Jo Walton's My Real Children

[jsburbidge]

I'll add my two bits to the generally laudatory reviews / comments on this.  The book works both as a novelistic exploration of love / aging / loss and an SFnal alternate history (or set of histories).

Reactions to a couple of comments I've seen in other reviews:

1) The book is not told in an omniscient 3rd person narrative.  It is tight third person and reflects a set of events and experiences highly coloured by Patricia's point of view: it reflects her retrospective from the framing point in the nursing home. (Not quite that, because it may cover things that she could not remember by the framing point of the story).  In keeping with this, it is not a good idea to assume that the narrator is reliable.

2) The book is not particularly "political", or not any more than any other book is.  The focus on experiences reflecting women's rights are inextricable from the time period for any woman in England of that age and the highlighting (rather than erasure) of GLB characters is, in the context of the book, an important way of throwing light on the differing directions of the development of Patricia's local social context; it's no more (and no less) "political" than the varying role played by religion in the two timelines.

I had a couple of questions about the AH side of things:

- Jo has provided one plausible point of departure for the Pat timeline, in an interaction with Alan Turing at a pro-homosexual rally. Since Turing is later referenced as alive in the same timeline in 1963 (and this is followed a little later by a reference to his weather prediction computers having allowed mitigation of the losses in the flooding of the Arno in Florence in 1966) it's plausible that the interaction altered Turing's own trajectory to avoid the arrest / suicide.

- However, the Trish timeline has started to diverge by 1956 or so -- Europe and Russia both have space programs in 1956 -- but she has had little if any recordedimpact on any movers-and-shakers or people with likely connections to movers-and-shakers between 1949 and 1956, being almost entirely domestic.  The general details up to the point of her marriage are sogeneral -- she's not paying much attention to anything other than World War II at the global level at that point -- that it's impossible to tell whether the timeline had already diverged from our own before then.

We are left with several distinct possibilities:

1) The simple introduction of Patricia (and her parents/grandparents/sibs) into the world has, by authorial fiat, already made for a timeline divergence before her marriage / non-marriage decision.

2) The point where she makes her choice is on our timeline but some event or events unrecorded in her memory are the drivers for divergence by 1956.

3) She never was on our timeline, although in one very close to ours, and the Trish timeline is very close to a "base" value of her timeline.