Among Others, by Jo Walton

[avevale_intelligencer]

Something that has often irritated me about sf or fantasy stories set in present or near-present time is that there's never any sf or fantasy in them.

Not in the story, I hasten to add, but in the narrative 'verse in which the story takes place. Occasionally someone will say something fatuous like "This isn't science fiction, this is real life," which doesn't do nearly as much to aid the willing suspension of disbelief as the writer might have fancied, but mostly it doesn't even get a mention. Protagonists are hardly ever fans, and hardly ever do the obvious things that fans would do when confronted with the uncanny or alien, like run away and hide under the bed till it goes away--I'm kidding, I'm kidding, put down the axes. When characters are fans, they're usually presented as the vicious stereotype of "those other fans who aren't us," sad lonely adolescent boys with socialisation issues who can't deal with the real world, let alone anything beyond it. (Joss Whedon, I am looking at among many others you.)

This book redresses the balance and then some. The protagonist of Among Others, Mori, is a science fiction and fantasy fan growing up in roughly the time period when I was just discovering the genre, and this rang so many bells with me I almost couldn't hear myself squeeing. She's not a geek, not a nerd, not a dork or a dweeb or a fnut or a quang or any other nonsense word invented to marginalise me and my kind. She's a Welsh girl in her teens with a bad leg and a dead twin sister, and she sees fairies and does magic, and she loves sf and fantasy. She's practically me. (Okay, I'm an elderly English bloke with two good legs and a living non-twin brother, who's never seen so much as a flicker of a fairy, and whose only possible connection to magic is in what I'm doing right now, but still.) I don't share all her tastes--never got on with Vonnegut, haven't read that much Le Guin, don't knowingly read books that are going to depress me like Silverberg's Dying Inside--but there's enough overlap to make the identification easy and smooth as a very smooth thing covered in olive oil. And she's clever, and she has heart, and she's not cynical and misanthropic or a languishing hothouse flower, and she's never stupid just to make the plot function. She just works, on all the levels.

Various things have been said about this book, with not all of which I agree. It's definitely not about how reality as we know it is so much richer and sparklier and more wonderful than fantasy (it isn't, duh). It's not about renunciation, though that is a hurdle Mori comes up against, and it's definitely not about a girl who's not all there and lives in a pretend world. The magic in Among Others is real. It hurts as much as reality does, and it doesn't go away when Mori wants it to, and at the end of the book, even though she's got a boyfriend and become sexually aware, the magic is still there. (There is a way in the story to make someone incapable of doing magic or seeing fairies, but I'm not going to reveal it here; suffice to say that if it were true, there would be some people in Glastonbury and other places who would be looking pretty stupid...and I would have torpedoed my own chances of ever seeing a fairy about thirty years ago, without even knowing it.)

Walton avoids all the old cliches without being obvious about it, or falling into any of the new cliches that have replaced them. She tells a good story with a beginning, a middle and a positive end. I'd like to know more about what Mori did next, but if that doesn't happen I'm okay with that; I know she's going to be okay, and she will find happiness, not ever after but for as long as any of us get, in her world which is so much richer than mine. This book made me feel good while I was reading it, and happy afterwards that someone has finally done it, has told the story that I wish could have been mine. Its existence enriches this world.

Cavils: I have one. I could imagine someone growing up a fan in Britain in the fifties or sixties and not being aware of Doctor Who, but in the late seventies it seems odd; television is only mentioned once in the whole book, about two thirds of the way in, and never again. But that's it, and it's almost too minuscule to mention.

Overall, a perfect ten out of ten. If you like sf, fantasy, magic, good stories, and happy endings fairly bought, or if you like people who like all of the above, you might well enjoy this book. I do, and I did.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I thought Mori gave up the magic at the end of the book because she thought it was bad to force the universe that way.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Nope. She flirts with renouncing it in the middle, but the last page has "...and I'll...do magic as it comes my way and prevents harm." I think she came to the insight that *anything* we do is changing the universe, that if it's possible to do magic then it can't be against nature, and that the only sensible way to judge is on the nature of what you're trying to do.

But you're not the only one who brought that away from the book, from what I've read. All I can say is that if it had ended that way, my review would have been somewhat less glowing,

[pickledginger.livejournal.com]

I adored the book -- despite some misgivings going in, based on early reviews -- and that was one of the things I loved about it: her realization that *not* doing something (magically or not) is a decision, too, and sometimes a harmful one.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Ohhh kayy, gonna look for this one. thanks!