Narnia existed. I never thought I could be an Old One. I played schoolyard games based on Roald Dahl or other authors, but never with any serious expectation that something would actually happen. This, I am fairly sure, was due to the fact that I saw no need for magic. The world was interesting enough already. (More on that in a sec.)
**David Eddings - read at age twelve. My first introduction to high fantasy. These books taught me how to snark, and for that I owe them a lot.
Okay, I think the ideas I introduced above - that of maintaining wonder at the world and never actually believing in fictional magic - need to be discussed a bit more, because all through my high school years I read a LOT of fantasy books and also developed a very keen interest in science (though never, interestingly, sci-fi). This did not seem at all dichotomous to me. Fantasy was an escape, it was an interesting experiment in universes with different rules of operation: science was the real deal. And now I'm going to rant for a while about why I find the general conceptualisation of 'magic' to be weird and problematic. This is a dramatic leap away from everyone else's opinions, I know, so feel free to leap at me and start a discussion.
Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Hold that one in your mind, please.
I find it sort of odd when people who don't like learning science are all 'but I'd love to learn magic! if it existed!' because, to me, they're the same thing. Learning what the rules of your universe are, and what you can do with them, and then working out - based on personal and universal morality - what you should do with them. (And what happens when you try to break the rules: sure, foolishly doing some wild dark spell and draining your life energy is a whole lot more glamorous than leaping off a cliff and foolishly hoping you'll be able to fly, but it's exactly the same in principle. You're just submitting yourself to the rules that govern the system, and letting them break you.)
And yes, the learning is hard, but the only models of magic-learning that I had any patience with were always hard. The Harry Potter and Young Wizards books (the latter more than the former) are based on learning, and the learning is DIFFICULT, and that's what makes it worthwhile. I have never liked my magic to be easy and unearned and limitless. Fantasy as a genre is about magic, but it's also about the rules that govern that magic. Or at least it should be. And science is the magic of OUR world, and the things that we can do and discover are just as amazing if you bother to put in the effort. Refusing to learn the rules of your universe because they're hard is not an excuse - refusing because they're boring, because they're not magic, is saying that you want a different set of rules that would please you better because they would be novel. Think about that quote. Someone from a world without fire, coming to ours and experiencing it for the first time, would think: magic. But it's everyday to us and so not really worth thinking about - who cares how it's generated from friction and chemicals, I want to be able to make fire by snapping my fingers! Maybe it's just the ruthless and unsympathetic pragmatist in me speaking, but longing after a magic that is just something new new new seems like setting yourself up for disappointment, and a waste of curiosity and intelligence. This is your world. It's fucking amazing. Some things are possible. Some aren't. Some of the impossible things might be possible, but the only way you'll ever know is if you resurrect your sense of wonder, put the effort in, and find out where the limits are for yourself, so you've got a good tight grasp when you want to start stretching them.
Even if the rules of this world aren't rules. Even if they're more like guidelines. All we can do is comprehend the simple model (say, the nucleus at the centre of the spinning electron orbits) and then work at comprehending the harder model (electron orbits as clouds of probability) and then cast our minds out towards quantum physics and the curve of spacetime and things existing everywhere at once and other concepts that would sound like either magic or nonsense if explained to someone else, but which stem naturally from the rest of our knowledge. You know what, scientists know that every model we work with is flawed and every mathematical relationship is a miracle and that the day we find something that breaks the existing rules, we are on the brink of something breathless and new.
Did you know that Einstein showed the possibility, given a fast enough traveling speed, of time travel? Did you know that scientists have been able to teleport tiny amounts of matter? Did you know that matter can be destroyed and turned into energy?
I have never believed for a second that magic isn't real. But I have always defined it as 'something new that we cannot yet explain'.
It's the 'yet' that's important, because one day we might be ABLE to make fire by snapping our fingers. It's not going to involve saying a word and just concentrating really hard: it's going to be far more complex and probably involve a lot of effort by some faceless scientists and engineers somewhere, but the central idea of my whole worldview is that this will not make it less magical.
