Xena WP asked Jo Walton:

Jo, after finishing Transcription by K. Atkinson I wished for a few paragraphs at least of Juliet’s happy discovery of Italy and enjoyment of motherhood, things you describe movingly in My Real Children. I read My Real Children shortly after readingLife After Life and I thought they enriched each other. Have you read Life After Life and do you think it is a work of SFF? (If MRC is, then LAL is IMO.)

Jo Walton After I'd written MRC but before it was published, an editor told me people would compare it to LAL. I then read LAL. I thought it was great, beautifully written, great characters, but after I'd finished it I felt unsatisfied and that it was slightly lacking in resolution. I have not yet read the sequel, and I hope it has the resolution I was craving.

MRC was my attempt to meld the genres of women's fiction and SF, and the hardest thing about that was getting the pacing right. (Not sure I did completely.) It's a crossover book. It was therefore very interesting to me to see Atkinson trying to cross over in the other direction. I'm not sure how much SFF she read before deciding to write some. All the genres I've mixed up into my work are ones I read a lot normally -- cosy mysteries, women's fiction. Victorian sentimental novels, historical fiction. Atkinson clearly wasn't interested in blending SF pacing into LAL, and I sometimes got the feeling (as with Doris Lessing's SF) that she was trying to reinvent the wheel. But it was a very absorbing read, full of wonderful imagery. Great book.

And reading it was very influential not on MRC which was completely finished beyond any tweaking by the time I read LAL, but on my next novel Lent. You wait until you read that and then let's talk about this again. :-)

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