Why, oh why, Philogelos, I hear you cry, do you think that? What could possibly make you any more batty than you already are? How could you downscale the charts of insanity any more than you have already? What makes you think you have any sanity left to lose?
The answer to all these questions (bar the last one) is the resolution I have made for myself: I am going to read Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time'.
All twenty-one bricks of it.
With prequels.
And background.
It doesn't matter, though, because it annoys Gundrea, and that is reason enough for me. At the time of speaking, I have devoted a week of my life to chewing through the prequel, 'New Spring', and the first three volumes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Jordan.jpg
This guy is Robert Jordan. He did lots of mad stuff but, most importantly, he wrote the Wheel of Time (or the first twelve volumes, anyway). He said in the little thing they have in the back of the book that he 'intends to keep writing until they nail his coffin shut'.
He did, God love him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BrandonSandersonX.png
And this smarmy git is Branderson Sandon, or whatever his name is. I have not yet had the opportunity to peruse his additions to the seemingly unkillable Wheel of Time, so I look forward to Book Thirteen. Will he live up to expectations, or will he flounder and fail with the 'unlucky thirteen'? Find out my opinion some time in the distant future, if by some miracle I stick to this insane resolution.
Now we have the background out of the way, I intend to cast an eye on the first book in the series: 'The Eye of the World'. No professional book critic am I - far from it - and my opinion is further biased by the special place 'The Eye of the World' holds in the dusty, ill-maintained attic that serves me as a heart. I can, in fact, remember the very day when my mother presented it to me...
I read this repeatedly as a child, and no wonder. Jordan, a history buff, crafted the history of his world magnificently, a failing I noticed in (say) Moorcock's 'Elric'. He also took a leap into the abyss by completely excluding any traditional fantasy races - the only recognisable element being the dragon, and even that is just a picture on paper. His characters are good - not Shakespearean by any stretch of the imagination, but very good (I keep forgetting whose eyes I'm reading through, particularly later in the series, but that's just 'cause of the vast profusity of characters). The plot (I'm sure you all know it off by heart by now) is good enough - not exactly a page-turner, and not heavy on twists, certainly not this early in the colossal saga, but I was never bored. As ever, Mr. Jordan's strength is his fantastic background and his equally brilliant evocation of it - he keeps pulling stories, festivals, artefacts, monsters, and factoids out of a profusity of sleeves. I could see every inch of the Ways, see the walls of Caemlyn, so on and so forth. I enjoyed reading it as much this time as I did the time before, and the time before that, and the time before that...
Next: 'The Great Hunt'. In the meantime, the Great Hunt for the 'Great Hunt', as I seem to have misplaced both my copies. Oh dear.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
First Contact
Set chronologically some time after the events of "Interval's End", when Cyrus is dead.
Inquestor Slithiz of the Argubadian Faunocracy ruffled her wings, blinked her six eyes, shuffled her suctopeds, brushed her numerous pets away, and made popping noises with her proboscis, all through a surfeit of nervousness. Every eye in the room – which, when a room was filled with Argubadines, was very very many indeed – was riveted on the matterthrower, four-columned and ecologically pleasing, in the centre of the leafy room.
Inquestor Slithiz closed her many eyes and remembered how this bloody affair had started. It had had the most ignominious of beginnings, truly – some little boy of the Khanati, one of the Arbugadine's allied spacefaring races, on some benighted colony in a region of space characterised by Eks banditry, had, being an insufferable genius, built himself a little radio – as if that wouldn't bring the aforementioned Eks raiders down on his planet. Not only that, but this radio had the capability to pick up signals from space – unknown space, actually, making this child just about one of the most intelligent Khanati ever to have lived.
Probably strangest of all, the radio had begun picking up signals.
“Inquestor Slithiz!” An eager young Arbugadine by the name of Dermicbowl prodded her with her proboscis – all Arbugadines were female. “Inquestor Slithiz!” Slithiz flapped her pallid wings, bowling over another Arbugadine, and turned to face Dermicbowl.
“What, Dermicbowl, is it you could desire at such an inopportune time?”
“The Faunocratine desires a situational report, Inquestor.”
“Exactly the bloody same as five minutes ago!” Slithiz blew bubbles through her proboscis again. How had she ended up with this bloody assignment?
Oh yes. The Khanati had asked the Argubadines – as their newest ally, still fresh from the egg of their world – to handle this first-contact situation. The Faunocrat, of course, back on Bthyryz Amorgana, had consulted the animalcular oracles and of course, the oracles had interpreted, they should accept! This was a grea big step in the cultural development of the Argubadine Faunocracy, blah le blah le blah le blah. And Inquestor Slithiz, previously Inferior Pen-Pusher Slithiz in the unforgiving Morcunian Arbugadine language she spoke, had been pulled from a nice cosy job and flung halfway across an admittedly very tiny space empire to shepherd some new species into space and to hoover them into the Khanati web of intrigue they called an alliance.
The radio – well, the Arbugadine equivalent of a radio - buzzed, bringing Slithiz back from her vaguely furious daydream. A harsh, barking voice, unlike the natural trills and pops that constituted most of the Argubadine languages, came through, spitting some barbaric foreign tongue through its flower speakers. Those messages had started coming in, as soon as they'd started orbiting this cesspit of a planet three days ago. The translators had been doing their best on translating the language, but somehow, Slithiz doubted that the alien's enigmatic words really meant “Bob's hot dog doing dance banana banana going down.” Eventually, in frustration, she had ordered the ship to grow a matterthrower and send it down in an unwomanned (as it were) capsule. Like all the technology of the nature-loving Arbugadines, they had literally grown the matterthrower. It hadn't always been like that, of course: but when they discovered genetic engineering, they couldn't resist using it to make more natural machines. The matterthrower, in essence, did exactly what it said: it flung matter through Lodgespace, whatever that was (Slithiz wasn't properly sure herself) and popped it down on another matterthrower. They had, of course, no guarantee that the aliens could even conceptualise technology as advanced as a matterthrower, but no less than three minutes and thirty seven seconds ago, they had received a message which the translators deemed to be “Bob's hot dog used matterthrower laundry possible soon.”
