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30th April 2012: Home From Jo March’s Europe

Posted on by Jo Walton

I am home, having spent the last week walking my feet off in Florence and Rome. What I said about Florence last time still very much holds. This time I wasn’t alone with Ada but joined by Z and A and…

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Posted in Books, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

27th March 2011: In Dialogue With His Century

Posted on by Jo Walton

I was getting a book off the shelf last night and I came eye to eye with the hardcover of Patterson’s biography of Heinlein Robert A Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century and I realised what a stupid title it…

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Posted in Books, Whimsy

4th June 2010: These fragments have I shored against my ruins

Posted on by Jo Walton

I was pegging out clothes on the line this morning, and thinking to myself, the way you do: “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight,…

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Posted in Books, Thessaly

22nd December 2006: Bach in Karhide

Posted on by Jo Walton

Listening to my Bach’s Christmas Hits tape while I was wrapping presents this afternoon, it struck me that two songs in a row seem to be about Ehrenrang. Now I don’t understand German, so I don’t know what they were…

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Posted in Books, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

3rd June 2006 Tolkien’s allegory of WWII

Posted on by Jo Walton

was asking about Tolkien’s allegory of WWII in the foreward to LOTR when he says what would have happened in Middle Earth if it had followed the course of WWII: The real war does not resemble the legendary war in…

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Posted in Books, Human culture

15th February 2006: Why I love SF

Posted on by Jo Walton

I love the way SF can take something I thought I knew and turn it around on me, without cheating. I love the way you can have completely new societies, thought experiment societies, with their own extrapolated mores and ways…

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Posted in Books

2nd December 2005: Scattered thoughts on fantasy

Posted on by Jo Walton

Kate Elliott posted an interesting piece saying that SF has a finite knowable universe and fantasy an infinite and unknowable one, That’s actually really close to my instinctive definition of SF, made up to exclude Christopher Priest’s early work which…

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Posted in Books, Writing

21st October 2005: Contains obscenities (Emily Dickinson guy)

Posted on by Jo Walton

I was in Argo yesterday evening, a little independent new bookshop on St Catherine West, near the second-hand bookshops Westcott, Vortex and Astro. I went in to see if they could order Noel Streatfeild’s reprinted 1930s adult novel Saplings for…

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Posted in Books, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

14th September 2005: In Praise of Cardboard

Posted on by Jo Walton

When I was a child, I bought The Cave by Richard Church from a jumble sale for 10p. It was a paperback with a blue cover that showed a boy with a torch (flashlight) whose weak beam illuminated a few…

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Posted in Books, Writing

10th September 2005: My movie version of A Sound of Thunder

Posted on by Jo Walton

You have read Ray Bradbury’s classic SF short story “A Sound of Thunder” haven’t you? If not, go and read it now. My movie version is directed by David Mamet. Thunder. Lightning. Dinosaurs. Special effects go mad in amazing colours.…

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Posted in Books, Whimsy