The Wheel of Time and me

I haven’t thought about Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” in years.

I think I first started reading it eleven, twelve years ago. The summer of 98 or 99, I forget which. I was looking for fresh reading material at the time, and I picked up “The Eye of the World” (number 1) at the local bookstore. That bookstore went out of business years ago, but every Thursday or so I used to walk down there and pick up my reading material for the week.

But, anyway. “The Eye of the World”. I read the first hundred pages, and thought “Wow! This is really boring.”

By the end of the book I thought “Wow! This was really not boring!” It was an amazing experience. Jordan had created a world of richness and detail, populated with vivid characters and a plotline of epic scale and grandeur. I hastened to the local bookstore and got the next one. And the next one. And then the next one.

I blasted through the rest of the series in fairly short order – I think up to “Crown of Swords” (number 7). And I got the next two books faithfully as they came out. And then…I just gradually lost interest. The plot didn’t move forward very much. The books came out farther and farther apart. And I was busy, and I had lots of other things to fill my time. So I forgot about it, and when “Knife of Dreams” (number 11) came out, I thought about getting it, but never actually got around to it. It had been so long I couldn’t remember all the plot details, and I didn’t want to restart this enormous series from the beginning once again.

And then Robert Jordan died, which was sad. Since he left detailed notes, I figured they would hire someone to finish, but I didn’t really plan to read it. It’s never the same after the original author has died, after all.

Then I read Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn”, and I realized that he definitely has the chops to finish off “The Wheel of Time” in a satisfactory manner. And “Wheel” is such a huge epic tale that I want to read the ending. Besides, I’ve been reading it for twelve freaking years, you know? When I first started reading those books, I’d never used a laptop, I didn’t have my own Internet connection, didn’t have a car, had never written a book of my own, never been published. The Wheel’s turned over quite a bit since then, but the series is still there. I want to see how it ends.

So, I’ve decided. I’m going to read “The Wheel of Time” again. I’m going to start with the prequel book “New Spring” that I never actually read, and I’m going to read all the way to the end. Not all at once; I’ll read other stuff in between the “Wheel” books. So by the time I actually get to the end, Sanderson might well have finished.

I look forward to it.

-JM

“Mistborn”, by Brandon Sanderson

This is the first epic fantasy I’ve liked in quite some time.

There’s the usual elements. A Dark Lord ruling over an empire of groaning slaves and corrupt aristocrats. A band of plucky heroes dedicated to the Dark Lord’s overthrow. But they’re not planning to seek out the one sword that can slay the Dark Lord, or the one ring that is the source of the Dark Lord’s power.

No, they’re planning to swindle the Dark Lord out of his dark throne.

See, the Dark Lord’s economic power is based upon control of a single rare mineral, and if our plucky heroes can snatch away his stockpile of the aforementioned rare mineral, the Dark Lord loses the ability to pay his soldiers, who will then seek gainful employment elsewhere, and his empire collapses.

It’s as if Gandalf and Frodo decided to defeat Sauron not by destroying the One Ring, but by manipulating the Minas Tirith Stock Exchange until Mordor’s economy collapses, driving Sauron to bankruptcy and causing the uncounted legions of orcs to quit when Sauron can’t make payroll that month. Mordor collapses into insolvency, and to cover his debts Sauron has to sell the Dark Tower to the Chinese, who rename it the Spire of Harmonious Prosperity and hang a giant portrait of Mao from the Window of the Eye.

It’s a very interesting twist on the usual fantasy epic, and I enjoyed it a great deal. Economics don’t often turn up in fantasy books. When economics do turn up in fantasy books, it tend to be the usual Marxist horsecrap (specifically, I’m thinking of China Mieville), so it was refreshing to see economics based even loosely upon actual reality.

I’ll definitely be picking up the other two books in the series. Though since they’re published through TOR, I’ll have to get them through Barnes & Noble, since Amazon is currently attempting to crush TOR’s parent corporation Macmillian.

Ironically, it’s a plot right out of “Mistborn”.

-JM

to kill yourself for nothing

Sir Terry Prachett is a superb writer, but he has some highly disturbing thoughts about assisted suicide. Namely, he wants friends and family to be spared prosecution for murder should they help a terminally ill person kill himself:

The debate over assisted suicide will be reopened tomorrow when Sir Terry Pratchett uses the annual Dimbleby Lecture to call for a radical overhaul of the law.

The best-selling author, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, will say that the “time is really coming” for assisted death to be legalised.

