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My Real Children
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I thought this book told two really interesting stories. Both of Patricia's lives felt realistic, robust, and engaging. I'm sure many of us have conducted a thought experiment like that - what if I had chosen differently at this moment, or that moment? I really liked this part of the story.Patricia's decline into dementia was so sad. The way her kids treated her - both sets, but especially Tricia's kids, was both cruel and understandable - having lost my own mom to a long dementia, I understand how impatient one feels with a parent who no longer seems to be themself, and I thought this book did such an amazing job of showing what dementia feels like from the inside, and the utter tragedy of watching oneself lose one's mind. This part of the book worked so well, and was very moving.
The "choosing" part didn't work for me. It felt gimmicky. As if somehow Patricia as an old woman, making a choice, would somehow go back in time and alter reality for the whole world? Like, one reality would just wink out? Why should that be how it works? This story fits better into a multiverse framework, where multiple realities coexist. Which one she "chooses" as "really real" doesn't matter at this point, for her - she is at the end of her life. And the idea that somehow one senile old lady could make a choice that would affect everyone else's reality just seemed silly to me.
So, I really liked the book, and the fact that the ending didn't work for me doesn't really change that, I think I just decided to ignore that. I think that this is why I didn't like this book the first time I read it - I was annoyed by the ending and it affected how I felt about the rest of the story - I felt cheated somehow. This time I just decided to enjoy the stories that unfolded and not worry about the kind of silly "choice" bit at the end. That's how I dealt with it - I'm really curious what others thought, though!
I love Jo Walton's style. She has a wonderful way with portraying people and bringing about her love for Florence and the Italian Renaissance. And - as was the case in other of her books as well - she has a problem with endings. But that doesn't matter much to me here, because this book felt very personal to me. I could deeply relate to some of the going ons. It was a bitter sweet, melancholic read for me about beauty and hope in times of personal and world-encompassing tragedies.It is a bit of a stretch in my eyes to shelf this novel as SF, though. Yes, there are parallel timelines and alternate histories, but the focus is heavy on the family affairs and Patricia's development depending on her one decision.
I appreciated that Walton chose to paint the two realities in the combination personal joy/horrible political development and personal hardship/positive political development. In the end this leads to the classical decision about the need of the many versus one's own needs. Of course the logical choice would be the need of the many, but since Walton intimately brought Patricia's life and struggles to the reader it is a choice with a heart broken.
For me this was a beautiful novel about love and appreciation and another prove why I appreciate Jo Walton so much as an author and lover of her passions.
I found this book to be compulsively readable, and I blew through it in one weekend. I enjoyed the back and forth between the two worlds, seeing the changes (but also how Patricia's personality was not that different), and watching how the two families developed and grew. Both lives had their ups and downs, which was interesting - it wasn't clearly that one life was better than the other. I thought the dementia part was very well done (and also hard to read because of that). About half way through I did grow a bit tired of how perfect everyone was, though. Even when tough things happened, it often seemed like everyone responded in the best possible way or it was too easy - Tricia getting divorced, Tricia taking care of Mark when he had his stroke, Tricia and Bee's relationship, Bee making the best of it after losing her legs, Doug giving up heroin cold turkey, everything Michael did for the family, so many helpful friends, and so much understanding. The beginning and the end were less this way. It wasn't enough to make me dislike the book - I just rolled my eyes here and there. :-)
I'm still not sure how I feel about the end. I didn't like that Patricia had to make a choice between the world where she overall felt the most love and acceptance and the one where the world itself was a better place. It felt a bit gimmicky to me that whether or not she said yes to marrying Mark would have had such a big impact on the world overall. And if so, why couldn't Mark's choices have made the difference - like he told her that he didn't want to get married after all, since it didn't seem like he ever really wanted that? Why does Patricia have to be the one to make the sacrifice? I like Rose's idea of there being multiple realities, and that her choice won't wipe out the other reality but both will exist alongside each other.