Ladies and gentlemen. We are floating in space. And nobody waved a single wand.
**Robin Hood - This gets first mention because it was the single most important and formative story for me, especially between the ages of...let's say six and ten...though I've never really gotten over it as such. I am not sure exactly what about the legend captured me so completely, but I was obsessed. I collected different versions of it - Antonia Fraser's was my favourite, and the version by which I critically assessed all of the others. I had extensive self-insert daydreams. (I was never Marion. I was just, you know, there. Part of the Merry Men. Gender didn't really seem important in this.) I made endless bows out of bent sticks and string, and shot twigs across the backyard with them. The day we visited the Robin Hood museum at Nottingham was the best of my WHOLE LIFE. And it was such a wonderful, wonderful idea, turning outlaw because the laws were not right. Acting by your own moral compass.
**Ronia the Robber's Daughter - by Astrid Lindgreen (who also wrote the Pippi Longstocking books?). Following on from the Robin Hood theme, this was about a girl whose father was a brigand chief or something and who made friends with the son of a rival chief (er, maybe. I am hazy on the details.). It was kind of a Romeo and Juliet story: when the two kids were forbidden from seeing each other, they ran away and lived in a cave together. And their fathers ranted for a while and pleaded with them to come home and then eventually there was some kind of truce made, but it was actually a whole lot less romantic than I'm making it sound. It gave me one very important lesson, and one that I've lived by since: when an authority figure is genuinely wrong about something, they don't deserve your respect and they don't deserve your cooperation. You can just say 'screw you' and run away.
**The Chronicles of Narnia - Like many people, I had no clue that these were about Christianity. To me, they were just another fantasy series, and the natural stepping-stone between Enid Blyton and the world of high fantasy. I always liked The Horse and His Boy best, because it was less about displacement and more about someone who was already familiar with the world. Plus, Shasta and Aravis were so much more interesting than the Pevensies (sorry), and the book turned the Calormenes into something more than just faceless enemies. I'm listing them because the exposure to fantasy themes was very important, but I have never liked them with any extreme or obsessive force. (I never liked Tolkein much, either.)
**Frances Hodgson Burnett - I loved The Secret Garden. I loved it. The characters were so REAL, so flawed; my major problem with A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy was that their protagonists were so infallibly good. Bad things happened to them, but they bore their troubles and waited and refused to stop being good, and eventually they got their reward. Even at the age that one is when one reads Burnett, which is not very old at all, I found this to be infuriating. Nobody is that good all the time! Nobody! Would it have killed them to have lacked some talent, or to have been stubborn or bad-tempered on occasion? Mary was awesome. Mary and Colin's hissy fits at each other were more awesome still.
**Noel Streatfield - I'll mention her next because one of her books, The Painted Garden, was partly about a film production of The Secret Garden and one of the things I still remember about it was the fact that the producers wanted to 'nice-ify' the story and make Colin more timid and Mary sweeter, but the fact that the actors playing them didn't get along (as kids sometimes don't!) encouraged the director to keep the fights and the sourness. I thought that was great. Anyway, Streatfield was probably the second most important influence on me: she wrote about performing children. Acting, singing, circus performing, ice skating (one of the few authors that I found who did, which was important to me as a skater myself) and most especially dancing. Her characters were always flawed, but her clear love of the stage and its associated features (including, tellingly, the texts of Shakespeare) shone through. I ate that up. I wished that I could have been trained to perform from an early age. (I still do!) I read all of her books many many times and never got tired of them.
