Talk:Among Others

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Walton's comments on the book

Here's a terrific Q&A session on the novel, with Annalee Newitz and io9 readers asking questions, with Walton's surprising and cogent answers:

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5922140/ask-jo-walton-anything-you-want-about-among-others

For example, regarding the evil mother in the novel, Walton wrote:

Many people go through their whole lives without knowing any evil people, and that's a very good thing except when they come to write fantasy. Having an actual evil mother — or in scientific terms a paranoid schizophrenic mother — gave me a useful knowledge of evil.

I think I did worse at writing an evil mother character here where she's essentially just my actual mother only with real magic, than I have when I have written evil characters with a little more distance. There are things in the book that my mother did — the photographs for instance — but mostly I couldn't put those things in because they're too implausible. Showing up outside the school and shouting curses for instance. It's not that I didn't put it in because it still makes me want to sink through the floor, I didn't put it in because it's not plausible enough for fiction.

Charlie Jane Anders: one thing that seemed really interesting is how many science fiction books Morwenna reads, in a novel that's fundamentally about magic. Is there a reason she's not reading more fantasy?

Walton: It was 1979/1980.

There wasn't more fantasy.

I think this is something difficult for somebody of your generation to see, but in 1980 there really wasn't much. There was LOTR and Donaldson and the first Shannara trilogy, and there were older things here and there if you could find them — Dunsany and so on — there were children's books, but genre fantasy as the juggernaut it is now began in the eighties. It wasn't even really on the horizon. The Pern books were being published as SF. It was a different world.

Having said that, I also thought it was interesting to write about an SF reader with fantasy problems.

I'll work up a section on this, unless someone beats me to it. Also, I should reread the book! Cheers, Pete Tillman (talk) 04:35, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]