Rose wrote: "I thought this book told two really interesting stories. Both of Patricia's lives felt realistic, robust, and engaging. I'm sure many of us have conducted a thought experiment like that - what if I..."I found this book totally absorbing - finished it in one day. I agree with your assessment - I was going to write my own thoughts but yours expressed mine so well I'll just add a thumbs-up to yours. You and Kaia, who commented here as well, mentioned Patricia struggling to choose one life or the other at the end - I didn't see that as what happened (which is why the end didn't bother me - I would have hated that). I saw her as thinking about both lives and wondering IF she had had to choose, could she have? That the positives and negatives of both lives were so different, were they in any way comparable enough to make such a choice? Did anything she did in either life affect what happened to world events in those lives? This is the type of thing I would have been pondering if I were in her situation. But I didn't read it that she was actually trying to choose. I thought the point of her thoughts at the end was that all of her children were her "real" children (hence the title of the book).
I'm glad we read this book - it was on my bookshelf waiting to be read - but it wasn't science fiction in any sense that I understand science fiction. The OED defines scifi as "fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets" and while this book included those elements, I think the crucial lack is that it was in no way based on them. Opinions vary, obviously, but I do not feel that when I read this, I read a science fiction story.
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Allison wrote: "You don't think an imagined world where nuclear war was common and AIDS was cured or an imagined world with a moon base and gay rights but no cure changed the story?"This was the story of a woman's life and the two possible directions it would have gone if she had made different choices at one crucial moment. Coincidentally, the world developed somewhat differently during her two lives but we have no reason to believe her decision had anything to do with that - in fact we have no way of understanding why that happened at all. Why wasn't the world the same in both of her lives? It made much more interesting reading that it wasn't, but there is no logic to it that I can see.
Every pivotal episode in Patricia's life could have happened the same way without any science fiction/alternative reality elements. Localized war is common, just not that type of war. Doug could have died of a heroin overdose instead of AIDS - his song could have been about getting married on the ISS instead of the moon - the scientific work, about which we are told very little, could have been done on the ISS... I would argue that the fact that the events described in the book are not what has historically happened in our world did not change her story. I can't see how her life - lives - would have been different if there had been no "science fiction" elements in the book at all.
As Gabi says above, "It is a bit of a stretch in my eyes to shelf this novel as SF, though. Yes, there are parallel timelines and alternate histories, but the focus is heavy on the family affairs and Patricia's development depending on her one decision."
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This is something I'm passionate about! What killed Bee, where her kids went, and the social safety nets available are integral to how Patricia's lives went. they're not astrophysics issues maybe, but human sciences are sciences, which is why 1984 and Brave New World and Handmaid's Tale are all sci-fi classics which are not limited just to stories of aliens and spaceships. Those are all also about individual lives.
This is fiction based on historical and technological differences from our reality and how it impacts society and in particular this person.
It's "low" sci-fi, because you're right there's very few space ships, it's on Earth etc but I see speculative fiction as a great big bucket replete with subgenres that we may individually like or dislike or make our own categories for. this is like magical realism, but science.
One of the other things I liked was that neither timeline was what actually happened in our timeline. Bobby Kennedy wasn't assassinated in either, for example. This was cool for me because it also made me question my own sanity a bit. I started confusing what I knew and what each Patricia knew.
Anyone else see things that use the science or history of the world to move the story?
Speaking of terms, I like that this group pretty much uses SFF. I also, even more, like the term "Speculative Fiction.' In that sense, this book is very speculative, very What If... which makes it very much akin to classic SF.
I love this book and I was really happy to read it again. I love the way the two different lives are so fully realized. I was very confused on the first read, but then realized the trick is that when her life is good, the world is horrible, and vice versa. It makes the story easier to track.I think her relationship with Mark is appalling, and there is no way I would be taking care of him after his stroke. He's alone and has nobody to take care of him? Well, maybe he shouldn't have been a horrible human being.
One of the saddest things to me is how cold and cruel Cathy is when she's being put in the home. I understand how upsetting it would be to have your mom forget your son died, but it was just cruel. I cried at the part where she was begging to take her computer into the facility. It was like she was losing the last of what made her who she was and it was so critically important to her identity to have that.
The choice thing would be odd if that were truly all she had to do to make one life real. Whether or not she chose to marry Mark had nothing to do with how the world developed. I don't, personally, read it as she gets to make the choice. I read it as a multiverse story where she's trying to understand why she remembers two lives and that's how she rationalizes it.
I do think it's sci-fi because it deals with multiverse elements and alternate history. There are varying degrees of sci-fi and fantasy, but the umbrella term is "speculative fiction," and it's speculating on alternate histories using parallel realities. It doesn't have to be sciency to be sci-fi.
