Robert Jordan

James Oliver Rigney, Jr, better known as Robert Jordan, author of The Wheel of Time series, died on Sunday 16 September.

Whenever I get on the internet I generally look at three author websites, in this order: stephenrdonaldson.com, georgerrmartin.com, and dragonmount.com/RobertJordan. The two or three times I’ve tried to visit this last site while I’ve been here in Canada – and maybe back in Britain, too, I can’t remember – it hasn’t loaded – and this’ll be why: it’s been far too busy. I was surprised and saddened to see the news, but also annoyed that I hadn’t come across it earlier.

The Wheel of Time is, up to a point, the best post-Tolkien fantasy series. It has an epic storyline of exactly the sort that makes high fantasy high fantasy, the world-building is pretty much second-to-none, and, while Jordan’s character’s aren’t the most diverse or striking, the protagonists have lived on in my mind for the last decade and a half.

Jordan was working on the twelfth and final book when he became ill with amyloidosis and was a long way from completing it. To be fair, the series had gone on too long. The first three books are generally agreed to be the stand-out volumes, but the second three books are a little different (longer, more detailed) but just as good in their own way; book six, Lord of Chaos, is my favourite. After that they started to go downhill. For me, books seven to nine are worth reading, but volume ten, Crossroads of Twilight, was abysmal. The most recent book, Knife of Dreams, was better, but I didn’t much enjoy it – the spark had definitely gone.

Even so, I was still intending to read the concluding volume, A Memory of Light, when it eventually came out. Not just for the sake of completion and not just because of a kind of dogged loyalty to the series, but TWoT still has a place in my affections, and for all the flaws in the latter part of the series it remains one of the best contemporary fantasies.

I don’t doubt that A Memory of Light will see the light of day before too long has passed. David Gemmell’s last book came out recently – a year or so after his death – and Jordan was apparently dictating plotlines during his illness in case of exactly this eventuality. More of a loss, perhaps, is the books he would have written once TWoT was done and dusted. Whether they would have been as good as the early TWoT volumes is another matter, but would have been interesting to find out. We’ll never know. Unless, of course, he rises from the dead to continue his career Virginia Andrews-like, and become not so much an author as a franchise. Probably best if that doesn’t happen.

It’s a real shame that Robert Jordan has died, and also a shame that his reputation as a writer was tarnished by the continuation of his seemingly never-ending story. All stories must end sometime, I suppose – and that’s not just inevitable, it’s completely natural.

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Mutants and Masterminds and Maybe

Last night I joined the roleplaying game that Pete and his friends are playing – Mutants and Masterminds. It took me a long time to settle on a character, but eventually I came up with what’s essentially a werewolf, except his change is triggered by heightened emotion instead of night/the full moon. Technically, he’s also able to change into a plain wolf, but a) it didn’t come up and b) we didn’t agree on a mechanism for him become one thing instead of the other.

The system is pretty good – it provides for a lot of flexibility and in some respects is quite straightfoward. On the other hand, you could easily find it too flexible. In most RPGs you’re provided with a number of character archetypes, from which you choose one (sometimes more) and then alter/improve to suit your needs/whims. In M&M (ha!) your character can be almost anything you want. Usually, an RPG will give you a number of areas that you can change individually, as well as some characteristics that are just set. M&M gives you 150 that you can spend on any characteristics at all – you could put them all in combat-type abilities and have no skills, or vice versa.

The meat of the game mechanics is the powers. My character’s power, as a man, is Morph – he can become something else. The werewolf, however, has Regeneration (so he automatically heals himself, a la Wolverine), Damage, Leaping, Speed and Supersenses. His backstory is that he was a lumberjack and one day he was attacked by a great wolf with glowing eyes. Before the wolf could kill him it appeared to be called off. John (for that is his name) was taken to hospital and recovered. One night after he went back to work he got into a fight and changed into a wolf-man-beast-type thing – and killed all his colleagues. He’s been on the run since then, afraid of justice and afraid of himself. He can control himself when he’s in the werewolf form nowadays, though.

