Among Others

Among Others by Jo Walton

This is for all the libraries in the world, and the librarians who sit there day after day lending books to people.

Thanks and Notes

I’d like to thank Aunt Jane, who accepted axiomatically that I would grow up and write, and her daughter Sue, now Ashwell, who gave me both The Hobbit and Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. I’m also grateful to Mrs. Morris, once my Welsh teacher, who worried about me for thirty years.

Mary Lace and Patrick Nielsen Hayden encouraged me while I was writing this. My LiveJournal correspondents were excellent at providing random required information, especially Mike Scott, without whom this would have been impossible. Some people have full-time research assistants who aren’t as speedy or as well informed. Thanks again, Mike.

Emmet O’Brien and Sasha Walton and, quite often, Alexandra Whitebean, put up with me when I was writing. Alter Reiss bought me a DOS laptop so I could keep on writing, and Janet M. Kegg found a battery for it and delivered it. My next-door neighbour René Walling found this book a title. I have the best friends. Seriously.

Louise Mallory, Caroline-Isabelle Caron, David Dyer-Bennett, Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James, Mike Scott, Janet Kegg, David Goldfarb, Rivka Wald, Sherwood Smith, Sylvia Rachel Hunter, and Beth Meacham read the book when it was done and made useful comments on it. Liz Gorinsky, and the hardworking production and publicity people at Tor, always do a great job paying attention to my books and helping get them into people’s hands.

People tell you to write what you know, but I’ve found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up. It’s easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it’s much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little more detachment. It’s terrible advice! So this is why you’ll find there’s no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though.

Er’ perrehnne.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self, and at what age?

Any time between 10 and 25:

It’s going to improve. Honest. There really are people out there that you will like and who will like you.

—Farah Mendlesohn, LiveJournal, 23rd May 2008

Thursday 1st May 1975

The Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around. We’d measured it on the mileometer. It looked like something from the depths of hell, black and looming with chimneys of flame, reflected in a dark pool that killed any bird or animal that drank from it. The smell was beyond description. We always wound up the car windows as tight as tight when we had to pass it, and tried to hold our breath, but Grampar said nobody could hold their breath that long, and he was right. There was sulphur in that smell, which was a hell chemical as everyone knew, and other, worse things, hot unnameable metals and rotten eggs.

My sister and I called it Mordor, and we’d never been there on our own before. We were ten years old. Even so, big as we were, as soon as we got off the bus and started looking at it we started holding hands.

It was dusk, and as we approached the factory loomed blacker and more terrible than ever. Six of the chimneys were alight; four belched out noxious smokes.

“Surely it is a device of the Enemy,” I murmured.

Mor didn’t want to play. “Do you really think this will work?”

“The fairies were sure of it,” I said, as reassuringly as possible.

“I know, but sometimes I don’t know how much they understand about the real world.”

“Their world is real,” I protested. “Just in a different way. At a different angle.”

“Yes.” She was still staring at the Phurnacite, which was getting bigger and scarier as we approached. “But I don’t know how much they understand about the angle of the every day world. And this is definitely in that world. The trees are dead. There isn’t a fairy for miles.”

“That’s why we’re here,” I said.

We came to the wire, three straggly strands, only the top one barbed. A sign on it read “No Unauthorised Admittance. Beware Guard Dogs.” The gate was far around the other side, out of sight.