Sir Terry said that if he knew he could end his life at a time of his choosing, without the fear of incriminating a friend or family member, he would enjoy the rest of his life far more.

Except he already can end his life at a time of his choosing, without the fear of incriminating a friend or a family member. It is appallingly easy to kill oneself, whether through intent or stupidity. But he’s not really talking about suicide, is he? He’s talking about having his family kill him when he decides that the time is right. In other words, he wants his family to have the legal power to murder him at his permission.

That’s not a good thing.

See, this is a power that cannot help but lend itself to abuse. The popular image of assisted suicide is the kindly old man in bed, surrounded by family & friends, whispering to his beloved wife that the time has come. The doctor slides in the injection, and the old man just…drifts away, while tears trickle down his wife’s face and the soundtrack swells to a moving crescendo. Except that image is a fantasy. A pleasantly smiling mask over a grinning skull.

And euthanasia showed its real face quite clearly in Nazi Germany. The Nazis had a program called “Action T4“, and wound up giving what they called “mercy deaths” to something over a quarter of a million people. Of course, I think Sir Terry would argue that there’s a world of difference between a Nazi mercy death and assisted suicide. A man who wants to kill himself in an assisted suicide has decided that his life is no longer worth living. A Nazi doctor decided that the life of someone else was no longer worth living.

But…there’s not much of difference between a man deciding that his life is no longer worth living and a panel of certified, trained experts deciding that his life is no longer worth living, is there? After all, a sick man is hardly the best judge of his own condition. And Grandpa wouldn’t have wanted to have been a burden, would he? And can the state be expected to bear the cost of these hospital bills? Really, the humane thing, the sensible thing ought to be done.

In the end, all forms of euthanasia boil down to this: killing inconvenient people to save money. There is no way the legal power of assisted suicide cannot be abused. It will descend from high-minded talk about dignity and rights to, in the end, making sure the numbers balance properly on an Excel spreadsheet.

-JM

seven days…

…and 20,000 words written.

So. What’d you do this week?

-JM

once more into the breach

It is time to embrace the madness once more, and write another book. And why not start a new book on January 21st? My youngest brother was born on the 21st of January, and he’s turned out pretty well so far. So the 21st should be an auspicious day for starting a new book.

I plan 27 chapters, with 80,000 to 85,000 words. I want to be done by March 21st. Two months to write 85,000 words. Think I can pull it off?

And this time I’m doing something new: I’m writing the book using OpenOffice.org 3.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Every book I’ve written prior has been with Microsoft Office* running on Microsoft Windows**.

Actually, that’s not quite true – I wrote about half of “Soul of Tyrants” (available for free in handy PDF format) using OpenOffice 1.1 because I couldn’t afford a copy of Office at the time. Eventually I did get Office 2003 and finished the book in that. OpenOffice 1.1 did kind of suck ***- but it’s improved considerably since then. Hard to believe that was five years ago already. My, the time does fly.

So can I do it? Can I write an entire book using Ubuntu and OpenOffice? Can I finish an 85,000 word book in two months?

Tune in here to find out.

-JM

*Office 97, 2000, and 2003, specifically. I never really got into 2007, though I use it for work on a regular basis.

**Windows 98, XP, Vista, and 7, specifically. Thankfully I have never purchased a computer running Windows ME, the deformed sociopathic mutant stepchild of the Windows family.

***About that time I saw someone’s laptop with OpenOffice, and they had renamed the icons for OpenOffice Writer and OpenOffice Calc to “ghetto Word” and “ghetto Excel”.

If Senator Ted Kennedy were still alive…

…I imagine he would have a message like this for his fellow Democrats:

I mean, a Republican Senator from Massachusetts? Holy crap, Batman!

We do indeed live in chaotic times.

-JM

outline

Writing an outline for a new book.

Of course I write the outline first. You ever try building a house without a blueprint? When you’re done, you’re lucky if the toilets don’t explode when you flush them.

-JM

Books I Have Read Of LAte

“Devil in the White City”, by Erik Larson.

“Devil” is a popular history that juxtaposes two concurrent events; the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and the murderous rampage of Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. Or, at least, the first serial killer to get caught. I knew a little bit about the World’s Fair, but I had no idea what an impact it had on American technology and modes of thought. After all, the Ferris Wheel originated at the Fair, along with a host of other devices.

