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14th March 2005: Cold Girly Steel

Posted on by Jo Walton
Kate Elliott asked me why I wanted to write about warrior women, and I thought as this was likely to be long and self-indulgent, I’d answer over here. This also follows on from some things we were discussing in Rilina’s journal last week about L’Engle and female expectations.

I could cheat and say I don’t decide these things, they decide me, but that would be cheating.

I think part of is was growing up when there were very few cool parts for girls in the kinds of books I liked. I had no problem identifying with male characters ever that I can remember, but terrible difficulty identifying with Pollyanna and Katy and Elsie Dinsmore. I was always happier when there was a tomboy, an “exception” — Jo March, Nancy Blackett, George. I think if I’d been a man the “men are one way and women are another” message would have gone past me without a ripple, because it only snagged on me because if men were one way and women were another I was definitely coming up on the male side, the exception side. I remember taking great feminist comfort from C.S. Lewis when I was about fourteen and all my female friends were turning into Susan, both that I had a way of categorising it and that I had a contrasting voice telling me it wasn’t a good thing or an unavoidable thing.

There was a pervasive idea in fiction that men have honour and adventures and women are beautiful and sexually monogamous. Men’s possible victory conditions top out at conquering the world, women’s top out at being beautiful and marrying someone wonderful who loves you.

So yes, I wanted more and better female characters (or “girls’ parts” as I used to think of them) to identify with. I wanted more female choices. But by the time I came to be writing the Sulien books really there were lots — not 50%, but lots, it wasn’t 1980 it was 1998, and there had been a whole generation of books growing up in there, and I’d been reading them. (Having said that, at about that time the only female character I could think of who actually conquered the world was Pyanfar Chanur.)

But I didn’t do it feeling there weren’t any, or even really that there weren’t enough, because to some extent there was already a cliche there, I did it because I wanted to.

What I wanted to write, or what I had a very strong sense of, the place I started from in writing my two “jock on a horse” novels, was the idea of a middle-aged women who had fought as a young woman for the sheer joy of it, and who was now responsible for other people, dutifully coming back to the colours to fight again as a duty. There’s a scene about a quarter of the way through The King’s Name which is actually the core of what I started with — though I actually wrote it as a poem.

So I had this poem, and I looked at it, and I turned it around and looked at it again, and I asked myself what world the poem came from, because it wasn’t our world. Immediately before that I’d been writing a series of poems which I suppose are fanfic, from the POV of Eowyn, and which I had jokingly been describing as “feminist chivalric atavism”. Looking at this thing I thought well, there have been women who fought, historically, look at Sichelgaita of Salerno, look at the Scythian graves, but there have never been any who fought as a duty, they always had to really really want to, they were the exception, the girl as good as a man who does it because she wants to. And I thought about cases where warrior women had been done in recent fiction and it seemed they were almost all doing “exception” in this way.

There were men, who were like men. There were women, who were beautiful and liked clothes. Then there was Our Heroine the Exception who went out and made people eat cold girly steel, only generally she also cleaned up well and other found true love too.

I did a lot of worldbuilding background detail stuff, much of it invisible in the text, to make myself happy with the world, and I thought of all sorts of interesting things I could do with playing with Arthurian stuff and real history, and I thought how interesting it would be to do real economics and nation-building (only pro-tax books ever), and I started to write a fully immersive fantasy where about ten percent of the people fighting were women, and where if there wasn’t a direct male heir, a direct female heir came ahead of a collatoral male one. (Salic, but with direct daughter inheritance.)

In doing this, I also deliberately confronted and contrasted other female choices, because if I was saying “being a kickass warrior is a legitimate way to be female which lots of people choose”, which I was, I also wanted to add “…among many other valid and interesting female choices.”

Sulien’s a warrior, her sister Aurien never wanted any more than to learn the minimum amount of self-defense fighting, sitting sewing a seam, marrying for an alliance, and managing her husband’s estate suited her perfectly. For that matter, this would also have suited her brother Morien, but he didn’t have the chance, poor guy. I also did this directly with Elenn and Emer. I also did it with sexual choices with women who fight; Sulien (celibate), Enid (married to a colleague) and Marchel (married to someone who stays home), and Alswith (“I haven’t done it with anyone for weeks and then it was only ap Erbin!”). And there’s Garah, Sulien’s groom, who doesn’t have the weight to be a warrior but becomes a logistics organizer, and eventually a queen.