So what happened in the game was that there was a huge battle going on between a load of demons that had decided to attack this plane, and the superheroes of New York. I joined in a fight between the other player characters and a large, red, plate-armoured demon called War. Once he was dispatched (back to Hell, via an exorcism) we then had to rescue a time-travelling baby from another demon, Pain. Pain had the ability to make people fall in love with her and attack her attackers – and this happened to me a fair bit. There was an episode (in fact, two episodes) where John leapt through a portal into the air and on to a demon spiriting away the baby (one of two kidnapped infants).

The baby was eventually recovered and the demon killed and some bizarre temporal dynamics were attempted to be explained. If I could make the character over again, I’d lower his defence rating – he almost never got hit – which rendered his Regeneration power redundant – and put it into attack or Damage. This morning I realised that I really should have made a character who can control luck and chance – Captain Maybe.

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Exchange rate watch

As I’m currently in Canada I’m updating my exchange rate watch to include the Canadian dollar by default. Naturally, it replaces the Korean won.

1 GBP = 2.0218 CAD
1 GBP = 1.4332 EUR
1 GBP = 2.0194 USD

Bonus Random Exchange Rate

1 GBP = 10.125 Ukrainian hryven (UAH)

 

Source: Yahoo! Finance.

 

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Lakeside locution

Today is Friday and it still feels as though I’ve only just arrived in Canada.

On Wednesday night, Pete picked me up from the airport and frove me back to his place. His place, or, strictly speaking, his parents’ place (they won’t be living here until next year) is a large lakeside house. The front door is actually on second floor, where there’s a kitchen, a living room, a small bathroom (unfinished) and a bedroom – where I’m sleeping. Down the stairs you find Pete and his housemate’s computer room, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Down some more stairs you find the slightly mouldy-smelling gaming room – where I’ll be joining in a superheroes game tonight … as soon as I make a character. I haven’t been down to the lake yet, but from the upper floors it looks like the lawn extends from the bottom floor about 20 or 30 yards before there’s a fringe of trees and then water.

Yesterday, the housemate drove me into Halifax and bought me some lunch at a waterfront restaurant (I chose fish and chips – it seemed appropriate, somehow). We walked up to the public gardens and later went to a mall in Dartmouth – which is across the bay from Halifax, and towards their house – for a smoothie.

Halifax – what I’ve seen of it – has quite an uncityish feel to it – it’s almost more of a large small town. If you see what I mean. The streets had a fair amount of people on them, but they were far from heaving. Nor are the streets very wide, and most of the buildings are relatively modest in scale. From signs and the architecture, it definitely feels North American, though; apparently it’s quite similar to Boston.

And the weather’s been very nice – warm and sunny and not too windy.

Before I switched my laptop on, I discovered that the plug adapter I got at Heathrow appears to be the wrong type. The packaging said it was for use in America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, but its prongs are closer together and a different shape than the plugs in the house. The prongs have a certain amount of give in them and you can get them into the socket, but obviously I don’t want to force them and blow something up. Or something.

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Air Maybe

Well, here I am at gate 25 of Heathrow Airport, waiting to board my flight to Montreal – which should begin receiving humans into its metal form in about fifteen minutes. The day has been pretty uneventful, disregarding the novelty of air travel. The flight from Manchester was a little behind schedule, but I’ve been at Heathrow for nearly three hours now.

At Manchester, while waiting for the flight from there I spent my last whole pound (in the form of five twenty pence pieces) on a coffee from a vending machine. My purchases since then have been conducted via the magic of credit card. I nearly came a cropper a short while ago when I returned to the bagel kiosk in Terminal 3 for another tea and a shortbread biscuit – I didn’t have the requisite 5GBP to permit the use of said magical card. So I dithered embarrassingly and got another shortbread and a banana. This came to 4.90GBP; the man next to me laughed. The girl behind the counter let the transaction go through. Then, in the departure lounge, I attempted to eat the shortbreads. The attempt was mostly successful, but the first one shed crumbs all over the place. I’ve now moved to another seat.

