Arthur here. I come to you today to open to your perusing one of the best speculative fiction series I have ever read: Swallows and Amazons. The twelve-book series combines historical fiction (at least it’s historical to us, today), children’s literature, piratical adventures, communication with alien planets, train journeys, boot journeys, wildlife preservation, science, mining, firefighting, exploration of foreign climates, naval hierarchy, and cannibalism.

Here’s more from Amazon:

The classic English series begins with a tale of two families of children uniting against a common foe: an uncle who claims he’s too busy for his nieces.

The Walker children (John, Susan, Titty, and Roger) are on a school holiday in the Lake District and are sailing a borrowed catboat named Swallow when they meet the Blackett children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail the boat Amazon. The children camp together on Wild Cat Island, where a plot is hatched against the Blacketts’ Uncle Jim, who is too busy writing his memoirs to be disturbed.

Fireworks—literally—ensue along with a dangerous contest, a run-in with houseboat burglars, and the theft of Uncle Jim’s manuscript. How all this is resolved makes for an exciting and very satisfying story. Uncle Jim ends up apologizing for missing his nieces’ adventures all summer—thankfully, readers won’t miss a thing.

Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series has stood the test of time. More than just great stories, each one celebrates independence and initiative with a colorful, large cast of characters. Like the entire series that follows, this book is for children or grown-ups, anyone captivated by a world of adventure and imagination, exploring and setting sail.

This series covers a wide range of children. The four Walker children, who are only young for half of the series. For the other half, they are:

1. A brave captain,
2. An organized and sometimes officious but always helpful first mate.
3. A hardworking, sometimes distracted, seaman.
4. A ship’s boy who becomes an able seaman later on.

They all spend time being explorers, savages, mining prospectors, and aliens from Mars.

Next, the two Blackett girls, Ruth and Margaret, spend a small and unfortunate part as themselves. Later, they became known as Nancy and Peggy: wild savages, courageous explorers, and bold and tyrannical pirates.

Other children, Dick and Dorthea, cover many of the above roles, but keep lapsing into a very distracted authoress and an even more distracted scientist.

The Death and Glories: Three young boys who go from being pirates to very real and not at all speculative young men, rescuing rich idiots from sinking boats and getting their cut from the salvage operation.

The Mastodon, Daisy, Dum, and Dee: Savages who have an interesting relationship with certain missionaries (LIving with them as boring English children for parts of the year). They are fond of eating and pretending to be eels, and capturing and eating trespassers, particularly if they are fat, young, and like the idea, as long as it isn’t too scary.

Port and Starboard are founding and active members of an ecological society called the Coot Club, who spend their time sailing up and down the river and checking on nesting birds. That is, when they aren’t racing up and down the same river with their “Aged Parent” or avoiding his victims (patients) in their living room. Tom, another founding member of the Coot Club, is a notorious fugitive known for setting loose an obnoxious motor cruiser which had moored next to the nest of just-hatching cootlings, and prevented their parents from feeding them. He also captained a sailboat down the river for some foreign (not from Norfolk) tourists.

This series covers a wide range of locations:

• The peak of Kanchenjunga
• Various pirate locations
• Mars
• Various rivers, bays, and lakes in England
• The English Channel
• Holland
• The Amazon River
• Rio

I had an unfortunate childhood and didn’t discover these wonderful books until I was about fifty years old. But I heartily recommend them to any and everyone interested in children’s literature and fantastic writing. Arthur Ransome, as I hope I’ve managed to communicate, had an incredible talent for taking children riding along on a train, then transporting them mid-sentence to a war zone thousands of miles away or the far side of the Moon.

The books are also wonderful as an antidote to modern parenting. Indeed, I would recommend they only be read by parents who are sitting down and not suffering from any kind of heart or digestive difficulties. Because these parents do things right. Not perfectly, by any means. And hopefully even children done right don’t come close to dying every single summer like in the story.

But as the father of the Walker children says: “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown.”

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