The one I really intended to use as a contrast was Sulien’s mother, Veniva, who grew up in a different world. There are huge changes in Sulien’s life, but they don’t compare to the ones in her mother’s life. Sulien is a barbarian warrior fighting for peace without knowing what it is, her mother remembers civilization. This isn’t balanced because we are always in Sulien’s POV — I’m not sorry I wrote it in first, but it does make for observer bias. There’s a conversation in chapter 2 of The King’s Name, where Veniva yells at Sulien about this “My own child thinks it’s splendid that there is acknowleged law and very few people die fighting before they are grown up, at least most years, and what’s worst is that you are right!” Veniva is an educated person from a civilization that’s gone down like a sandcastle, and over the course of the two books she becomes realistic about the world she is now in.

One of the things I’m much less happy about, at this distance, is showing legitimate male choices in traditionally female spheres. I have Masarn retiring from the ala to help his wife with her candle-making and baby-raising business, and I have Glyn doing the logistics stuff beside Elenn and Garah, and you needn’t tell me how pathetic this is because I have actually noticed.

It’s much easier, as Le Guin has said, to show women doing cool “trad male” stuff than to show men doing “trad female” stuff because there’s very little “trad female” stuff that actually impresses itself as cool in the tradition of storytelling, or at least on me. I’m trying to redress this at least a little with Lifelode, which is still a living project, though crawling forward at the moment.

Having written the two Sulien books and then The Prize in the Game, in which one sister thinks being beautiful is a profession while the other thinks a large facial scar shows she didn’t parry fast enough, I’ve since written two things that aren’t this kind of thing, and I don’t have much desire to go on and write more cold girly steel any time soon, at least not like that.

Perhaps the reason these things are attractive to people is for the same reason stories set in utopia never work. Utopias are seamless and stories happen in the cracks, and the more cracks you have, the more stories generate there. Imbalances of power create cracks, in the same way that putting together two societies with contrasting values creates cracks. Gender imbalances of power and gender-based cultural differences, give you both kinds, right in the heart of society, which can provide a lot of cracks for stories to sprout in.

Posted in Sulien World, Writing

1st March 2005: Dydd Dewi Sant

Posted on by Jo Walton

It’s snowing half a ton — well, about 10cm, which on top of the old snow that was already there makes it very deep where it hasn’t been cleared. The sidewalks haven’t been cleared today, which makes walking like wading through ten centimetres of powder, more where it’s drifted.

Zorinth and I went out with the intention of having breakfast and buying some food and some daffodils, or failing that, a leek.

It’s not very onerous, being Welsh, you only have to have some daffodils (or leeks) on March 1st, otherwise there aren’t really any obligations, it shouldn’t be very hard, it’s not like being Jewish or something.

However, we had breakfast, we decided to shop in IGA instead of Marche Atwater because of the aforementioned ton of snow, we bought food, and only at the bus stop did I remember that I needed a daffodil. (Or, you know, a leek.) They even had leeks in IGA, but I hadn’t bought them thinking I’d generally rather have daffodils when I got around to flowers.

I didn’t go back, as we were laden and the bus was just coming, I thought I’d be able to get a leek in our little local corner shop, which is expensive but pretty good for fresh veg. Not today, not a leek in sight, never mind a daffodil. This is, of course, where the girl works who had never heard of Wales, so I suppose it’s only to be expected.

I came home through the snow a bit glumly. I couldn’t quite face going out again especially in quest of daffodils/leeks, so I decided to make a cake and make a daffodil in icing on the top.

The reason for this obsession with things with green shoots on March 1st actually has nothing to do with St David, who converted the Welsh to Christianity in about AD 500, and whose fame largely rests on having dropped a handkerchief to make another hill so he could be seen. (The hill is still there. Wales is full of hills. He’s get more points with me if he’d made a flat bit, which Wales is notably lacking. Zorinth once remarked, when crossing a rather large parking lot, that there was more flat space right there than in the whole of Wales.) The green shoots were in a battle about six hundred years later, when the cunning English had disguised themselves in the same uniforms as the Welsh and the Welsh cleverly pulled up some nearby daffodils (or, in some versions, leeks) and put them in their hats to be able to tell friend from foe. That’s what Mrs Caulfield told me when I was six, anyway, they may have updated the story since. I always thought it was very dim of them not to be able to tell the difference between daffodils and leeks, and Zorinth used to pretend they were actually the same, as a joke, but a few years ago I saw some leeks growing and realized that if you just have the green shoots they really are very similar.