**Elizabeth Goudge - Third place in influence. The Little White Horse was my absolute favourite book for years and years and years, and Linnets & Valerians was not far behind. I loved them because they were, of a kind, urban fantasy: mostly to do with the real world, but with touches of genuine power that was always, interestingly, a little to do with religion and a little to do with joy and a little to do with curses and earth-magic. All blended seamlessly into the stories about children coming to a place and learning the histories/past tragedies and setting out to put things right. Maria Merryweather was my kind of heroine: she cared about her clothes looking neat, and she liked good food, and she was brave and sharp-tongued and cared about people and got a great love interest in the form of Robin. I had a big crush on Robin. Plus, Elizabeth Gouge always did this fantastic thing where she gave an epilogue telling you what they all did when they grew up and who they married and she pulled this off SO MUCH BETTER than JK Rowling ever could, and it gave me perfect and satisfying closure.
**Willard Price - Okay, so my grandparents owned most of these books and my brother and I got into them at the same time. They all had titles like 'African Adventure' and 'South Sea Adventure' and they were about a pair of brothers who went around the world with their naturalist father, or sometimes by themselves, and collected animals for zoos (in many ways they were EXACTLY like SPN except with animals instead of ghosts. omg. this could explain a lot!). I learned HUGE amounts about zoology and culture from those books. And there'd always be some kind of issue like illegal whaling or (memorably) African wereleopards and voodoo (for serious. it was AWESOME.) to deal with as well as the animals themselves, and the boys were pretty awesome protagonists, and there were probably some large seeds of biological fascination being planted there.
**Catherine Jinks - We're getting a little more recent now, though we still haven't left primary school: I read the Pagan books for the first time when I was ten, and a new one came out LAST YEAR and I bought it immediately. I still reread them. At the time they were the funniest thing I had ever read, and in retrospect I think the reason I liked them so much was that they flatly refused to talk down to me. Jinks is a medieval scholar as well as a writer: she had done SO MUCH research on the Crusades and the politics of the church and Jerusalem and despite the fact that the protagonist was a teenager, nothing was polished up or glossed over. Pagan - smart, irreverent, insulting, fiercely loyal Pagan - remains my favourite narrator of any first-person POV novels (and Isidore and Babylonne are great too). I bought into these books with an emotional intensity that I've never given to any fiction before or since: the bond between Pagan and Roland, the violence and the pride and the misery and the deaths and the black humour. Saladin's honour and the fall of Jerusalem. Esclaramonde and the Cathar heretics. Lord Jordan -- oh, god, Jordan. I have never quite recovered from the emotional wallop that was Jordan's love for Pagan and his jealousy of his brother and his casual cruelty and the way he and Pagan bantered as adults in Carcassone and and and YOU SEE, I get worked up and upset just talking about these books. I love them with an unholy passion.
**Sophie's World - I read this when I was eleven, because my best friend at the time was reading it and she bought it for my birthday. I was a bit too young for it, but I ploughed through anyway because I was at the stage where I was starting to ignore things like the Young Adults section of the library and just read anything I could get my hands on, and the idea that I would let a book defeat me was unthinkable. It's a history of Western philosophy in the form of a highly postmodern novel, and it's fantastic, and I've read it twice since. It opened my mind considerably, and also spurred me to find Jostein Gaarder's other books, which did great things for my concept of the limits of fiction. But the best thing it ever told me was this:
To summarise briefly: A white rabbit is pulled out of a top hat. Because it is an extremely large rabbit, the trick takes many billions of years. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink.
"Ladies and gentlemen," they yell, "we are floating in space!" But none of the people down there care.
"What a bunch of troublemakers!" they say. And they keep on chatting: Would you pass the butter, please? How much have our stocks risen today? What is the price of tomatoes? Have you heard that Princess Di is expecting again?
**The Dark Is Rising - Also read at age eleven (helpfully!) and notable because a) although not mentioned above, the Arthurian legends were close behind the Robin Hood ones in terms of childhood obsessions, and b) it was probably the first proper fantasy series I read. I really loved these books. But reading everyone else's discussions has made me realise something: never, not once in my life, did I ever confuse any fictional worlds that I read with the real one. I always knew it was fiction. I never thought Narnia existed. I never thought I could be an Old One. I played schoolyard games based on Roald Dahl or other authors, but never with any serious expectation that something would actually happen. This, I am fairly sure, was due to the fact that I saw no need for magic. The world was interesting enough already. (More on that in a sec.)
