• The Venetian agents who stole the body of St Mark from Alexandria in the 7th century

• Hand-forged roman nails

• A huge Persian carpet of blue and gold, easily forty feet long and forty feet wide

• Mynah birds turning on an injured fellow

• An absent-minded man’s peculiar walk

These are all just bits of information that arrived in my mind in various ways. I have spent a lot of time looking at spring skies with the rain falling — in fact I look at the weather a lot and think about how it might be used in stories. I read about the Venetian agents who stole the body of St Mark in John Julius Norwich’s history of Venice. I have seen Roman nails in various museums and have handled replica nails. The Persian carpet I saw in a mosque in Syria, but I might just have easily have seen it in a book or on television. The mynah birds are a pest in my back garden, and the absent-minded man walks past my office at least once a week and his peculiar progress is always of interest.

I like to think of my mind as a kind of reservoir that is constantly being topped up with all kinds of information, which I am also unconsciously sifting all the time for things that might be useful in making a story. While the reservoir is constantly being topped up with new information, my subsconscious and sometimes conscious mind is at work on both sifting these chunks of information and connecting them into larger rafts of ideas that may form the basis of a story. This is essentially daydreaming, taking thoughts and seeing where they might go and how they might connect with other thoughts.

In many ways daydreaming is one of the core prerequisites for writing. The trick is to get past the daydreaming phase and actually do something with all that idle musing. Ideas by themselves are merely a raw material, and it is not enough just to have ideas. You have to work to turn them into a story.

Do you have a favorite among your books?

My favorite is always the one I haven't written yet, because when I imagine a book, it’s always better in my head than how they come out. I’m always wanting to try and get closer to the story as it is imagined. I never get there, but I always think it’s possible . . .

Is Garth Nix your real name?

Yes. I guess people ask me because it sounds like the perfect pseudonym for a writer of fantasy. However it is my real name!

Will you ever write a sequel/prequel to Shade’s Children?

I have no plans to write a sequel and no notes about possible storylines. However, I never know when a story will rise up out of my subconscious. A sequel is at least theoretically possible, as I always envisaged that the Overlords in Shade’s Children had taken over a single continent (basically Australia) and nowhere else, and the rest of the world was unable to intervene. So maybe the Overlords could try and establish themselves elsewhere …

books remembered

Garth Nix’s favourite books from childhood

There were several false starts to this list, which I originally wrote for the journal of the Children’s Book Council, USA. I began writing it in a hotel in Vancouver. I did a little more in a hotel in Washington D.C. A bit more got done during the long flight home to Sydney. Then I junked what I’d written, because I didn’t like how it was coming out.

The problems were many. First of all, I couldn’t possibly fit in all the significant books and authors of my childhood. The first dredging of the deep sludge of my mind made it clear I was also unable to organise the books in any meaningful way. All the books I wanted to mention I remembered because they were great books. All were and are important to me in many different ways and for many different reasons.

I couldn’t order them chronologically from when I read them because I mostly couldn’t remember when I did. Most of them I read in that space of true discovery, from the age of nine or so to maybe seventeen or eighteen. I didn’t think there was much point to ordering them by publication date either. They were new when I discovered them, regardless of whether they had been discovered by other readers days, months, years or even decades before.

Ultimately, I was left with one of the simplest organisational methods of all for this piece. A cunning structure, beloved of librarian, booksellers and highly-motivated book owners. Alphabetical by author.

So this is my own personal reading alphabet, the highlights of the years when I read six or seven or a dozen books a week. An annotated alphabet, with my comments and some rough notes as to what kind of books they are. I focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy, but others crept in. Many others had to be left out, for reasons of alphabetical, spatial or mental failure.

I’m sure there will be many old friends of yours here, dear reader, but I hope there will some new (and old) discoveries as well.

A is for Lloyd Alexander, Joan Aiken, and Poul Anderson

I remember reading Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain completely out of order, but it didn’t matter. I loved the combination of humour and adventure, and as I got older, my favourite book in the series changed from one to another and back again. I suspect this is because the careful mix of the serious and the light-hearted is different in each book, so they appeal to different moods and times. Taran Wanderer probably retains pole position to this day, but I love all the books.

Joan Aiken’s short stories are wonderfully imaginative and inventive as are her novels. My particular favourites are her short story collections, such as All You Ever Wanted and the ‘unhistorical’ novels set in a 19th century that never happened, from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Black Hearts in Battersea to The Cuckoo Tree. The later sequels (read with childhood long behind) never quite connected so well with me. Midnight Is A Place, the tale of two orphans forced to live by their wits in a horrendous 19th century industrial town, is another one I come back to re-read every now and again.

Poul Anderson was one of my ‘must-read’ SF writers as a teenager. I particularly devoured his Dominic Flandry books, tales of a naval intelligence officer in a decaying galactic empire, fighting the good fight while also cynically looking after himself. The books became more complex over time, as did Flandry himself. A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the standout, but all of them are good. Start with the first, Agent of the Terran Empire.

B is for John Brunner and Barbara Ninde Byfield

John Brunner’s Traveller in Black had a major impact upon me. I loved everything about it, from the bizarre, elemental characters of a chaotic, magical past to the dreadful fates of many of the selfish people who unwisely wished for something when the Traveller was nearby. Brunner plays with ideas of fate, self-will, time, creation and much else with baroque mastery.

Barbara Ninde Byfield’s book The Glass Harmonica (reissued a few years ago as The Book of Weird) is paradoxically not a book remembered from my childhood. It is a book I wanted desperately to get after I read a reference to it in The Book of Andre Norton. If memory serves me correctly, Norton referred to it as the book you need to have to find out what a ‘castellan’ is and the difference between a wizard and sorceror. But I didn’t get my hands on a copy until many years later, only to discover that it was worth the wait. Delightfully illustrated by the author, its subtitle hints at its contents: ‘A Lexicon of the Fantastical, in which it is determined that: wizards see best with their eyes closed; Torturers reek of mutton, cold sweat and rust; It is Unwise to take a Herald on a Picnic ...’ and much more. If only I’d got hold of a copy when I was 10, instead of 36! In minor tribute, I named one of the four main characters in my book Shade’s Children Ninde.