J.A. Ironside
asked
Jo Walton:
Hi, I just wanted to ask how you came up with the concept for the fairies in 'Among Others'? They are both intangible and yet as real as every other character in the book. What made you think of them the way you've depicted them there? (Absolutely loved the book by the way!)
Jo Walton
As with a lot of my writing, the reason I chose to do this comes from problems I have with the way other people do things. When I read urban fantasy I generally find it hard to suspend my disbelief -- if these things really existed and behaved that way, I'd have to be stupid to have missed them. So I wanted to have magic that was non-falsifiable, and had plausible deniability. And I didn't want to use the Celtic stuff that would have been natural to the landscape I was writing about, partly because I've done it before (_The King's Peace_ uses Celtic mythology) and partly because it has been so overdone by everyone in the world that it feels cliched. There is in fact some pull towards the Celtic things in there -- the Halloween section -- but I wanted to avoid that as much as I could. And I wanted a child's understanding of that the fairies were -- that's why they're deliberately called fairies and not elves or fae or faerie or any of these more sophisticated terms. She knows she doesn't really know what they are, she knows they're something, and she has known them since she was a child and she's using a childish word. Then so many people write fantasy where True Names are important, so I thought well, she's going to call them fairies, what do they call themselves --- how about if I do completely against that and they don't use names? Or even nouns? That's interesting. (Hard to do, but interesting.) And she's given them names from Tolkien and mythology. The thing that makes them real is that she's absolutely matter of fact about them -- they're real to her, they're a real problem, the same as her family or the girls in school.
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Oct 11, 2014 01:27PM · flag