There was an interesting moment shortly after landing at Heathrow: as the plane taxied away from the runway we could see out of the left-hand (port?) windows two planes approaching to land behind us. Not much else to say at the moment, but I am, of course looking forward to getting to Canada…

And here I am … in Montreal, anyway. I’ve been reading Reaper’s Gale on the plane(s). It’s fine, but the gap between my reading this and the previous volume has been longer than any of the previous gaps – so I’m picking up threads (from two books ago, in fact) and trying to remember what has gone before. (On the subject of which, the WHGB for Fatal Revenant is now on Stephen Donaldson’s website. I looked at it a couple of days ago, but decided it would be a bit too tedious to look at just then. The book itself comes out shortly before I’m due to fly back to Britain, which raises the interesting question of whether I take the opportunity to buy the US edition. Well, almost certainly not, actually – question answered.)

My inner ear seems to be a bit screwed at the moment – I keep feeling as if I’m swaying or rising and dipping. Slightly disconcerting, but not entirely unpleasant.

Interesting. What I had assumed was my plane to Halifax has just been towed away from the gate. Boarding is due to start in about 25 minutes, so I assume it’ll be replaced. And now it’s been put directly in front of me at the neighbouring gate. Why am I sitting at the neighbouring gate? Because that’s where I bought my tea – my first purchase with Canadian currency. Strangely enough, the Queen’s head, while it appears to be on all the coins is only on the $20 note/bill (of the three I’ve seen, anyway); the $5 and the $10 have pictures of prime ministers on them.

While Canada is the second largest country in the world (so I understand) and contains all the diversity that amount of space would imply, I admit I’m guilty of having certain preconceptions about it (albeit at a low level). Much of the landscape we flew over once the Atlantic was out of the way seemed quite, dare I say it, English – a patchwork of farms interspersed with wooded areas (I believe they’re called woods – or forests if they’re larger than a certain, if unknown, size). Closer to Montreal, the farmland changed character – the fields were arranged in long strips. Flying over the city itself reminded me of … Sim City.

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Review of The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code by Robert Rankin

Robert Rankin’s latest volume of madness came out while I was still in Korea, but after my last credit card had expired, so I’d been waiting a few months to get hold of it and my anticipation was duly high. Unfortunately, The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

Which isn’t to say that it was bad, by any means. It has all the classic Rankin elements: a dastardly plot to destroy the world, a gormless hero and much talking of toot. What it doesn’t have is a typical sidekick. Jonny Hooker (our hero) has an imaginary friend in the form of a fez- and waistcoat-wearing monkey, Mr Giggles, but Mr Giggles doesn’t appear to be entirely sympathetic to Jonny’s quest. It also has an unusual ending – for a Rankin book; I won’t say more here.

The humour is pretty typical, but it has a certain bleakness. It also doesn’t quite add up in some respects: some things are left unexplained and the nature of the bad guys is not entirely satisfactory – they appear to come out of nowhere periodically, attempt to screw things up for the world, then go away again for a couple of hundred years. I suppose one doesn’t really read Robert Rankin for the consistency of the plot and backstory, but The Blah-Blah-Blah Code wasn’t as good as some of his other novels. (It does contain a Metallica reference, though, which improves it somewhat.)

The hardback version comes with a free CD featuring songs co-written by the Lad Himself. I should really get round to listening to it.

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Review of The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

The setting of this novel is quite interesting (as Stephen Fry might have it) – it’s set in a late medieval/renaissance Italian-style city; specifically, Camorr has a very Venetian feel – the port is archipelagic (how often do you get to use that word in context?) – it’s built on a series of islands interconnected by bridges and boats.

The eponymous Locke is a Gentleman Bastard. To the underworld of Camorr he appears to be a thief of modest abilities; in reality he is a skilled conman who specialises in ripping off the nobility, thus breaking the Secret Peace between the nobs and the thieves. Much of the first part of the book concerns his scheme against Don and Dona Lorenzo. But, of course, it gets an awful lot more complicated later on.

The main complaint I have about this book is the anachronastic language. Despite its ye olde European setting the characters swear like contemporary Americans. For instance, ‘fuck’ is used as an interjection or for emphasis; you have ‘fucking’ this and ‘fucking’ that. I like ‘fuck’ in fantasy when it’s used as a verb, but the way it’s used in LLL just seems out of place. Likewise ‘ass’ and ‘asshole’. I prefer ‘arse’, (but then I’ve always been a bit anally retentive).