Of course, at the same time, Holmes built his notorious “murder castle”, a hotel specifically built as a giant prison and torture chamber for Holmes’s mostly female victims. It was rather chilling to read how easily Holmes seduced his victims again and again and again, and they never suspected a thing until they found themselves in Holmes’s gas chamber or kiln or basement torture chamber. Beware a smiling face; it might conceal a grinning skull!

“Princeps’ Fury” and “First Lord’s Fury”, by Jim Butcher.

The final two books of Butcher’s “Codex Alera” six-book sequence. Which I suppose would make it a sextology, though that sounds like one of those semi-obscene infomercials that play at 2 in the morning.

Anyway, the hero Tavi, having overcome every foe in the previous four books, now faces something worse: the insectile Vord, who are a combination of the Borg from “Star Trek” and the Zerg from “Starcraft”. The net effect of this is that Butcher has spent four books carefully constructing an elaborate and complex world…

…and in book five he takes a sledgehammer and starts smashing things right and left.

I quite enjoyed it. I still think the “Dresden Files” books are better, but “Codex Alera” was enjoyable in its own right.

“Chronicles of Chaos” trilogy, by John C. Wright

These books center around five teenagers at a deeply disturbed boarding school. For one thing, the school only has five students. To make matters stranger, each of the teenagers have supernatural powers that they interpret according to a different mental paradigm. Amelia can see into hyperspace, Victor can manipulate matter at the atomic level, Quentin can speak to spirits, Colin can make himself faster and stronger by simply believing it is so, and Vanity can create secret passages where none existed before.

(mild spoilers follow)

The kids realize that their school is actually a prison, and that their teachers and captors are in fact the ancient Greek gods of Olympus. You’d think the Greek gods would have gone out of style, but as Hermes points out, Sex and Violence are worshipped in America, so Aphrodite and Ares do quite well for themselves.

These are formidably erudite books. I know a bit more about Greek mythology than most people, but I had to fetch my reference books several times. It was still enjoyable to figure out who Lady Cyprian and Lord Mulciber were, for instance, before the teenagers did. The books are classified as fantasy, but I think they’re much closer to science fiction, since the Greek gods are more like trans-dimensional energy beings with reality altering powers than actual gods. Plus, the various characters fight with nanobots and directed energy weapons.

But that’s a quibble. Good books, and intellectually heavy ones. It was enjoyable to see how Mr. Wright wove together the awkwardness of the teenagers with hyperspatial travel and armies of nanomachines.

“Going Postal” by Terry Prachett.

I never thought a book about a man going to work for the Post Office would be both entertaining and insightful, but, well. There you go. Of course, I suppose it helps that the post office is in Ankh-Morpork, and that the man is Moist von Lipzig, con artist extraordinaire.

-JM

three days under two months

Is how long it took me to write a book, revise it, rewrite a final draft, and submit it.

I did the best I could. Almost certainly it is not good enough. But what more could I have done?

-JM

Thoughts on James Cameron’s “Avatar”

I wasn’t going to see “Avatar”, but a bunch of friends invited me along, and I thought, what the heck, I should get out of the house more.

You know that one cheerleader in high school, the one who’s exquisitely beautiful, but turns out to be as dumb as a box of rocks? “Avatar” is kind of like that.

The visuals are stunning. It’s 2010, and we may not have flying cars, moon colonies, or robot servants, (or even a functioning economy), but we can create amazing illusions. No wonder it took years and enormous amounts of money to develop the technology to make the movie.

Alas, all this visual splendor is wasted on a movie with a lame plot. “Avatar” ought to have been titled “Dances With Wolves…In OUTER SPACE!!!” It’s basically 1.) traumatized white guy falls among native peoples, 2.) white guy gains respect of native peoples while overcoming his inner demons, 3.) white guy leads native peoples to victory over some external threat. That used to be a plot of a bunch of films and books, but it’s less popular now, since people tend to decry it as racist.

More troubling is the movie’s notion that nature is sacred, transcendent, and that humanity’s problems could be solved if only we abandoned our destructive technologies and moved closer to nature. But that’s bunk. Ever read about lions? They don’t form prides for more efficient hunting. They form prides to defend against other lions. Evidently, male lions will attack rival prides, kill off all the males, kill off all the cubs, and forcibly mate with the surviving females. That’s what nature is really like; rape and murder, red in tooth and claw, the strong dominating the weak. Not a pleasant world by any means.

Still, the movie was entertaining, and I rather liked the villain. Sure, the movie tried to set up Colonel Evil as the most loathsome villain in the history of man, but he was just so magnificently dogged that it was hard not to root for him.

-JM