Anyway, I made a chocolate cake, and I covered the top with melted chocolate. I left it to set for a while (not long enough) and then I made very thick icing, the kind that’s icing sugar and yellow food colouring and just a little water.

Now a daffodil, in essence, is just a yellow triangle and two yellow ovals.

I tried, really, I tried.

I should have done a leek.

I called Zorinth, who had been clearing the steps of snow and sorting out his bookshelves like a model child.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“A yellow axe?” he suggested after squinting at it a moment.”Part of a JCB? Oh. A daffodil. Ah. What a pity. You should have asked me to do it.”

I put the stupid cake on a plate, and Z disappeared in here. I washed the dishes. Not very difficult, a daffodil or a leek once a year, but clearly too challenging for me.

“Come here,” Zorinth called.

I came in. He’d used google image search to find a beautiful picture of a big bunch of daffodils for me.

And the cake will taste just fine.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, Whimsy

5th February 2005: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Posted on by Jo Walton

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is clearly written from an alternate universe where the great fantasy-defining genre-starting book of the twentieth century, after Dunsany, was not Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings but Hope Mirlees Lud-in-the-Mist. It’s not a great deal like Lud-in-the-Mist, but it’s much closer to it than it is to anything else, or than Lud-in-the-Mist is to anything else.

I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I expected to. I’ve been waiting for a novel from Susanna Clarke since reading her story “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” in Starlight 1. “Grace Adieu” is set in the same world and has some of the concerns of the novel. I think it would be a pretty good guide for anyone liking one liking the other.

It’s written in an elegant witty true omniscient, a true omni that makes me think I should just crawl under the bed with a bucket on my head for ever thinking I could do it. (Incidentally, if you liked the voice in Tooth and Claw, which is actually SF by my definition below, you’ll love JS & MN.) It’s an omni that can get away with the most wonderful things, though unfortunately most of them are spoilers and thus unsuitable to quote. It is written in such a way that one longs to read it aloud. It made me laugh frequently, just with the beautiful way it puts things.

It’s set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an England that is the same but distorted by the operation of magic on history, and it concerns the bringing back of practical English magic.

What it’s about is the tension between the numinous and the known. The helical plot, which ascends slowly upwards, constantly circles a space in which the numinous and the known balance and shift and elements move between them. It’s a truly astonishing feat and I’ve never seen anything like it.

Fantasy approaches the numinous, that’s my definition of it, that’s what, for me, divides it from SF and historical fiction. There’s a problem in writing about the numinous, especially about magic that works, denizens of faerie you can converse with, in that as you approach it, it becomes mundane. It approaches Clarke’s Law from the other side, and magic risks becoming nothing but technology. The terrible enemy dissolves into an old cloak. (The Dark in Hambly’s Darwath books are the easiest example of this.) There are ways of dealing with this, which have been laboriously worked out and laboriously copied — Tolkien does it by sheer use of language, other people have explored what it would mean for magic to be technology. Magic has costs is one typical answer, seen well done in Hobb’s Farseer trilogy and Kay’s Fionavar. There’s Dean’s Dubious Hills answer, of what is numinous when magic is as everyday as making dinner. But part of the problem is the difficulty of approaching the numinous directly. Fantasy typically tries to edge around this and approach it from different directions.

Clarke goes straight at it in the structure of the novel and the balance of the novel and the plot. It’s the fulcrum of the whole thing. It’s quite incredible that she makes it work, but there it is, as one thing moves from the numinous to the known, another appears in that direction, and the whole thing pivots around the space in which this is happening, never losing anything in either direction.

I think this is the most significant thing done with this in years. It’s as if we’ve all been building sandcastles in the shadow of a cliff and suddenly Clarke has raised a great castle out of the sea with a strange light shining through the foam-water windows.