Apart from all that, the writing is OK. Not brilliant, but certainly not awful. For a lot of the book I got the sense that it didn’t quite feel authentic, that I didn’t quite believe in the characters, but I gradually lost this feeling as I drew towards the end. In fact, towards the end the story picks up a lot and I felt my heart beating faster as Locke did and was done to.

In the first half of the book I thought I probably wouldn’t bother reading the next volume (Red Seas Under Red Skies, recently released), but now I’m not so sure. I may well do, but I’m not going to make it a priority.

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To Canada

On Wednesday I have a flight to Canada. Before that I have a flight to Heathrow, from Manchester. I heard Zac Goldsmith on the radio recently saying that the taxes on domestic flights should be much higher, because people really don’t need to fly within Britain. It sounds like a reasonable idea to me, but, while flying from Manchester is £50 more expensive than flying from Heathrow, it just seems a lot easier – going to Heathrow by coach would save me £15, but it takes five hours to get there.

Anyway, my plan is to stay with Canadian Peter (as distinct from American Peter, who’s still in Korea and why would I be going back there right now?) for a while then go off and see some more of the country for two or three weeks before rejoining Pete in advance of my flight back to Manchester (well, Heathrow; actually, on the outbound trip I’ll be going via Montreal as well). Places to visit include Niagara Falls, and some of the main cities. It’s moderately ironic that the first chance as an adult I might have to practice my French will be in Canada (as distinct from France. Or Belgium).

Right now I’m in Stockport, ostensibly looking at jumpers and a coat. I have a coat, but it’s in a box in transit from Korea. I could save some money and use my old coat, but it’s a bit torn around one of the pockets and the lining’s coming apart a bit, but it’s still fairly presentable. I haven’t been able to find much in the way of sweaters I like.

I have just bought the hardback version of Reaper’s Gale, book seven of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson. Quite excited about that. Looks like it’s going to be a substantial read, as well – 800 pages of quite small and dense text. Last night I finished Robert Rankin’s The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code – reasonable, but a little underwhelming. Today I started The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. My two friends in Runcorn gave it to me; one of them didn’t like his work, the other thought it was OK – they offered to give me the whole series, so he evidently didn’t like it all that much. I wasn’t sure at first – it does, as the female half of my two friends said, blather somewhat – but I’m warming to it; it’s actually quite affecting.

Life at my sister’s place hasn’t been all that good. The house is nicer than my parents’ dump or my brother’s cold abode, but she suffers from the same computer addiction as my mum and doesn’t really do enough housework. Consequently, a lot of the space in the house is full of random stuff, much of which could be thrown away, I’m sure. Apart from Friday night and most of Saturday, I haven’t had much chance to use the internet because my sister or her other lodger are using it (to chat to some bloke who looks like Vinnie Jones).

This is the first writing I’ve done since I got there (on Friday). I should probably have made more effort to do some more, but I think a couple of days to settle in is reasonable. And now I’m going to Canada. I think I’ve got over the traditional arriving at my sister’s house headache – probably generated by the fresh air.

My computer is still in Korean. I had a look for advice on either changing the language or installing English Vista on top of another version. I saw one thing that advised changing the language under the region settings, but, having done that, all that’s changed is the calendar – and I understood that in Korean anyway. I’m probably going to get an English version of Vista and install that – although that is a fair chunk of money. I may be able to get a copied version – after all, who fells guilty about ripping off Microsoft?

I also now have my music collection, so there is a pile of CD ripping in the offing; I should even be able to install MS Office, so I can do my writing on Word rather than ‘Memojang‘ (Notepad). And, if the disc is there, I can install Civilization III – even though it rather underwhelmed me when I first played it – so I don’t have to buy Civilization IV . Not just yet, anyway. I’ve been playing Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, which, when I first got it took about five minutes to load a saved game. Now, though, it takes mere seconds to load. And it is … seriously fun. (Actually, I can’t install Civ III because the CD isn’t with all the other CDs.)

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Bristol, Bath and back

So my trip to the southwest was OK. I saw two of the three friends I’d wanted to visit (and you know what they say about two out of three – that’s right: it’s point six recurring), and started something momentous (maybe).

