The Bone Season

"The Bone Season is Samantha Shannon’s first book. It’s a really intriguing kind of science fiction: it’s an alternate present, derived from a different history in the 19th century. We end up with this very alluring, strange version of the present, where people are often born with different kinds of magic. But if you have the wrong kinds of talents, you’re often arrested and sent to Oxford, which is run by very strange supernatural beings, one of whom is called the Warden. Wardens are what Oxford colleges have instead of headmasters. He’s a magnetic figure. A young writer meets him quite early on and is deeply unimpressed; she’s been imprisoned and sent to this centre, this penal colony essentially, that is Oxford in this alternate version of now. It’s one of those lovely slow-burn romances where you think, “Oh, no, you shouldn’t – oh, this is really bad.” A kind of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, where you’re thinking, he’s not a good guy – but he might be…? So it’s really captivating, partly because of that quality, and partly because of the length and breadth of the changes that we see in this alternate future. Yes! People can all do very different things. It feels like a really sophisticated version of X-Men. Yes, definitely. Proper romance has only really recently been incorporated into science fiction. You can contest this, but I think that until this century, romance wasn’t altogether what science fiction was for . I think it was often for the exploration of the great social or technological change that goes through each story. It’s only more recently that lots of writers have said, “You know what, readers know about the technological change. They know about the charting of societal change. We can do other stuff as well now, and it’s going to work.” I think it’s really fascinating that lately we see this return to first-person narrators, which seemed to go out of fashion for a while. We see these lovely grand romances and the hugely toxic romances that you find in Margaret Atwood novels. It is all there – layers of stacked human emotion – and I really think it’s powering through. See our list of Romance Fantasy recommendations."