I'm curious - which life would you all have chosen? I would have chosen the Mark/Tricia timeline because it was a much more beautiful world, but what a horrible choice!
Allison wrote: "But those things didn't happen, this story did. Military Sci-fi novels could use horses instead of spaceships, they could die of bullets instead of lasers and then they'd be war novels not sci-fi...."
The difference to me between the works you cite (Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, 1984) and My Real Children is that your examples were about the societal changes, with the individual characters there to show us what the result of the societal changes were - what society had wrought. I don't see that at all in Children. We have no idea why the two societies developed differently. It felt completely arbitrary to me, remained unexplained, and while of course there were impacts on Patricia's lives, the book was relentlessly about her lives, not the different societies. There were lessons to be learned from your three examples. What lessons did you learn about society from Children? The argument has been made that science fiction isn't about the future, it's about the present. Your three examples would all bear that out, I believe. But this one would not. Neither of Patricia's worlds was "better" than the other, and both felt incidental to her personal story - yes I understand that the events in each had a strong impact on her, but what impact do they have on us?
Dixie, excellent question. I admit I dnf'd the book, so I hope to see others' responses.
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Friends, what do we think? What did this book say about our present or future?
This is my first Jo Walton book, and I did enjoy her writing style. In short, I enjoyed the book, thought it was beautifully written, but like Dixie, I felt that the two world histories were peripheral. The nuclear exchanges caused the death of some of the characters, but while their illnesses had emotional impact, the world events that caused them didn't.
I thought the framing mechanism, Patricia's senility reconnecting her two lives, unconvincing and artificial. On the other hand, without it, we're left with two separate stories that happen to be interleaved in the same book. If we read just one of the lives, would (say) Tricia's stand-alone alternative history be worth reading without Pat's running alongside?
Allison wrote: "Yeah that's a super great question! I have thoughts, but my passion for avoiding gatekeeping in specfic is not aimed at you Dixie, and I don't want you to feel that it is, so I will wait and see as..."I had the feeling that our present is somewhere in the middle of those two timelines and those two represent two possibilities society's future can develop. The ideal of course was to pick the best from both TLs, yet I think Walton wants to tell us that that's not possible, that we always will have the good with the bad.
Finished the book a few hours ago and still struggling to put what I feel to words. In some places it really hit extremely close to home for me. I both eye-read and listened to this book, and it was really a very smooth reading. I immediately got into the story and had absolutely no problems getting used to the writer's style. This doesn't happen often and it felt great. Patricia's voice was strong and clear and I loved the way she was basically the same person in both versions of her life. At the same time I had no trouble at all switching from one to the other, which is not typical for me.
I haven't given much thought to good life in bad world vs. bad life in good world thing before I read this thread, but now that I think about it, it seems unfair.
I also don't believe in the idea that the direction the whole world took depended on her decision. Don't think that Patricia actually believed this either. We don't know what she chose in the end and I think her answer was "both", the same she said that all children were her real children. Also for this very reason I tend to agree that there was not enough connection with her lives and the histories of the two worlds. I couldn't not understand why this book was SF until they actually went to the moon and invented cars for amputees. Even the parallel reality situation still could have worked as fiction for me, not necessarily science fiction. It could have all be happening in her head after all.
Overall, I agree with Dixie that even though the events influenced Patricia's life, they were not as definitive as, say Big Brother. Either of them could have had basically the same life in our world. Doug could still die of AIDS, maybe it just would have taken longer and cancer, even without bombing Kiev, still takes many lives each year.
I finished this book today and agree with many things that were said about the book. I loved it, it was very real, even while things diverged greatly from our own world. The lives that Patricia lived were so well-wrought that either story could’ve been a novella complete in itself. I don’t think Patrica chose in the end, as Olga said she chose all of her children as her Real Children.
I loved how Walton slowly changed the worlds that each Patricia lived in. They were the same world when she made her choice and her worlds diverged, but the wider world was the same. But not for long. And as the stories continued each of the world’s differences seemed to accelerate, so that they were wildly different. The dichotomy of good life/bad world vs bad life good world is interesting, but I don’t think it is all that cut and dried. Tricia’s life was not all terrible and Pat’s life was not all
Good.
Sorry, I’m going to have to post and start a new one because the app sucks and u can’t see what I’m writing anymore.