Posted in Books

4th December 2004: The Tempest, Madd Harold

Posted on by Jo Walton

Directed by Madd Harold, at the main stage of the Saidye Bronfmann, with a budget.

The Tempest the way Madd Harold directs it is not a play about some funny people on an island, it’s a play about a man dealing with the end of life — forgiving, arranging, releasing, surrendering power, and finally asking forgiveness. It’s also a play about illusions, in which the theatrical illusions the audience take for granted are one by one revealed to be physical manifestations of Prospero’s power, such that as he surrenders it, the curtains behind which characters have made their entrances fall, and the gauze behind which Ariel has stood lifts for him to step out, and Prospero’s final speech asking forgiveness and release is made to the audience, breaking the metaphorical fourth wall but the literal back wall, which is glass, and shows the outside world, which contains streets and cars and houses.

They cut less than in any production I’ve seen and the songs were sung. The characters — even Miranda — all seemed psychologically credible. The actors were very good, especially Trent Pardy as Ariel and Gareth Armstrong as Prospero, but there wasn’t a dud among them.

The whole production takes place on a raised sandpit on the stage, the sand begins beautifully raked like a Zen garden and becomes progressivelyt rumpled. The characters are dressed in black or white, and there is an understated chess theme, which resolves when Miranda and Ferdinand, revealed to the company as alive, are playing chess. There are wonderful things done with light and shadow, some of them reminiscent of the De Profundis we saw last winter.

As for T.S. Eliot’s influence on Shakespeare, I saw it mainly in the way Prospero is the Fisher King. He’d been a terrible duke of Milan, and would be again, if the characters arriving in the ship are real, if for that matter the island is real. (The whole thing could have happened in Prospero’s head in the first boat.)

We talked about Freud’s influence on Shakespeare as well, and the way in which Ariel and Caliban and Miranda are all Prospero’s children and are disposed of. Also, Antonio doesn’t show a shred of remorse and would, as he’s just demonstrated with Sebastian, do it again in a heartbeat. Forgiving someone like that is madness.

In the end, this is a play about Prospero letting go. It’s an intensely emotional experience to sit in a theatre thrown open to the world at the back and be begged to release him. Clapping furiously, I found myself thinking of clapping to prove one’s belief in fairies in Peter Pan, but all the fairies had gone, all the illusions had been broken, there were cars going by outside and really truly it was an actor and a theatre, not Prospero in a cell he could be released from.

It was wonderful beyond words, and it’s still showing until Monday.

Posted in Theatre

31st August 2004: Representing…

Posted on by Jo Walton

John Brunner died at Intersection, the Glasgow Worldcon in 1995. I always think of him at this time of year. The other time I always think of him is when I walk into a convention bar and half-expect to see him.

He was a wonderful writer and a fascinating person who didn’t suffer fools but always had an interesting angle on any question. I met him at Follycon, Eastercon 1988, my first convention. “Look,” he said, pointing at some decals above the bar. “Do those look to you like Masonic symbols?” This was the first time I’d met a writer whose work I already knew and loved, and I’m glad it was John, who was fascinating and gracious to me as a babbling fangirl newbie. I think he was a little surprised to meet someone who had read quite so many of his books — practically everyone he met in fandom would have read Stand on Zanzibar but I had read at that point over fifty of his novels. Several times that first evening at my first con, talking to him, I was swept with the feeling of “OMG, I am actually standing next to John Brunner.”

A couple of years later he was in Lancaster for the LitFest, where he was appearing with Barrington Bailey and local writer David Mace in a symposium on creating alternate history worlds. (It was terrific fun.) I knew him quite well within fandom by then, so I invited them all for a meal at my house the night before. During the course of the meal, conversation turned to comfort books. I mentioned that one of John’s early pulpy novels Into the Slave Nebula was one of mine. (They don’t make titles like that any more!) “It’s got everything I want when I’m a bit down,” I said, “Interstellar chases, adventure, good characters, blue androids, and everything coming out like ninepins at the end. It always cheers me up.” Conversation moved on, I went into the kitchen to prepare dessert. Some months after, when I was a bit down and went to pick up Into the Slave Nebula, I discovered that while I was out of the room he’d taken the book off the shelf and signed it for me. I’m not much for getting books signed, but I really cherish that one.