**David Eddings - read at age twelve. My first introduction to high fantasy. These books taught me how to snark, and for that I owe them a lot.
Okay, I think the ideas I introduced above - that of maintaining wonder at the world and never actually believing in fictional magic - need to be discussed a bit more, because all through my high school years I read a LOT of fantasy books and also developed a very keen interest in science (though never, interestingly, sci-fi). This did not seem at all dichotomous to me. Fantasy was an escape, it was an interesting experiment in universes with different rules of operation: science was the real deal. And now I'm going to rant for a while about why I find the general conceptualisation of 'magic' to be weird and problematic. This is a dramatic leap away from everyone else's opinions, I know, so feel free to leap at me and start a discussion.
Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Hold that one in your mind, please.
I find it sort of odd when people who don't like learning science are all 'but I'd love to learn magic! if it existed!' because, to me, they're the same thing. Learning what the rules of your universe are, and what you can do with them, and then working out - based on personal and universal morality - what you should do with them. (And what happens when you try to break the rules: sure, foolishly doing some wild dark spell and draining your life energy is a whole lot more glamorous than leaping off a cliff and foolishly hoping you'll be able to fly, but it's exactly the same in principle. You're just submitting yourself to the rules that govern the system, and letting them break you.)
And yes, the learning is hard, but the only models of magic-learning that I had any patience with were always hard. The Harry Potter and Young Wizards books (the latter more than the former) are based on learning, and the learning is DIFFICULT, and that's what makes it worthwhile. I have never liked my magic to be easy and unearned and limitless. Fantasy as a genre is about magic, but it's also about the rules that govern that magic. Or at least it should be. And science is the magic of OUR world, and the things that we can do and discover are just as amazing if you bother to put in the effort. Refusing to learn the rules of your universe because they're hard is not an excuse - refusing because they're boring, because they're not magic, is saying that you want a different set of rules that would please you better because they would be novel. Think about that quote. Someone from a world without fire, coming to ours and experiencing it for the first time, would think: magic. But it's everyday to us and so not really worth thinking about - who cares how it's generated from friction and chemicals, I want to be able to make fire by snapping my fingers! Maybe it's just the ruthless and unsympathetic pragmatist in me speaking, but longing after a magic that is just something new new new seems like setting yourself up for disappointment, and a waste of curiosity and intelligence. This is your world. It's fucking amazing. Some things are possible. Some aren't. Some of the impossible things might be possible, but the only way you'll ever know is if you resurrect your sense of wonder, put the effort in, and find out where the limits are for yourself, so you've got a good tight grasp when you want to start stretching them.
Even if the rules of this world aren't rules. Even if they're more like guidelines. All we can do is comprehend the simple model (say, the nucleus at the centre of the spinning electron orbits) and then work at comprehending the harder model (electron orbits as clouds of probability) and then cast our minds out towards quantum physics and the curve of spacetime and things existing everywhere at once and other concepts that would sound like either magic or nonsense if explained to someone else, but which stem naturally from the rest of our knowledge. You know what, scientists know that every model we work with is flawed and every mathematical relationship is a miracle and that the day we find something that breaks the existing rules, we are on the brink of something breathless and new.
Did you know that Einstein showed the possibility, given a fast enough traveling speed, of time travel? Did you know that scientists have been able to teleport tiny amounts of matter? Did you know that matter can be destroyed and turned into energy?
I have never believed for a second that magic isn't real. But I have always defined it as 'something new that we cannot yet explain'.
It's the 'yet' that's important, because one day we might be ABLE to make fire by snapping our fingers. It's not going to involve saying a word and just concentrating really hard: it's going to be far more complex and probably involve a lot of effort by some faceless scientists and engineers somewhere, but the central idea of my whole worldview is that this will not make it less magical.
Ladies and gentlemen. We are floating in space. And nobody waved a single wand.