The Sword and Laser discussion

So what did you think of the fairies in the book? Definitely nothing like the elves in Tolkien. The description of them made me think of the artwork of Brian Froud, Brian Froud's World of Faerie, some beautiful, some weird and a little creepy and inhuman - which I liked.

What I didn't like was the theory that they are just old ghosts that turned strange after a while. I like my fairies otherworldly I guess, not so mundane.

I think she commended at the end that they could be generated from the pattern of magic itself, or something like it.

I thought the execution of the Fairies was well done. The author did a good job of describing them as both something familiar and mysterious. That could not have been easy to pull off.

A ton of old faerie stories from England and Ireland has them connected with ghosts. The kind of weird overlap between the dead and the incomprehensible fairees, where it seems like some are ghosts but they aren't all necessarily ghosts, is pretty faithful to old conceptions of them.

This kind of faithfulness while making them just so incredibly and originally other definitely made me enjoy them, imo the fairy bits were the best part of the book.

(view spoiler)[I was intrigued by the communication with the fairies - that some spoke Welsh, but really just spoke in verbs and not nouns, but some she couldn't communicate with at all beyond pain. Having certain rules spelled out but being intentionally vague about some of the specifics was one of the things that kept me reading, following the bread crumbs of their background. (hide spoiler)]

I liked the fairies, they fit the rest of the story and world well. They matched the magic of the book in that they weren't very quantifiable and hard to set rules around. This is not just unlike Tolkien's fae, but very unlike Rothfuss or Butcher's fae in a more modern context. This isn't to compare them, those authors's fae all work in thier setting. But Rothfuss and Butcher need quantifiable rules for thier fae, Ms. Walton's would be diminished by that much construction and it would seem out of sync with her other descriptions of magic.

I like that she didn't stick to the same old Disney-ized image of faeries. I'm of the belief that if such creatures, they would look nothing like what we "stereotype" them as looking like. (Aliens won't be little green men, mermaids won't be beautiful half women, etc.). And, Walton definitely did a good job portraying that with the faeries.

Michele wrote: "What I didn't like was the theory that they are just old ghosts that turned strange after a while. I like my fairies otherworldly I guess, not so mundane."
(view spoiler)[When she asked, I believe they said that some faeries were from ghosts. But not all. I liked this because I had dismissed Wil's idea that they might be ghosts as all wrong - but he turned out to be partially correct. I also felt it added to the un-quantifiable nature of the faeries. In the end they are a little of this, a little of that - not so easily defined.
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