I went to his funeral, in September 1995. I went because his widow is Chinese, and from a culture where they believe that the importance of someone’s life is measured by how many people go to their funeral. I was a friend of John’s, but I wouldn’t have gone from Lancaster to Taunton for his funeral by usual English custom. I went in white, Chinese mourning colours. At the time I was working part-time editing a local events guide called Something Completely Different. (We had the world’s best answering machine message, it said “Hello, this is Lancaster 64201. Whoever you wanted to reach, you have got through to Something Completely Different.” This was made funnier by the fact that our number was only one digit different from the university, so we got a lot of wrong numbers.) In any case, I worked flat out on Wednesdays and Fridays, but the funeral was a Thursday, which wasn’t a work day, so I could go fairly easily.

Before I went, I posted on rec.arts.sf.written mentioning that I was going, and that if anyone had any messages I’d be happy to print them out and take them with me, or if anyone would like their name added to a card, I’d do that. I was naturally innundated by names and brief remembrances, which I duly printed out or copied onto the card.

At the actual crematorium there was a man collecting names as we went in. I think he was a funeral director. Immediately before me was reporter from the local paper. I stepped up, and the man asked me, as one question, “Name? Representing?” Maybe it was because I was following the journalist, or maybe I had the air of someone who edited an events guide and often went to things representing it. On this occasion I wasn’t, so I stared at him for a moment, until it occurred to me that I was, in fact, in bringing the messages, representing quite a lot of people. “Jo Walton,” I said. “Representing the internet.”

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

5th July 2004: Old men ought to be explorers

Posted on by Jo Walton

I didn’t sleep much last night, and I was reading Anne de Courcy’s excellent biography of Curzon’s daughters The Viceroy’s Daughters (kind of post-research for Farthing) and it struck me how incredible it was that someone could be born before the Boer War and without out-running their three-score and ten, die during the Vietnam war. One of the sisters lived to be ninety, and hence was born during the Boer War and died after the Berlin Wall came down.

I feel a little like Inspector Grant waking himself up to say “Thomas More was Henry VIII”. I can remember being similarly surprised that Samuel Pepys, who everyone knows lived during the Restoration, also lived through the Commonwealth and on past the Glorious Revolution well into the reign of William and Mary.

I’m going to be forty in December. When I was born, there were states in the US where it was still illegal for people to marry if they happened to have different skin colours. I’ve lived through, and entirely missed, the Swinging Sixties, the Vietnam War and the Moon Landing. I came to political consciousness at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Thatcher, and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. I was a child of the Cold War, I entered adolescence quite sure the world would never last long enough for me to need to worry about growing up. I began work in the Yuppie eighties, I rejoiced and conceived a child when the Berlin Wall came down, I thrived in the optimistic and wired nineties and go on into this darkly worrying twenty-first century.

When I was born, the best computers in the world could do what freebie pocket calculators do now. I lived through the beginning of calculators, early home computers, and when we bought my 286 it was the best computer in the world. (I still think it’s the best computer in the world, and certainly one of the longest lasting and most reliable. I wrote three novels on it and two more on the more moveable clone of it that is my 386 laptop, Caliban.) When I was born we didn’t have a telephone, though richer people did. When we got a telephone, when I was seven, I only knew two other people who had one. I now regard a telephone as only slightly less essential than a fridge. (We didn’t have a fridge either.) And socially, I’ve lived through whirlwinds, revolutions and counter-revolutions. I’ve lived from a world in which one had to have one’s friends in walking distance to one where most of my friends are people I met online.

And if I live thirty, forty more years? What an incredibly thrilling thought. If I live forty more years, forward day by day, in the very-slow-time-machine, if I can look back, will today seem as primitive by comparison as when I was born? Certainly it will seem as distant and exotic and as much part of history and inevitability, where it all now stands open and unknowable.

