My Real Children
Jo Walton’s My Real Children is a lot like her Among Others, in that it takes place largely in the 20th century; but here, instead of making the world into a fantasy setting, Walton makes it into an SF one.
Specifically, an alternate history—or rather, two of them. The book follows a protagonist from girlhood through two versions of her life, in which not only her own life but the world itself go in different directions. It’s a relatively low-key narrative, focused on a personal story rather than big SF ideas, but that works for me. Walton’s an excellent writer with a fine eye for characters; and seeing how one early decision can totally change the shape of one’s life in unpredictable cascading ways is a fascinating conceit.
If I have a criticism, it’s that the book is maybe a bit too obviously Waltonian. When characters talk about, for instance, how great the NHS is, it’s hard not to hear the author’s voice when you’ve previously read her talking about how great the NHS is. In Among Others, that was part of the quasi-autobiographical nature of the thing, but here it feels a bit more intrusive. I don’t know that there’s really any way around that in a book of this sort, though; it might be that if I read more authors’ blogs, I’d encounter this sort of thing more often.
But I’d put that in the “minor flaw” category. Overall, this is a well-written, deeply affecting (if you can emerge from it with dry eyes, you are more stoic than I am) book. Recommended to anyone looking for a small-scale, personal story.
Comments
Walton’s stuff tends to be superlative on some levels—her depiction of character and how human beings interact at most levels is absolutely wonderful. I can’t think of any SF writer who does it better, and I’ve certainly learned from it. I just wish I was as good. Her descriptive prose is also very, very good, leading to a very strong sense of ‘place’, and her pacing and plotting are extremely smooth. She can make long stretches where no “big stuff” happens gripping and interesting, and that takes writing of a very high order at the level of structure.
On some other things, she does tend to rather blatantly use the unexamined assumptions of her social reference group as if they were so “obviously true” that no further thought is necessary.
Eg., in MY REAL CHILDREN (which is outright beautiful and which on the whole I cannot recommend strongly enough) this grating note appears whenever she tries to relate the alternate histories on the scale of high politics and grand culture to the personal arcs of the characters in each.
In the “bad” alternate history, for example, despite a divergence point in what is apparently the post-WWII period, the European powers are still fighting decolonization in Africa in the 21st century. This is just loopy. The World Wars destroyed the ideational and physical foundations of the African colonial system; it isn’t a matter of what the people running the colonial empires -wanted- to do, but of what they -could- do that made the Europeans retire from Africa, at least in the more overt sense of not sending out guys in pith helmets to reside in Government House. Far easier to control from a distance with bankers.
They’d conquered the place easily and quickly in the late 19th century, and done it precisely because it was so easy to conquer and so easy to hold. After 1945 it stopped being easy, and shortly thereafter it stopped.
Likewise, the treatment of fascism in the “Ha’penny” series is terrible—it betrays a basic misunderstanding of what fascism, as a real political movement rather than an all-purpose curse word, was -about-. Fascism is not a form of radical conservatism; it’s a form of right-wing plebeian radicalism. The archetypical fascist leader, or militant, was a working-to-lower-middle-class type.
Organizationally and in many ways ideologically it’s closer to Leninism than to, say, classical liberalism or traditional conservatism. Its hallmark isn’t conspiracy, it’s vast organizations of people in colored shirts and mass followings voting and/or fighting for power. Its objective is mobilize and permeate mass society rather than suppress it.
This was its characteristic shape in every European country in which it became important. Mind you, the -trappings- of fascism had a certain popularity in the 1930’s with right-wing movements of other stripes, but that’s just like North Korea calling itself a “People’s Democracy”.
So having a bunch of Old Etonian-and-Oxbridge types institute fascism in Britain by using the old-boy network to repress the non=U masses is rather comical. Fascists aim at a -replacement- of elites.
An authoritarian conservative system is no more a Fascist one than it is a social democracy. As the Spanish fascists found out when Franco used, betrayed and destroyed them—Franco -was- a traditionalist reactionary, and a nasty, murderously ruthless piece of work, but no more a fascist than he was a Rotarian.
This is not arcane stuff.