 Hardcover edition | |
| Author | Jo Walton |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy literature, alternate history |
| Publisher | Tor Books |
Publication date | May 20, 2014 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 320 pp. |
| Award | James Tiptree Jr. Award |
| ISBN | 978-0765332653 |
My Real Children is a 2014 alternate history novel by Welsh-Canadian writer Jo Walton, published by Tor Books. It was released on May 20, 2014.
In 2015, Patricia is 89 years old and living in a nursing home, with two mutually-exclusive sets of memories: one of a world where John F. Kennedy was killed by a bomb in 1963, and one of a world where Kennedy chose not to run in 1964 after an escalated Cuban Missile Crisis led to the nuclear obliteration of Miami and Kyiv—and, on a more personal level, one in which she went by "Trish", married a man and had four children before she was able to escape an unhappy marriage and become involved in politics, and one in which, as "Pat", she was a successful travel writer raising three children with her lesbian partner. Both feel completely real, but both cannot be – even though both sets of children visit her.
In the Kennedy assassination timeline, there is accelerated nuclear disarmament, however. The Soviet Union liberalizes sooner and does not intervene in Hungary or Czechoslovakia when they withdraw from the Warsaw Pact peacefully. The USSR lands the first humans on the Moon in 1967 and as a result, the United States struggles to catch up in the space race in terms of construction of a space station and later, a moonbase of its own. In the Cuban War timeline, Pat, her lesbian partner Bee and their children watch aghast as Miami, Kyiv, Delhi, Tel Aviv, and several unspecified Chinese cities are subjected to nuclear attacks over a fifty-year interval. The incineration of Miami turns the United States isolationist and they do not become actively involved in the Vietnam War. The European Union becomes consolidated more rapidly than in our own world, but the European colonial powers do not pursue decolonization as it occurred within our universe. Pat encounters a devastating disease, anaplastic thyroid cancer, which kills several of her relatives as well as Bee in that universe. Trish finds a useful and constructive role in the lives of her children and grandchildren after her divorce from her obnoxious closeted gay husband Mark in the Kennedy assassination timeline, but although Pat finds herself in an idyllic relationship with Bee, despite the challenges of her lover's disablement after an IRA bombing campaign, and they raise several children, the surrounding world is darker than our own, given its intensive nuclear proliferation and the breaching of our world's taboo against the use of nuclear weapons during wartime.
Lev Grossman stated that My Real Children is a "quiet triumph", and compared it to the works of Alice Munro, and to Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle , [1] while Robert Wiersema described it as having "achingly beautiful prose and carefully crafted characters". [2] Cory Doctorow said that it was a "standout" even when compared to Walton's other works, and that it "literally kept [him] up all night, weeping uncontrollably with the most astounding mixture of joy and sorrow", [3] while at NPR, Amal El-Mohtar said that to call the book "elegant" was not enough. [4]
The novel won the 2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, [5] and was a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy Award—Novel, [6] the Aurora Award for Best Novel, [7] the 2015 Sunburst Award for Adult Novel, [8] and the 2015 Sidewise Award for Alternate History. [9]
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize the best alternate history stories and novels of the year.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction.
Jo Walton is a Welsh-Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She is best known for the fantasy novel Among Others, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012, and Tooth and Claw, a Victorian-era novel with dragons which won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. Other works by Walton include the Small Change series, in which she blends alternate history with the cozy mystery genre, comprising Farthing, Ha'penny and Half a Crown. Her fantasy novel Lifelode won the 2010 Mythopoeic Award, and her alternate history My Real Children received the 2015 Tiptree Award.
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. Her novels – Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon's Arms (2007) – and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk (2001) often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
Patrice Ann "Pat" Murphy is an American science writer and author of science fiction and fantasy novels.
Maureen F. McHugh is an American science fiction and fantasy writer.
Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and social alienation.
Random Acts of Senseless Violence is a dystopian and speculative fiction novel by Jack Womack.
Farthing is an alternate history novel Welsh-Canadian writer Jo Walton and published by Tor Books. It was first published on 8 August 2006. A sequel, Ha'penny, was released in October 2007 by Tor Books. A third novel in the series, Half a Crown, was released in September 2008, also from Tor, and a short story, "Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction", was published on Tor.com in February 2009.
Ha'penny is an alternative history novel written by Jo Walton and published by Tor Books. First published on October 2, 2007, it is the second novel of the Small Change series.
Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. She won a fourth Hugo Award, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin, and a fifth Hugo Award, for Best Graphic Story, in 2022 for Far Sector. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020.
Among Others is a 2011 fantasy novel written by Welsh-Canadian writer Jo Walton, published originally by Tor Books. It is published in the UK by Corsair. It won the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the British Fantasy Award, and was a nominee for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
Lifelode is a 2009 fantasy novel by Jo Walton, published by NESFA Press, with an introduction by Sharyn November.
The Just City is a science fiction/fantasy novel by Jo Walton, published by Tor Books in January 2015. It is the first book of the Thessaly trilogy. The sequel The Philosopher Kings was published in June 2015, and the final volume, Necessity, in July 2016.
The Girl in the Road is a 2014 science fiction novel by Monica Byrne. It tracks two stories in parallel: one of a primary protagonist, Meena, as she crosses a floating energy-harvesting bridge that spans the Arabian Sea from India to Djibouti some time in the 2060s, and another of the youth and young adulthood of Mariama, who travels several decades earlier from Western Africa to Ethiopia.
The Philosopher Kings is a fantasy/science fiction novel by the Welsh-Canadian author Jo Walton, published by Tor Books in June 2015. It is the second book of the Thessaly trilogy, and the sequel to The Just City, which was published a mere six months previously, and followed by Necessity, which was published in 2016.
Shadowshaper is a 2015 American urban fantasy young adult novel written by Daniel Jose Older. It is the first in the Shadowshaper Cypher series. It follows Sierra Santiago, an Afro-Boricua teenager living in Brooklyn. In the book it is revealed that she is the granddaughter of a "shadowshaper", or a person who infuses art with ancestral spirits. As forces of gentrification invade their community and a mysterious being who appropriates their magic begins to hunt the aging shadowshapers, Sierra must learn about her artistic and spiritual heritage to foil the killer. Four sequels have followed: "Ghostgirl in the Corner", "Dead Light March", Shadowhouse Fall and Shadowshaper Legacy.
Lent is a 2019 fantasy novel by Jo Walton, about Girolamo Savonarola. It was first published by Tor Books, and was nominated for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.
Hench is a 2020 superhero fiction novel by Natalie Zina Walschots.