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beccastareyesSo, I downloaded my Hugo Voter's packet, so expect to see a lot of posts regarding the contents. For those of you don't know, the Hugos are Science Fiction and Fantasy's Big Award Ceremony. The nominees are chosen by popular vote of the attendees and supporting members of WorldCon, and then the nominees are voted on by that same body. So it's a good indication of what a subset of the fandom is doing.
I already reviewed one nominee for best novel, Mira Grant's Deadline. So Among Others by Jo Walton is the second. Since I'm nearly finished with the third, I better post this entry.
Unlike Deadline, which is a thriller, Among Others is a quiet coming of age story. Mori is a disabled teenager in Wales in 1980 who goes to live with the English father she never met, and is promptly sent off to boarding school as her upper-class aunts insist. There she gets the whole 'I am an outcast for being Welsh and new and a cripple' deal, but discovers that the town has a SF book club with local kids her age, and the book captures the feeling of 'I am not alone' so wonderfully.
Mori is also able to see fairies and her mother is a witch and contributed to her accident. It's not on the Hugo ballot for being about genre.
The book itself is slow and takes a bit to pick up, and I wonder how parse-able a lot of Mori's journal entries are to readers who are younger than me. Mostly because Mori is fannish, but there's 30 years of SF between her and today. She gets excited over new Pern and Amber books that I remember as classics, and I have to mentally catalog which of the authors I love she'd even heard of. And, while I set out to give myself a 'classic SF education', helped by my friend Cassie (a giant fan of Heinlein's juveniles*) and my uncle Andy, I don't know how normal that is for 20 or 30 year old SF fans. (Remember Mori is 15 in 1980, so she's two decades older than I am in literary time.)
But the feeling is right. And here I'm going into my personal 'how I entered fandom' story.
I was your classic 'outsider nerd kid' in middle school. I'd gotten into fantasy by CS Lewis, and science fiction by Star Trek (The Next Generation). I also read non-fiction books for fun -- myths, history, archeology, biology, astronomy, geology... you name it. I didn't have many friends: the closest I had were a few girls in middle school who looked out for me and tried to include me in things. I was mostly picked on and/or ignored, though. Occasionally I could talk to people -- my sister introduced me to someone at summer camp that was also a Trekkie. My mother promised me high school would be different.
And, it was. For one, the district psychologist ran a highly gifted girls' weekly discussion. One of the girls, Cassie, was in my English class that year, and she started loaning me books. She and her friend, Sara (in the year ahead of me) invited me to the SF club that was just starting at our high school. Or maybe I came on my own and they did too; it was half a lifetime ago.
It was my first introduction to the concept of 'fandom', that people who had a shared interest in stuff could hang out together and share the stuff. And sometimes you become friends, and others you're just acquaintances that can talk to one another about your hobbies.
Incidentally, this is why I actually did like high school. I wouldn't call it 'the best years of my life', but it was important as it was the moment when I realized that life was not middle school and that there were other people like me (besides my dad, I mean). The enjoyability of high school is inversely proportional to the amount of garbage you have to put up with from students and teachers. Having a group where I belonged that hung out together meant I had distinctly less garbage to put up with.
It seems like a lot of fans have that moment, unless they are lucky to grow up in the right place. Which probably speaks to some of Among Others appeal; we know that feeling.
--
* What modern audiences would see as YA, probably, but that category didn't exist when Heinlein was writing
I already reviewed one nominee for best novel, Mira Grant's Deadline. So Among Others by Jo Walton is the second. Since I'm nearly finished with the third, I better post this entry.
Unlike Deadline, which is a thriller, Among Others is a quiet coming of age story. Mori is a disabled teenager in Wales in 1980 who goes to live with the English father she never met, and is promptly sent off to boarding school as her upper-class aunts insist. There she gets the whole 'I am an outcast for being Welsh and new and a cripple' deal, but discovers that the town has a SF book club with local kids her age, and the book captures the feeling of 'I am not alone' so wonderfully.
Mori is also able to see fairies and her mother is a witch and contributed to her accident. It's not on the Hugo ballot for being about genre.
The book itself is slow and takes a bit to pick up, and I wonder how parse-able a lot of Mori's journal entries are to readers who are younger than me. Mostly because Mori is fannish, but there's 30 years of SF between her and today. She gets excited over new Pern and Amber books that I remember as classics, and I have to mentally catalog which of the authors I love she'd even heard of. And, while I set out to give myself a 'classic SF education', helped by my friend Cassie (a giant fan of Heinlein's juveniles*) and my uncle Andy, I don't know how normal that is for 20 or 30 year old SF fans. (Remember Mori is 15 in 1980, so she's two decades older than I am in literary time.)
But the feeling is right. And here I'm going into my personal 'how I entered fandom' story.
I was your classic 'outsider nerd kid' in middle school. I'd gotten into fantasy by CS Lewis, and science fiction by Star Trek (The Next Generation). I also read non-fiction books for fun -- myths, history, archeology, biology, astronomy, geology... you name it. I didn't have many friends: the closest I had were a few girls in middle school who looked out for me and tried to include me in things. I was mostly picked on and/or ignored, though. Occasionally I could talk to people -- my sister introduced me to someone at summer camp that was also a Trekkie. My mother promised me high school would be different.
And, it was. For one, the district psychologist ran a highly gifted girls' weekly discussion. One of the girls, Cassie, was in my English class that year, and she started loaning me books. She and her friend, Sara (in the year ahead of me) invited me to the SF club that was just starting at our high school. Or maybe I came on my own and they did too; it was half a lifetime ago.
It was my first introduction to the concept of 'fandom', that people who had a shared interest in stuff could hang out together and share the stuff. And sometimes you become friends, and others you're just acquaintances that can talk to one another about your hobbies.
Incidentally, this is why I actually did like high school. I wouldn't call it 'the best years of my life', but it was important as it was the moment when I realized that life was not middle school and that there were other people like me (besides my dad, I mean). The enjoyability of high school is inversely proportional to the amount of garbage you have to put up with from students and teachers. Having a group where I belonged that hung out together meant I had distinctly less garbage to put up with.
It seems like a lot of fans have that moment, unless they are lucky to grow up in the right place. Which probably speaks to some of Among Others appeal; we know that feeling.
--
* What modern audiences would see as YA, probably, but that category didn't exist when Heinlein was writing