This was why Slithiz was standing on the wooden floor of her wooden spaceship, watching this bloody matterthrower, waiting patiently for nothing to happen.
She was disappointed.
A flicker – no more – graced their end of the matterthrower. Slithiz failed to show any emotion, but underneath, she was astounded: these aliens could use a matterthrower.
Maybe they could move on to numbers next.
A stronger flicker came, then repeated itself, growing slowly into a continuous-ish buzz of light and sound as the Lodgespace route between the two matterthrowers was established. The whole room shushed as one, a chorus of trills and pops silencing suddenly. Even the Arbugadines' pets shut themselves up. The tension was thick enough to be cut with a knife.
Then the alien boot took its first step into space.
A figure, robed in green trimmed with red and tall – at least half again as tall and broad as any of the Arbugadines – stepped through.
“Greetings.” it smiled, the translators working furiously. “I am Gunnarus Asmodaeus of Ostmark, in Jotunheim, and I come on behalf of the Akarean Empire.”
Inquestor Slithiz of the Argubadian Faunocracy ruffled her wings, blinked her six eyes, shuffled her suctopeds, brushed her numerous pets away, and made popping noises with her proboscis, all through a surfeit of nervousness. Every eye in the room – which, when a room was filled with Argubadines, was very very many indeed – was riveted on the matterthrower, four-columned and ecologically pleasing, in the centre of the leafy room.
Inquestor Slithiz closed her many eyes and remembered how this bloody affair had started. It had had the most ignominious of beginnings, truly – some little boy of the Khanati, one of the Arbugadine's allied spacefaring races, on some benighted colony in a region of space characterised by Eks banditry, had, being an insufferable genius, built himself a little radio – as if that wouldn't bring the aforementioned Eks raiders down on his planet. Not only that, but this radio had the capability to pick up signals from space – unknown space, actually, making this child just about one of the most intelligent Khanati ever to have lived.
Probably strangest of all, the radio had begun picking up signals.
“Inquestor Slithiz!” An eager young Arbugadine by the name of Dermicbowl prodded her with her proboscis – all Arbugadines were female. “Inquestor Slithiz!” Slithiz flapped her pallid wings, bowling over another Arbugadine, and turned to face Dermicbowl.
“What, Dermicbowl, is it you could desire at such an inopportune time?”
“The Faunocratine desires a situational report, Inquestor.”
“Exactly the bloody same as five minutes ago!” Slithiz blew bubbles through her proboscis again. How had she ended up with this bloody assignment?
Oh yes. The Khanati had asked the Argubadines – as their newest ally, still fresh from the egg of their world – to handle this first-contact situation. The Faunocrat, of course, back on Bthyryz Amorgana, had consulted the animalcular oracles and of course, the oracles had interpreted, they should accept! This was a grea big step in the cultural development of the Argubadine Faunocracy, blah le blah le blah le blah. And Inquestor Slithiz, previously Inferior Pen-Pusher Slithiz in the unforgiving Morcunian Arbugadine language she spoke, had been pulled from a nice cosy job and flung halfway across an admittedly very tiny space empire to shepherd some new species into space and to hoover them into the Khanati web of intrigue they called an alliance.
The radio – well, the Arbugadine equivalent of a radio - buzzed, bringing Slithiz back from her vaguely furious daydream. A harsh, barking voice, unlike the natural trills and pops that constituted most of the Argubadine languages, came through, spitting some barbaric foreign tongue through its flower speakers. Those messages had started coming in, as soon as they'd started orbiting this cesspit of a planet three days ago. The translators had been doing their best on translating the language, but somehow, Slithiz doubted that the alien's enigmatic words really meant “Bob's hot dog doing dance banana banana going down.” Eventually, in frustration, she had ordered the ship to grow a matterthrower and send it down in an unwomanned (as it were) capsule. Like all the technology of the nature-loving Arbugadines, they had literally grown the matterthrower. It hadn't always been like that, of course: but when they discovered genetic engineering, they couldn't resist using it to make more natural machines. The matterthrower, in essence, did exactly what it said: it flung matter through Lodgespace, whatever that was (Slithiz wasn't properly sure herself) and popped it down on another matterthrower. They had, of course, no guarantee that the aliens could even conceptualise technology as advanced as a matterthrower, but no less than three minutes and thirty seven seconds ago, they had received a message which the translators deemed to be “Bob's hot dog used matterthrower laundry possible soon.”
This was why Slithiz was standing on the wooden floor of her wooden spaceship, watching this bloody matterthrower, waiting patiently for nothing to happen.
She was disappointed.
A flicker – no more – graced their end of the matterthrower. Slithiz failed to show any emotion, but underneath, she was astounded: these aliens could use a matterthrower.
Maybe they could move on to numbers next.
A stronger flicker came, then repeated itself, growing slowly into a continuous-ish buzz of light and sound as the Lodgespace route between the two matterthrowers was established. The whole room shushed as one, a chorus of trills and pops silencing suddenly. Even the Arbugadines' pets shut themselves up. The tension was thick enough to be cut with a knife.
Then the alien boot took its first step into space.
A figure, robed in green trimmed with red and tall – at least half again as tall and broad as any of the Arbugadines – stepped through.
“Greetings.” it smiled, the translators working furiously. “I am Gunnarus Asmodaeus of Ostmark, in Jotunheim, and I come on behalf of the Akarean Empire.”
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