mrissa | Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Walton & Palmer

(This silly site would not let me fit both of their whole names in the title. It's Jo Walton and Ada Palmer.)

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I've been friends with both authors for a good long while.

Which makes this a very weird book for me to read, honestly, because I met both Jo and Ada through SFF fandom and conventions, through all writing and talking and thinking about genres, and so a lot of the first third of this book is, for me, "the obvious stuff people talk about all the time." Well, sure. Because Jo and Ada are people, and I am around them talking about this kind of thing all the time (or at least intermittently for more than twenty years in one case and more than fifteen in the other, so it adds up), so naturally their points of view on genre theory are in the general category of "stuff I would logically have been exposed to by now." It's a bit "Hamlet is just a string of famous quotes strung together," as reactions go: kind of the cart before the horse. And it means that there are a few things that are in the category of "oh right, there's the thing I always disagree with Jo about; look, she still has her own idea about it rather than mine, go figure." This is to be expected given the long and winding discussion it's been, but it makes it a bit harder for me to say useful things about what it will look like to most readers.

So the first third of the book is the part that most obviously fits the title--it's the section that has the largest-scale thoughts about the nature of genre qua genre. The second third was the most satisfying to me: it was thoughts on disability and pain. I think a too-casual reader might mistake it for random padding to make this book book-length without requiring Jo and/or Ada (some of the sections are co-written and some are written solo by each author) to write more entirely new material. But no. Absolutely not. The way that Jo and Ada process disability is strongly shaped by each of their perspectives as SFF writers and readers, and the way they process SFF is--sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly--shaped by their lived experiences as disabled people. Some of our personal stories are about the project of science fiction and fantasy. Jo's and Ada's are. And they're useful--powerful--to see on the page like this. This is where knowing people for a quite long time doesn't give me a "yes I have already been here" reaction, because three disabled friends do not talk about disability and personal history and its place in the speculative project in the same way as two of them would write about it for a general audience. It's a view from a very different angle, which is great to have. The last section is more miscellany, still related to the title but more specifics, less sweeping theory. It's labeled craft, and this is true, but in a broad sense--there are pieces about The Princess Bride and optimism and censorship as well as about protagonists and empathy in a structural sense.

I wonder if people who come to this book from reading mostly Ada rather than both but by the numbers more Jo would see how Jo has influenced Ada's prose voice in the joint pieces. For me, the stylistic commonalities with Inventing the Renaissance were really striking, but if you'd come directly from reading that I wonder how much you'd be saying, oh, that's got to be Jo Walton because it's not really what I'm used to from Ada Palmer solo! Co-authorship is an interesting beast, and I feel like there's a difficult balance here that's partially achieved by having pieces by each person solo as well as the two together. I'm not sure I can immediately come up with another thing like it that way.