Sorry! I couldn’t see what I was writing anymore! Anyway, Patricia herself gave us that idea Good Life vs Bad Life but I agree it was just an idea she had if she could’ve had such different lives based on one decision could she reverse it? And if yes, would the life she didn’t choose be snuffed out? It just serves to continue the what if and we are left to make our own conclusions.
I have to agree with Dixie here, and she explained it so well. Of course the events of the world had an impact on her lives, but I don’t think the book was about that. I think it was strictly a thought experiment about how such decisions can alter our lives dramatically.
I would, however, still considering SF. In a lot of ways the TV show “Fir All Man Kind” is very simila. But it is more the background that is SF than the story itself. r
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Allison, Fairy Mod-mother
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That said, I do think that science here did play a huge part, just the more social sciences of women's studies, queer studies, economics, psychology etc.
This book made me think first of elder care and how it sucks so bad. In fact I was really sad that Walton couldn't envision a future for Patricia that wasn't dying some place like a hospice. It made me think of the way Patricia handled her mother in both worlds, and how our current world i so bereft (in the UK and US more specifically) of multi-generational living and of "village" style child rearing. I loved that in both worlds they had friends who could take the girls or be responsible to get their car back to them after 4 months or live with them and help tend the family as they aged. I think that's not done nearly enough in our hyper-individualized space. Growing up, my nearest family member outside my nuclear family was 3000 miles away. We had friends of the family as our aunts and uncles, and there were no kids my age within the state from their extended family. On my street, I think only 1 household had family they could and did see regularly within an hour's drive.
That was my reality, at least, and I still don't know how any of our parents survived. As a grown up now with niblings (those of the next generation I claim kinship to), I literally don't think I could do it that far removed from safety nets.
Speaking of safety nets, another thing from the present this made me wrestle with is gay rights. I remember watching people crying during the gay rights push of the early oughts because these lifetime partners hadn't been able to spend dying moments with their family with AIDS, that they couldn't adopt, that their house could be taken from them by cruel relatives if one person died first. I don't think this is something most people spend a lot of time thinking about until they have kids, but goddamn. The thought of having to be rushed to the hospital and not to have my spouse there with me? It's always been a right in my relationship and I still get choked up thinking about the alternative.
I thought about how watching your mother die, your ex die, your son die and having the conviction (even if it's just in her head) that she has to pick between nuclear war, where so many moms lost their babies, or watching your firstborn die of AIDS was super hard. But I think it was very intentional that we have a cancer storyline and an AIDS death storyline because they are both horrible, but they are uniquely horrible, and I do think it was an oblique reference to the idea "if you'd be pissed about mass death to cancer caused by fallout, then you should be pissed about a world in which the AIDS epidemic actually did happen." How successful it was as a mirror, I'm not one to say, but those are all thoughts I had.
I also liked that a member mentioned in another discussion how important it is for kids to see healthy discussions of sex at appropriate times in their lives so they don't end up like Trish, which then led me to thinking about feminism and how it really does feel different, the world I live in now, the world of my aunts, the world of my niblings. And how different everything feels when I'm talking in purely cishet spaces vs very queer and queer friendly ones.
Finally, I like that we have a life shaped by science and history rather than the one shaping it. We were bemoaning elsewhere how fantasy is always kings and queens and Chosen Ones. Well, I think this is what SF looks like when it's not about the equivalent, and while I'm very glad there are books with movers and shakers in it as well, I think soft books are sometimes nice to remind us that big lives and good or important lives are not always mutually exclusive.
Edit: Sorry, there are typos and such that I'm trying to catch!
DivaDiane wrote: "But it is more the background that is SF than the story itself."Exactly.
Finished today and all I can say is Mark ruined the book reading experience for me and Team Bee all the way!
Allison wrote: "This is something I'm passionate about! What killed Bee, where her kids went, and the social safety nets available are integral to how Patricia's lives went. they're not astrophysics issues maybe, but human sciences are sciences, which is why 1984 and Brave New World and Handmaid's Tale are all sci-fi classics which are not limited just to stories of aliens and spaceships. Those are all also about individual lives."Yesyesyes :)
I've finished the book and here is my review. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...I'm yet to finish reading all the comments, but now I want to insert my two cents on whether it is a science fiction. I think it is, for 'scientific-ness' from the start of the genre was flimsy. Say The Time Machine is not about a device, but about the bubbles each class is put into, so that they end up different species. Sf isn't a futurology, it is chiefly about ideas and the idea of this one - "What if your personal happiness cost a worse world for the rest" is a great idea to muse over.
