Articles with the Tag Jo Walton

Among Others – Jo Walton

books and books review, science fiction
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cover of Among Others


Among Others
Jo Walton
302 pages
published in 2010

Have you ever read a book you just wanted to gulp down in one sitting, so eager to get on with the story that everything else has to wait? Or alternatively, have you ever read a book you didn’t want to end, stretching out your reading so you could savour it, making excuses not to read it just now, so as not end it too soon? I’m sure you have and so have I, but much rarer are those books where you want to do both, gulp down the story and stretch it out because once the book is finished you can never read it for the first time again. That’s how Among Others was for me, a book I wanted to stay in, but also wanted to keep turning the page to see how it would all turn out. Jo Walton has always been a good writer, but here she’s surpassed herself.

But perhaps I’m not quite objective. After all, I’ve known and liked Jo since the mid-nineties, as a fellow fan and friend from the rec.arts.sf.* Usenet groups, who has had a huge influence on my reading, in science fiction, in fantasy, who I got to know about as well as you can get to know a person from Usenet posts. All I could think about at the start of the book was how Jo-shaped it was, even knowning going in that this was rooted in her actual life growing up as a science fiction reading Welsh girl in a post-industrial landscape which she populated with fairies. She made the fairies and the magic real for Among Others but at heart it’s still her own story and that’s what made me want to spent more time in it, because being with Jo, a disguised Jo in fiction is the next best thing to seeing her at a convention.

Which is all good and well, but what will that do for you, if you don’t know Jo Walton and are just wondering if all the praise from people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Cory Doctorow, Robin Hobb, Steven Brust, Suzy McKee Charnas and many others is justified? Will you get anything out of this?

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Amongst Others

Art & Criticism, books and books review, science fiction
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cover of Among Others

When you have Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

I am not Welsh or female, I do not walk with a cane, and I do not have a dead sibling or a parent who wants me dead. I never attended a boarding school, my family is far-flung and American, and I have never (to the best of my knowledge) conversed with fairies. And yet to a startling extent Among Others feels like a book about the experience of being me when I was, like Mori, fifteen. This turns out to be a fairly common reaction to reading Walton’s novel, at least among the kind of people I tend to know. It is quite possibly the best thing I have ever read about the way people of our ilk, when young, use books and reading to—in the words of Robert Charles Wilson—“light the way out of a difficult childhood.”

Locus reviewer Gary K. Wolfe:

I don’t believe I’ve seen, either in fiction or in memoir, as brilliant and tone-perfect an account of what discovering SF and fantasy can mean to its young readers – citing chapter and verse of actual titles – as in Jo Walton’s remarkable and somewhat autobiographical new novel Among Others.

As Cory Doctorow:

This is one of the places where Walton does something that made my head spin. For though Morwenna’s life has much that makes her unhappy, from her family to her pariah status to her gamey leg, these books are not an escape for her. She dives into them, certainly, and goes away from the world, but she find in them a whole cognitive and philosophical toolkit for unpicking the world, making sense of its inexplicable moving parts, from people to institutions. This isn’t escapism, it’s discovery.

Rave about the same book and with largely the same comments, you pay attention. Not that I needed introduction to Jo Walton, having know her as a fellow fan on Usenet since the mid-nineties and as an excellent science fiction and fantasy writer since her first published novel, The King’s Peace, but such high praise from such distinguished reviewers does concentrate the mind. Amongst Others might just be Jo’s breakthrough book, the novel that moves her from a cult author into a proper success, finally. She has been upping the stakes with every new book: from her start with her three book Histoire à clef series fo Arthurian fantasy, to her reworking of Anthony Trollope with dragons in Tooth and Claw, to one of the most chilling alternate histories in the Small Change series. In each case I had expected her to achieve the same sort of success as somebody like Alastair Reynolds had gotten, but for some reason it never quite happened. Even those alternate history novels, which I had thought would’ve been a surefire hit, well, didn’t quite make it:

Well, actually, Half a Crown is arguably an example of the system not working as well as it might. Farthing did okay midlist numbers in hardcover and actually better-than-expected numbers in mass-market paperback. But for reasons best described as “weather” (i.e., nothing whatsoever to do with the book), Ha’penny took a dip in hardcover–fewer library sales, among other things, if I recall correctly–and the mass-market paperback fell off a cliff. This is why Half a Crown hasn’t had a softcover edition yet–since we were clearly doing something wrong, I didn’t want to spray-paint further lousy numbers onto Jo’s track record.