It brought me to a new appreciation of something I’ve understood for a long time — it’s in the quantum stuff about “now” in Burnt Norton which one day in 1987 Unfolded itself to me on the Metropolitan line between King’s Cross and Baker Street — that here we are, poised in a moment of consciousness in which I write this and you read this, between the cluttered fixity of the known past and the blankness of the unknowable future, and that this unattainable target of “now”, (this moment that cannot be examined because to examine it is to fix it in time, where it recedes under examination, it moves too fast, it only is when it is moving), is the only time in which we can move, can act, can decide, can choose, and hence the only time there is. (Eliot put it all much better in Four Quartets, and doubtless Heisenberg too, for those who read mathematics.)

But how wonderful that here we all are, making history, political, social and technological, making both future and past, making time, as we live and breathe and quietly get on with doing the next thing.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, My Real Children

2nd June 2004: Reading about people just like oneself

Posted on by Jo Walton

Two discussions today that made me think about something.

The question of needing people to identify with in fiction was raised, and also the question of “translating” fiction to make it more comprehensible and easy to identify with. Some people seem to only be interested in reading about people exactly like themselves — and other people seem to imagine that people would do that.

I’ve run into both kinds — middle-class middle-aged British women who will only read books by Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing, and also perfectly well-meaning people who told me I couldn’t possibly like SF because there weren’t any girls in it. I remember a teacher actually taking a book I had already read out of my hands at a junior school book sale and saying I wouldn’t like it because there weren’t any girls. Smugly knowing best, she refused to take my money for it.

(That particular book wasn’t actually SF. It was a really brilliant adventure story about three boys and a silver mine in Africa and a plane and international jewel thieves and a volcano. At one point the kids climb down actually inside the volcano to hide, and at another point the volcano erupts, quite thrillingly. It had a blue cover… and it probably isn’t anything like as good as I remember, as I was about six at the time. But I remain indignant! And fond of volcanoes.)

Thinking about this, if I were to want to read books about someone just like me… well, there isn’t anyone just like me. And if I were to look for them, whatever would I use as the sort criteria? Short Welsh women SF writers of forty who have been married twice and emigrated to Montreal aren’t really a demographic. Even if I broadened it and was prepared to read about ones with any job, or any sexual orientation… or even tall ones… or even ones who emigrated to other places… not until I broadened it enough to accept men and then people of any age would I get any books at all, and then it would only be How Green Was My Valley, which I’ve already read and even if I hadn’t wouldn’t last me long. Even if there were a vast literature of my experience, wouldn’t it be awfully boring? Even if it explored different nuances, surely it would get to feel much the same?

I have long thought that the supposed problem men have with reading from female POV comes about through their having so many things to read from male POV that they can be picky and never learn how to do it. (I know there are plenty of men who do learn it without any problem, I’m just talking about the ones I’ve run into, mostly on rasfw, who do have this problem.) If I had limited myself to female POV, growing up, I’d have run through all there was in the house very quickly. And once you’ve been David Copperfield and Tom Sawyer and Merlin and Theseus before you’re ten, mere gender seems no barrier. It can do weird things — I know I identified terribly with Nicholas Urfe in The Magus when I was about sixteen, but the whole bizarre thing of Woman as Mystery in the novel translated the other way for me without any problem, I read it as an entirely gender-neutral People-Who-One-Might-Be-Romantically-Interested-In-Of-Mystery and it wasn’t until someone else pointed out to me the weird construction of women in the novel that I even thought about it.

When I was a child, certainly, and also later to some extent, I read everything as SF. Nothing I read was about anyone even vaguely like me, or families even vaguely like mine. I didn’t know anything about the world. Everything informed me. Everything had world-building. I read a number of C.19 US children’s books, and the early C.20 Canadian Anne books, and I uncritically and unhesitatingly understood them, accepted the oddities, and never for a moment stopped to consider that they were not contemporary. In about 1970 at the age of six, I accepted both Little Women and Tom Sawyer as how America was, and Anne of Green Gables as how Canada was. At the same age I recognised that David Copperfield and Jane Eyre were set in the past — at least, I think I did.

I wonder if this is what children do, because to some extent they have to; they don’t know the world, they construct the world from the story, they accept what they’re shown and build things up from details. Reading as SF. A child reading about someone taking their clothes from a closet accepts and understands what a closet is, even though they keep their own clothes in a wardrobe, and even if they imagine a closet as something exotic and far more different from a wardrobe than it is, has widened their world — and heck, a closet is different, it’s built in and integral, whereas a wardrobe is (theoretically) moveable. A child who had that experience can, as an adult, move into a house and hear their spouse say “Look! Built-in wardrobes!” and say with a dawning sense of wonder “I do believe that may in fact be a closet! I’ve read about those.”