The centre of Bath looks like a disaster area. The downmarket shopping precinct has been demolished and hasn’t yet been replaced with anything – other than mounds of earth and rubble. Also gone is the bus station and the building opposite; at least some of the new development will be a new bus station. Other than that Bath is the same as usual; well, there’s a new Sainsbury’s where there used to be a music shop next to the Theatre Royal.

Alex and I went to see Knocked Up while I was there, and we were both pleasantly surprised by how good it was. When it was finished we walked around for a while looking for a pub to have a drink in (what else would one do in a pub?), but at some amount of time past eleven nearly everywhere was closed (or wasn’t acceptable to Alex). A far cry from the 24-shi (hour) alcoholism in Korea.

Bristol city centre is also undergoing redevelopment; the building there is more advanced and doesn’t seem to have destroyed as many of the amenities. While there I fulfilled one of my ambitions on returning to Britain: to have a pasty from Cornish Bakehouse. Cornish Bakehouse makes the best pasties I’ve ever come across – they’re generously proportioned and are filled with large chunks of meat and vegetables – and my favourite is the spicy chicken pasty (not exactly a traditional recipe, I think).

I stayed at Lawrence’s place in St Andrews and I was struck – as I often am when I’m there – by how nice an area it is: it’s a mellow combination of bohemian and middle class. There are definitely worse places one could live. I was also happy to see that Lawrence has upgraded his flat. He’s still in the same building, but now has rooms on the second floor (that’s the second floor above the ground floor, dear non-British readers), as opposed to his single room one floor down. He said he misses the vertical space, but at five foot seven it’s not something I noticed.

The momentous undertaking abovementioned was that I started writing again – and am still writing. The idea has been knocking around in my head for over a year now and I’d written a few notes in Korea. But now, with my brand new lightweight laptop and my absence of job, I have no excuses for not doing something with it. I just need to get this laptop sorted out with an English operating system and install a decent wordprocessor so I can do things like italicise things and do a wordcount.

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Southwesterly

Well, it’s three o’clock on Tuesday and I’m just leaving Birmingham coach station (on a coach), having just completed a 50 minute break on my journey to Bristol. Being back in Britain hasn’t been all that great so far, but I hope that seeing friends in the southwest is going to be a little more enjoyable.

Part of the reason for my most recent unhappiness is a feeling of – I suppose helplessness is approximately the right word. I have things I want – dare I say, need – to plan for the future, but without a satisfactory internet connection or even a credit card it’s not proving easy. I’ll probably spend two or three days dahn sahf then head back up to my sister’s place for another couple of days. Unfortunately, having tried to use her internet last night and this morning (during the brief moments when she and her friend weren’t using the PC) it doesn’t seem to be working very well. But apparently they’re off abroad somewhere or other later this week.

Another contributory factor to my sense of lack of control of my destiny is the inevitable difficulty of co-ordinating one’s actions, travels, intentions with other people. My friend in Bath is moving to Plymouth this week, so I thought I should get down and see him while he’s still there. I was also expecting to be put up in his house, but that’s not going to happen because of decorating. So now I’m staying with my friend in Bristol. There’s no logical reason I couldn’t go and visit Alex in Plymouth, but at least it’s been a prompt to go down now.

While coming back to the country has mostly been a case of returning to the familiar, it’s also made me see some things with new eyes – especially the people. Everyone seems to look the same – or, at least, to fall into one of a few broad categories. There are the young women who seem to take care of their appearance – but take care that they look the same as all their friends; they’re fresh-faced and fairly pretty, but they really nothing special. And their noses seem too big – that must be part of the post-Korea syndrome.

Then you’ve got lads with crew-cuts or at least very short hair – generally in sportswear. Middle-aged people – generally overweight. Particularly in St Helens, there are quite a few kind of skatey, punky kids. I remember there being a few before I left, but I’ve been surprised by their numbers. Something that is the same now as it ever was, is the homogeneity of the northern towns I’ve been cursed with having lived in. Being in Manchester and Birmingham today has been quite pleasant, simply by virtue of the mix of people there.

You know, it’s not all that easy to type while sitting on a moving coach.

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