Among Others, by Jo Walton

A semi-autobiographical fantasy, beautifully written and very odd. Like Walton’s equally though differently odd Lifelode, it struck me when I read it in advance copy as a novel destined for a small but extremely enthusiastic audience. But it’s getting a huge, huge promotional push, so it will certainly get a far larger readership than Lifelode. It will be interesting to see how it’s received outside of fandom.

Morwenna (Mori) and Morganna (Mor), are Welsh twins growing up amongst ruined and operating factories which they pretend are sites from Lord of the Rings. There they meet with real fairies who sometimes give them magical tasks. These fairies are more like the weird creatures from a Hayao Miyazaki movie than like anything normally seen in western fantasy, living expressions of the natural world. The nature of both magic and fairies is strange, ruthlessly unsentimental, hard to pin down, and even harder to prove.

One of those magical tasks evidently had horrific consequences, because the next time we see Mori, her sister is dead, she’s been severely injured, she’s been separated from her evil mother but also from the family she loves, and she’s sent to boarding school. There she reads a lot of sf and fantasy, looks for fairies, slowly comes to terms with magic and her sister’s death and her family, and becomes involved in fandom.

Though there are some very dramatic scenes, the action and tragedy and magic mostly twine through the background and the backstory; the foreground is Mori’s life at boarding school, and most of all, her thoughts about the books she reads and her introduction into fandom via an science fiction and fantasy club. It’s almost a “secret garden book,” in which the action of the story consists of emotionally significant moments taking place in a small, often private, and atmospherically described landscape. In this case, books take the place of a physical location.

It’s too bad that the novel ends before C. J. Cherryh began writing her major books, because the way that magic operates – to twist the world in deniable ways so that the desired outcome is the result of things that happened long before you cast the spell – is very Cherryh-esque, as is Mori’s solipsistic terror that she created all her friends, and they didn’t even exist before she cast a spell to get some.

As that paranoid-sounding anxiety suggests, a reader of mainstream fiction could plausibly interpret this novel as a realistic one about a girl caught up in a delusional fantasy world. I don’t think any fantasy reader would, but the possibility does give the novel a disquieting edge.

I thought Among Others was very moving and engrossing, but I’m just barely close enough to Mori's generation of sf fandom to be able to follow most of what was going on in her reading world, and so in her inner life. Unlike the literary references in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin or Walton’s own book reviews, I generally didn’t get much of a sense of what the books read by Mori were like unless I’d read them too.

I'm curious to see how accessible or appealing Among Others is to readers of a later generation than mine, who don’t have that context, or to readers who enjoy sf but have never been involved in fandom. But if you began reading sf in the 60s-70s, or if sf fandom is a crucial part of your life, this could be one of your favorite books of all time. Reviewers who fit that description have said exactly that.

Note: There is a brief, non-graphic scene in which Mori's father drunkenly comes on to her. This happens once and, to my surprise, does not have any significant repercussions, but I'm mentioning it so anyone who might be upset by coming across it unwarned is warned. Since it doesn't affect the plot, I'm leaving it outside of the spoiler-cut.

( Spoilers have identity confusion )

Among Others

2011 Rhysling Nomination!

For Minotaur Noir.

I need to write more poetry.