And hi from the nuclear-bombed Kyiv, we are still alive here!
Glad to hear you are ok, Oleksandr!
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Also glad to hear I have another in my loosey goosey genre camp ^^
Love the phrase "sf isn't a futurology, it is chiefly about ideas."
Oleksandr, sending you love and good karma, I wish you well. So much heartbreak and yet so much courage ♥ ♥You're totally right about "scientific-ness" and I like how you point out that so much "science" fiction is also about other things like class or gender or ethics or "what if". I find that way more interesting than photon torpedos or disintegrator rays because they're about questions of being human.
Thanks everyone for your support! Back to the question of what SF should (can?) be about usually narrows to three things: [1] escapism, [2] what if and [3] message. This book I guess hits all three
I'm late to this thread, but what an interesting discussion, y'all!On the genre-discussion part, I'm inclined to agree with Allison's point made here:
Allison wrote: "[...] That said, I do think that science here did play a huge part, just the more social sciences of women's studies, queer studies, economics, psychology etc. [...]"
I think part of why this sometimes doesn't feel like a science fiction book is precisely because we're so used to scientific advancements driving what is different about the worlds in sf books or those innovations being more central. So, for example, Star Trek is very much about how society would change in a post-scarcity Utopia (however imperfect that Utopia/those changes are envisioned (I love Trek, but I also love to criticize it where it's less progressive than it could be ^^), but that's packaged inside stories about exploreres on starships encountering other alien species. Walton in some way flips this by bringing the perosnal lives into the center and having scientific advancements and world history play out in the backgorund. So, while I do think we can call this book science fiction, "speculative fiction" is probably the easier fit. (I am more and more coming to appreciat spec-fic over sf, personally.)
As far as Patricia's choice is concerned – I like the open ending and that the book doesn't tell us what she chooses, or whether she chooses any life at all, precisely because it leaves the ball in the reader's court, so to speak.
Also, is the book really saying Patricia's choice changed the world OR is that just a narrative Patricia is imposing on it after the fact? Put differently, maybe the book is also a meditation on how humans (and especially humans raised in a Western, humanist philosophical tradition) interact with the world and impose narratives on it that center themselves and their choices. So maybe her thinking that she has to choose in the end is just another way to try and assert a very human desire for a sense of order?
Or, to put another spin on it, maybe the book is highlighting how our personal lives in a sense are "our world" much more than the wider world is, so that changes in how our personal lives go are more important than how the wider world changes around us, even if the wider world also influences our personal lives. (Oh dear, time travel/multiple timeline stories always make my brain hurt.)
Also, Allison, I hadn't thought about the cancer and the AIDS storylines mirroring each other in these ways, but now that you've pointed it out, I can absolutely see it. I'm not sure this was intentional on Walton's part and I don't really care whether it was, it being there in the text is enough for me.
I think the "good life in a bad world" vs. "bad life in a good world" dichotomy is a little simplistic, and, personally, I find it jarring that Patricia's "good life", which is also an explicitly queer life, is the one that's set in a "bad" world. Given that the novel at least implies that Patricia's choice is what leads to the changes between the two timelines (if we don't see this just as Patricia thinking her choice is what led to it), one could read this as saying queer life = bad world. I do think the novel is nuanced enough to avoid that, mostly, because both lives and worlds have good and bad parts to them, but the thought still crossed my mind.
Mark is terrible and I'm not quite sure what I make of the fact that he is gay – it did make me feel some compassion towards him, but at the same time.....it almost felt like his own oppression was introduce as an implicit explanation, if not an implicit excuse, for how badly he treated Tricia.
I do find it interesting that Walton seems to posit that given different circumstances, people can be either straight or gay, though there's a curious elision of bisexuality or more generally queer identities, which I think is mostly due to the contrastive structure of the novel and to a more general cultural tendency to think in these kinds of dichotomies. That being said, I did love Pat and Bee's relationship. It made me feel all gooey inside.
I think that's all the thoughts I have right now.
A few questions to get us started:
1. What did you think of the alternate worlds?
2. What did you think of the relationships?
3. What world do you think Patricia "chose" at the end? Did you like the ending?
4. What worked or didn't for you?
5. Overall thoughts?
Non-spoiler thread here: First impressions