#RAtR: My three favourite non-romance books

I missed August’s topic because I’m still convalescing from what I think I have to say is the absolute worst summer I’ve ever had, including the one where we went bankrupt, lost our house three weeks before our baby was due, my dad and two good friends died and Mr AL’s parents went bonkers.

HOWEVER. It was a good topic and I am feeling incrementally better each day. I’m thoroughly enjoying not having a gallbladder. I recommend it. For your delectation therefore, may I present you with my three favourite non-romance books?

I’ve pulled the covers of my own editions from Goodreads, but all of them have a lot of alternatives. I read sci-fi and historicals, basically!

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

This was transformative for me. Firstly because LeGuin’s writing is so lyrical. And secondly because of her portrayal of a society where people are of both/neither gender. The book is part of her Hainish universe and I devoured them all, repeatedly, via the travelling library that visited my family farm during my teenage years.

Although her books are hard sci-fi, they are very people-centred. She examined the classic what would happen to society if I changed these one or two things? question again and again in her stories, perfectly.

Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to Winter, a lost, stray world. His mission is to bring the planet back into the fold of an evolving galactic civilization, but to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own culture and prejudices and those that he encounters. On a planet where people are of no gender–or both–this is a broad gulf indeed.

The Lymond Books by Dorothy Dunnett (blatant cheat, there are six)

Another series I owe the travelling library! I graduated to Dorothy Dunnett via Jean Plaidy when I was about thirteen or fourteen. Dunnett was a historian and her work reflects that…her portrayal of sixteenth century Europe and the Ottoman and Russian empires are absorbing and detailed and her characters step off the page and haunt you. I can remember reading Pawn in Frankincense in the common room at breaktime at school and being in tears.

The “Lymond Chronicles” is a series of six novels exploring the intricacies of 16th-century history through the exploits of the soldier Francis Crawford of Lymond.

A Deepness in the Sky by Verner Vinge

It was a toss-up between this one and Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, which has the best alien life-form ever–they are distributed systems made up of puppies.

However, this one is the prequel so it slipped in by a fine hair. I’m not going to tell you what the aliens are like, because that would entirely spoil it for you. But they are fantastic. Their planet circles a star that switches on and off (and we’re left with the possibility it might be artificial) and the whole ecosystem is wired around that, including the intelligent lifeforms. There are two groups of humans who are fighting it out in orbit around the planet for trading rights with the first alien species they’ve discovered. And the aliens are also involved in what’s basically a planet-side foreverwar.

After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. Two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds.

The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap unimaginable riches. But first, both groups must wait at the aliens’ very doorstep for their strange star to relight and for their planet to reawaken, as it does every two hundred and fifty years….

Then, following terrible treachery, the Qeng Ho must fight for their freedom and for the lives of the unsuspecting innocents on the planet below, while the aliens themselves play a role unsuspected by the Qeng Ho and Emergents alike.