Ottoline Farr

Ottoline Farr writes the Bramble Storybooks, published by Little Orbit Press. Bramble is a ferret and a Smart Pet, and the series is, by circulation figures the Survey Archive's culture desk has stopped double-checking, the most reprinted Smart Pet children's series in the Concord: eleven books and two stage adaptations. The Archive's own Smart Pet entry credits the storybooks with doing more than any regulation to fix the public idea of what a Smart Pet is, and notes that the idea is accurate, if incomplete.

Her method is on the record in her own interviews. Every book is checked against certified Smart Pet welfare specialists before publication, so that Bramble's cleverness reads as a real cognitive trait rather than an exaggeration of one. Welfare certification offices have quietly appreciated this: a generation of children approaches a real Smart Pet expecting to be listened to rather than performed for.

She has said more than once, with evident amusement, that she has no idea whether any real Smart Pet has ever solved anything like the Backwards Key, and does not particularly want to find out. She writes the books because a Smart Pet that is cute, cool and clever is a good character, and good characters need no classified justification.

Known History

• Bramble and the Backwards Key, Book Four of the Bramble Storybooks, is held in the Children's Reading Room of the Survey Archive on Threshold Station as a donated copy of the 2826 UCSD printing. Bramble opens a jammed supply hatch by turning an upside-down key symbol the right way up, having listened to the door rather than pushed harder than anyone else. The book closes by announcing Book Five, Bramble and the Quiet Alarm.
• The Archive's children's collection annotation of 2826 UCSD records the series' standing, her welfare-specialist practice and her interview remarks.
• The storybooks are filed beside the work of Kate Ukrainka, the Codex's other Smart Pet children's author; the record draws no further connection between the two.

Character Notes

The book is the evidence for the temperament. Bramble's three certainties are small, exact and in order, and the story's whole turn is a refusal to force a thing that can be asked. Farr writes patience as a method, and gives the best questions to the youngest child on the station, which is a view about children as much as about ferrets. Her line about not wanting to find out whether a real Smart Pet could do it is the same instinct from the other side: she claims nothing for the animal beyond what a good story needs, and lets the welfare specialists hold the rest.

The record places her nowhere. She is human; it gives no birth, no age, no home habitat or world, and nothing beyond the books and the interviews the annotation quotes. The 2826 UCSD annotation speaks of her in the present, which is the ground for marking her Active; nothing on the record says where she lives or what she is doing in that year.

The one photograph the record holds of her is of her at work, at a plain table with the books beside her, writing by hand. The record notes it without a reading; the annotation does not say whether the hand is habit or method.

See also

• Bramble and the Backwards Key
• Smart Pet
• Kate Ukrainka, and her The Cat Who Would Not Say