RIP XIII #4: Among Others

By -
Among Others, by Jo Walton

Morwenna is heading off to a fairly posh boarding school.  It's 1979, and boarding school is the last place she wants to be....except for with her mother, which would be much worse.  Mor is Welsh (thus kind of foreign), brainy and bookish, and has to walk with a cane since her accident.  The school is largely focused on games and social standing, so Mor has few friends.  She misses her twin sister (who died), Wales, and the fairies they knew for years.  Mor is the survivor of the magical battle she and her sister fought, and this is the aftermath, the part after the story is ended.  But since Mor is still alive, she needs to find purpose and her place in things -- and maybe the battle isn't quite as over as she thinks.

I liked this novel a lot; it's good stuff, well-written and gripping.  Mor is very lonely, and finds solace in reading SF, and a good chunk of the book is a paean to old-school science fiction writers.  I would say, in fact, that it gets to be quite a bit too much, but it did remind me that I would like to read some James Tiptree, Jr.*  She also performs some magic, and then spends a lot of time trying to figure out the repercussions of what she's done, which I liked very much.  The fairies and magic elements in the story are very well-done.

So instead of traveling from a hum-drum life to a magical boarding school, Mor spends the whole story in a hum-drum boarding school, away from her magic-laden former life.  A fun turn-around.  Highly recommended, but only if you enjoy reading a surprising amount about Robert Silverberg and others.



__________________________________________
*Of which none is to be found in my local library.  But my brother did inform me of the existence of BloodHag, a death metal band that writes songs almost exclusively about SF/F authors and the joys of libraries.  I don't care for death metal but I quite liked the clip of "James Tiptree, Jr." I saw in a short film about them, "The Faster You Go Deaf...".  Share and enjoy!



Comments

  1. Jenny @ Reading the EndSeptember 25, 2018 at 12:56 PM

    I've had very up and down experiences with Jo Walton, but Among Others is a solid favorite. I get so many book recs from it! And I ardently cosign the James Tiptree Jr recommendation. I read Brightness Falls from the Air and liked it a lot -- if you ever get a chance!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanSeptember 25, 2018 at 6:28 PM

    Thanks! Maybe Kindle or ILL can be my friend. I'm not sure if I want to read more Jo Walton; I've now read five titles and they were all pretty good, but do I want to tackle Thessaly? Hm.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ed.pendragonSeptember 29, 2018 at 4:16 PM

    I thought this good enough, and haunting enough, to hang onto for a second read. It helps that, though I don't know the exact locality that's Morwenna home turf, I know the area and a bit of its history enough to say that it definitely captures its sense of both abandonment and other worldliness.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanSeptember 29, 2018 at 7:51 PM

    I really liked some of the landscapes in the story. Would love to visit there!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ed.pendragonSeptember 30, 2018 at 6:09 AM

      South Wales is an interesting area, especially with the valley regarded as a key matrix of the Industrial Revolution what with all the coal and iron produced there.

      These days, thanks to Margaret Thatcher, there's a population feeling purposeless and redundant as all the traditional sectors guaranteeing mass employment have largely disappeared. The UK's former Rust Belt perhaps.

      There has been some improvement in recent years, ironically as a result of EU reinvestment, which will (also ironically) disappear if and when Brexit happens.

      Delete
    2. ed.pendragonSeptember 30, 2018 at 6:09 AM

      "Valleys", not singular! 🙂

      Delete
  5. JeanSeptember 30, 2018 at 7:48 PM

    What are the former industries of South Wales besides coal-mining, and presumably some things that go with coal-mining? Do people really want to resurrect coal-mining, or is it something else? I've always been pretty curious about this, actually, but I'm not sure where to learn about it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more