Traverse Fantasy and Prismatic Wasteland challenged blog writers to think about their own Appendix N. I’ve been reading fantasy and science fiction for a long time. Here are the books that have stayed with me. There are a lot of series, which I typically reference by only the first book.

My players say that I make “grimcozy” games for them and I think you see their roots here.

• Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, 1485. The beautiful tragedy of romance, chivalry, betrayal, magic.
• The Blue Fairy Book, 1889; The Red Fairy Book, 1890; The Green Fairy Book, The Yellow Fairy Book, 1894, by Andrew Lang. Many stories that I still think of when preparing my games – East of the Sun and West of the Moon; Little One-Eyes, Little Two-Eyes, and Little Three-Eyes; the Lindorm; the Glass Mountain – I read here first.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900; The Marvelous Land of Oz, 1904; Tik-Tok of Oz; 1914 by L. Frank Baum. I was absolutely obsessed with Oz as a child, and as an adult I love that the world is so fantastical and so uninfluenced by Tolkien.
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937. My dad read this to me as a kid, I read it to my son. One thing I particularly take is the integration of song and legend into adventure.
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, 1950. As the youngest of four children (boy-girl-boy-girl) I felt *certain* that this was written just for me.
• The Once and Future King by T. H. White, 1958. The first Arthur stories I read; the sequences where Wart turns into different animals was something I thought about a lot.
• Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, 1968. One of my first forays into reading a series that was still being written! I remember waiting and waiting for The White Dragon.
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968. The richness of LeGuin’s worlds stays with me, and again its anchored in language and ritual.
• The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey, 1969. A lifelong fascination with cyborgs begins here.
• Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, 1970. Color-coded plane-shifting! I had such a great time with this series and trying to understand the political machinations of the brothers. Lord of Light is another Zelazny that I really liked.
• The World Wreckers by Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1971. Environmental consciousness in fantasy worlds and by extension our own – what if the elves were still around when the pollution and poisoning of the natural world began.
• The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper, 1973. I think this was my first introduction to Welsh myth, it was intoxicating.
• The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip, 1974. Poetic, tragic, magical.
• Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1975. Telepathy and psionic powers and sex, a heady mix. Note: MZB turns out to have been married to a convicted child abuser and to have been an abuser herself. I didn’t find out until very recently. Ick.
• Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, 1975. More about environments. I don’t love this book but it really made me think about whether we could imagine a different future.
• Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart, 1978. This is crazy radical feminist separatist stuff and said things that I didn’t think could be said.
• Kindred by Octavia Butler, 1979. I didn’t read this book until recently. The characterisation of both major and minor characters is impeccable. Unlike most time-travel stories, this one isn’t about returning to the present or escaping from it, it’s really about how the two times are intertwined.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, 1979. The absurdist nature of fantasy and space travel laid bare.
• The Pride of Chanur, by C.J. Cherryh, 1981. Hard SF with a lot of thinking about gender roles.
• Jhereg by Steven Brust, 1983. Why are elves such jerks? Steven Brust investigates, presenting a great portrait of a human in a world of immortals.
• Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, 1984. Master Li and Number Ten Ox and the celestial bureaucracy left a big impression.
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, 1985. A reply to the hopeful futures of gender equality with a future that is more like gender apocalypse.
• Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold, 1986. A romantic extension of questions about rights and cultures, cyborgs, disability, genders – this series has it all. I often think of it.
• Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey, 1987. Pure escapism with telepathic horses.
• Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, 1987. Giant space politics, with cool robots and wildly contrasting world views.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling, 1997. So many problems and yet still such great world building. Note: JKR is a noted transphobe, so please don’t buy her stuff.
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, 1991. Post-apocalypse, environmentalism, utopianism, strange belief systems, what can we save, and the wasteland that is the California highway system, all extremely appealing.
• Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, 1991. The past and the present intertwine – time travel, romance, violence and fantastic world building.
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, 1997. More time travel, more violence, more romance. The Domesday Book in this series is heart-rending.
• His Majesty’s Dragon (His Majesty’s Dragon, Temeraire #1) by Naomi Novik, 2006. What if Napoleon had dragons? I do love an alternate history.
• Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor, 2015. What if African life was central to space travel? A great series of novellas.
• All Systems Red by Martha Wells, 2017. Cyborg neuroticism and humour, with lashings of capitalist critique and utopian worldbuilding.
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, 2018. Rethinking and retelling those fairy tales, moving European stories east.
• Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, 2018. Apocalypse, whose apocalypse? It’s already happened.
• Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, 2020. Incredible new take on fantasy. I liked her earlier stories about the West, but I loved this trilogy.

You’ll see that I return again and again to themes of romance, ecology, marginalisation and power, human-machine and human-animal relations, and wonder and magic. I also love the power of words, spells, and songs.

What about you? What books stick with you? Any on my list that surprise you?