Among Others

Author: Jo Walton

In the early 1980s a young girl escapes the witchcraft of her controlling mother for a girl's boarding school, where she discovers science fiction. There's magic in the novel, though it feels low key and domestic; yet this is combined with a realistic account of school life at the time, and a recollection of the science fiction an eager and undiscriminating reader was encountering then. It's a curious mixture that shouldn't work; yet it does, as is shown by the awards that were showered on the book. Above all, it is a testament to science fiction. Jo Walton writes fluently about the sf novels she reads at the Tor.com website, and there is something of the same quality replicated in this novel. But here we see the books Mori reads, everything from Asimov to Delany to McCaffrey, as a way of confronting and dealing with the various horrors in her life. Because on the one hand she must lay spells to protect herself from her mother who may be a witch or may be insane, or may be both, and whom Mori blames for the death of her sister; on the other hand, she has to cope with the day to day experience of a school where she doesn't fit in and where she has few friends among the other girls. We see science fiction, therefore, not as an escape, but as the key to growing up. Why it's on the list: Science fiction about science fiction has a curiously long tradition, but rarely has it been as direct, as affectionate, and as affecting as it is in this novel.

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Among Others

Author: Jo Walton

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