This is, of course, why it is so fundamentally important never to dumb things down for children. Standardizing spelling may make sense, but anything beyond that is depriving those children of delight not only now but throughout their lives.

(Even the spelling thing — I spent some years convinced that “color” was a US term used specifically for skin colour, useful and appropriate because of their difficult history in that area.)

And if you try to make people read things that are “appropriate” and that they can “identify” with, you might stunt their ability to identify and empathise with people different from themselves, you may stop them ever being able to read outside a narrow range — just as if you’d made them wear sunglasses until they could no longer see colour. Not to mention that they might never forgive you for not letting them own and re-read that book with the volcano and the blue cover.

Posted in Books, Writing

20th May 2004: My father is dead

Posted on by Jo Walton

Well, dead. And when he stands among
the squeaking voices in the Stygian hall
before the two dark thrones, then say for me
he did me little good and little harm,
let him pass on without bitterness
but without vengeance, without a father’s offerings.
I speak for him as for a chance-met stranger,
let him pass on to Lethe and new life
where he might learn all he so manifestly did not learn
in this life he is leaving.

Please don’t sympathise. I hadn’t spoken to him since 1984. I feel very weird about it. He tried to get in contact with me a couple of times, but I resisted it. I’m not saying “Good” and jumping up and down putting out flags the way I would be if my mother were dead, but the last thing I want is deepest sympathy. I don’t have enough connection to him for that. He never felt like family to me. I’ve felt much much more distress at the death of friends.

I spent several years utterly out of contact thinking he was probably dead already. It’s amazing, considering how much he smoked and drank, that he made it to sixty.

He was a man who, all his life, ran away from things that were difficult. He never grew a spine. It isn’t possible to say anything about him, my relationship with him, that gets past the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” rule, and yet though he was a weak man and a man whose decisions make me wonder what he could possibly have been thinking, I mostly liked him.

He could be the life of a party, he could be generous, he could be very interesting to talk to, he once deciphered a letter I wrote not only entirely in Dwarven runes but in LOTR page and line references, and he introduced me to Heinlein and Delany.

I guess what I inherit is his copy of The Sirens of Titan he told me to look after because he wanted it back.

I will take the good that was in him, that is in my genes and Zorinth’s genes, and take that forward.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

1st April 2004: Skazlorls

Posted on by Jo Walton

I have, with John M. Ford’s gracious permission, managed to insert the following sentence into Lyflode “The sky was black with skazlorls” and then a little later “Did you see the skazlorls?”

When that’s in print, the word will be in print in two places, and we can start to agitate to have it accepted as an official Scrabble word. Mike says it makes him feel like a member of the Greater Tlon Public Works and Civic Advancement Association…

For this to make any sense, you need to have read “Scrabble With God” in John M. Ford’s collection from NESFA Press From the End of the Twentieth Century.

Posted in Lifelode

25th March 2004: Strictly Cash

Posted on by Jo Walton

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned before about all the time travellers around in Montreal.

They’re easy to spot. They got their clothes from a box marked “1970-2030” or sometimes “1950-2050”. They wear shoes that don’t quite look like any shoe you’ve seen before, with flared trousers and a jacket, shirt and bowtie. Or they might sport a brand new t-shirt declaring “US Troops Out Of Indochina Now!”, under a coat entirely inadequate to the weather. Their hair doesn’t look quite right, close, but not quite right. There’s usually one thing that draws attention, and then all the other little things that don’t quite add up. I generally see them on public transport, where you get time to look, as long as you don’t get caught. What really makes me sure they’re time travellers is that glorious enthusiasm they have for everything, the way they look at ads and stroke the seats of buses with an almost palpable glow of nostalgia. “Yes, this is how it was!” they seem to be thinking, or “My goodness, people really did this. I’m really here!”

Teresa mentioned on Making Light a while ago that she’d seen some in New York City. They’re probably everywhere, but there are a lot of them here. It just makes me hope nothing awful is going to happen to the city.