You do wonder why a great writer like Jo hasn’t been able to catch a break yet — insufficient promotion perhaps, though I’m not sure how much that still matters in this interweb age, or perhaps it’s because she switched genres too much, or not writing in the right subgenre, not writing widescreen space opera or, as Patrick says, it’s just the weather? Good writers can and do bubble under, write books that everybody who finds them loves, but which never quite find their audience. Science fiction is littered with examples (William Barton, T. J. Bass to name but two examples from my own shelves); it would be a shame if the same happened to Jo.

Especially since Among Others does sound incredibly interesting, ever since Jo told of how she grew up in a post-industrial landscape on her Livejournal and people started to tell her to turn it into a novel. She has managed to turn her own experiences discovering science fiction and growing up with it in a world where nobody else cared for it into a proper fantasy novel and while with any other writer I would be wary, Jo has been writing about this online for a long time, ever since we both were regulars on rec.arts.sf.written. She still does so at Tor.com, talking about all her favourite books and what they meant to her and why they’re so good and you should read them — she’s probably the one person who has done the most to nudge me towards books I would not have read otherwise, after S.

Which is why I put my order in for the hardcover at the local science fiction bookstore, which had already sold out of the two copies they had apparantly recieved in November. Eight days I got to wait now, oy.

Women in science fiction redux

science fiction
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A couple of months ago science fiction blog Torque Control had a lively discussion on “women, sf, and the current British market” and why it was female sf writers still seemed to have a much lower profile than their male counterparts. It inspired me to look at my own reading patterns and to my shock I discovered only ten percent or so of the sf books I’d read the last ten year were by women. Which of course means that I can’t put together a top ten list of the best sf books by female writers of the past decade, as Niall called for from the Torque Control readers. If you’ve only read a handful of books that fit the criteria, it’s pointless to put together a list. But I still want to put some candidates I would include in such a list.

First up is Jo Walton’s Farthing and sequels. Who would think that it was still possible in 2006 to write a “Hitler Wins” alternate history novel and offer a new perspective, but Jo Walton did. She does it by pairing the alternate history with a country house murder mystery, the coziness of that particular subgenre masking the existential horror of the world in which it takes place. As with most alternate histories of this type, some or much of its impact lies in the mismatch of what we know happened in historic reality and what the characters know/believe or allow themselves to know. But by making one of her protagonists a homosexual Scotland Yard inspector, she also makes explicit the continuity between an England that had, if not physically, certainly spiritually surrendered to the nazis and the England of our own reality. England was an anti-semitic, racist, “no dogs/no blacks/no Irish” country in which homosexuals could be hounded to their deaths, before and after World War II. That’s what makes Farthing so chilling, a genuine classic alternate history novel on a par with e.g. The Man in the High Castle.

Second, Mary Gentle’s 1610: a Sundial in a Grave, which does not look like science fiction, but in my personal classificiation it is. I first discovered Mary Gentle back in the eighties with Golden Witchbreed and have always found her a difficult writer, somebody who made you work at her stories, who sometimes seemed to go out of her way to make it more obscure than necessary. It can’t have helped her popularity, but I’ve always found it rewarding to struggle through her books — and she is one of the writers I do struggle with. 1610 is no different, though perhaps because it’s inspired by Alexandre Dumas pseudohistorical novels (Three Musketeers et all), it was surprisingly easy to read. It ticked all the Gentle boxes though: semi-historical, as in Ash told through supposedly translated historical documents and set in the early seventeenth century, a period Gentle returns to again and again. There’s the hermetic magic/science, though less prominent than in some of her other works, as well as the physical realities of adventuring: blood and filth and pain and sex all shown raw, with nothing pretty about it.

Farthing – Jo Walton

books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of Farthing


Farthing
Jo Walton
319 pages
published in 2006

At first glance Farthing seems to be a classic English cozy country house mystery, if set in an alternate England. There’s the locked room murder taking place during a weekend party at the Farthing country estate. There are the clues pointing all too neatly at one of the guests. There’s the doughty detective refusing to believe them and there’s the slow deduction of the real killer’s identity and motivations. It all feels like something Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey could’ve written — the latter’s unconscious class snobbery being consciously used here — but in the end Farthing turns out to be something very different from the cozy mystery or even alternate history tale it masquerades as. This is in fact a horror story, with the horror provided not by the plot or the characters, but through the setting. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in her front cover blurb: “If Le Carré scares you, try Jo Walton”.

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing‘s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.

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