They don’t bother me at all. We get tourists from all over because Montreal is cool. It seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do. rysmiel once saw a couple on the metro who looked just like us, only twenty years older. We think we’d come back to eat at some restaurant that will have gone out of business by then. If I’m going to do it myself, how could I possibly object to other people doing it now? (My clothes won’t look wrong. I’ll still have the same clothes. I have a sweat-shirt now that I’ve had since I was eighteen. I was wearing it on Monday. I’ll still have the same hair, too.)

Anyway, a couple of these guys, father and son, or maybe the same guy at two different ages, have started a new second hand bookstore up on Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke West and either Wilson or Harvard. They’re not stupid, they don’t have any stock from the future — in fact they’ve been really extra-careful and they don’t have any stock older than about 1964. What they do have is a lot of stuff — a lot of stuff — that you never see any more.

Gothics. Westerns. Ace Doubles. Old green Penguins. Most of all, those ancient American paperbacks with terrible covers and yellow page-edges that were the first paperbacks there ever were, the mass market paperbacks that led to the current system where mmpbs are pulped. They are pulp paperbacks.

Oh, you see them. You see all those things. I own some of them. But you don’t see huge honking expanses of all of them unadulterated by anything new. You don’t see the short stories of Noel Coward on paper that could have come from an old Galaxy, or Wuthering Heights with a clinch cover. They have a lot of old books of the kind that aren’t valuable, that you used to see second hand and you stopped seeing because they fell apart.

Books are published, and people buy them, and then lots of people get rid of them, and the books as physical objects circulate in the current of thrift stores and used bookstores and for a while they’re common and then they become rare and if there’s a reprint that releases more into the wild. If you consider a best-selling in their day author like Nevil Shute or Georgette Heyer, whose books sold in the millions, and who wrote lots of books, at one time you’d have had no problem finding everything they ever wrote second hand in a big city like this. Even now, it’s possible to pick up most of it just by looking, persistently, for a long time, going to Hay-on-Wye, keeping your eyes open.

But what you see easily, in big piles, are the newer authors, today’s bestsellers, the ones whose books have just started to pile up.

The older ones vanish because people buy them and keep them, or because they just naturally disintegrate, they’re not always being looked after. I’ve never had a mmpb I bought new fall apart on me, but not everyone is as fortunate.

I go to a lot of second hand bookstores. It’s not exactly a hobby, it’s more, as carbonel put it once as we both turned together towards a stall, a tropism for books. I notice this kind of thing because of that. To someone less bookstore accustomed, or even to me before I got used to the way books are here, different from Britain, it probably wouldn’t seem as odd, and I didn’t notice right away.

This bookstore doesn’t have any of the newer ones you’d expect, and it has large piles of the older ones which would naturally have disintegrated and be consequently rare. They probably picked it all up in 1960, and another load in 1994. Anything newer must be trades people brought in since they opened. We spent fifty dollars in there the first time we went in, bought about as many books as we could carry and picked up some interesting things — nothing I desperately needed, as it happens, but some interesting things. It wasn’t until the second time I went in there that I spotted what was odd. It wasn’t that they had or didn’t have any particular book, but the whole demographic of the place.

It didn’t even strike me as weird, the first time, that they sold records. Vinyl records, you remember them? I have lots of them myself. You used to see them in bookstores, sometimes. There are a lot of places up in the Plateau that are Francophone used bookstores that also sell CDs. CDs. Vinyl records are sold these days only in really impressively large music specialists or in thrift stores. And this is a brand new store, it only opened about a month ago.

Having been tipped off to their time-travelling nature, I looked closely at the guys. Their hair wasn’t right, but otherwise they’d done a good job with the clothes. They’d have got away with it entirely if it wasn’t for the slightly smug and very pleased expressions, the expressions that said how interesting ordinary things were here, and which has that indefinable certainty that they knew how things were going to come out.

I didn’t confront them. What would have been the point? It’s not as if they’re doing any harm — the opposite, in fact, running a second hand bookstore is a service to humanity, and I said, I quite like time travellers. And if anything awful is going to happen to the city, well, they’ll know, and as long as they’re there, we’ll know it’s still safe.

Posted in Whimsy