Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched.  Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion.  Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

~ Thomas Jefferson

I found this quote by way of reading The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins's recent atheist manifesto.  This clinches it: I'm adding a biography of Thomas Jefferson to my reading list.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr., who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan, died on Sunday, September 16, 2007.  He was 58. 

Reading about Jordan's struggle with amyloidosis, a blood disease, seemed at times like watching someone I knew personally struggle with sickness, and his recent, unexpected death seemed like the death of an old friend. 

I remember clearly, all those years ago, buying my first copy of The Eye of the World at the little bookstore in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire and reading it in my family's condo there.  It was summer, I think, and I went into the shop just before it closed.  I had just finished another good book and was feeling that accompanying sadness and I picked up The Eye of the World, having seen it and its first few sequels in bookstores before, and wondered if I was in the mood to begin a long, multi-volume fantasy series whose individual books might be used as doorstops.  But the store was closing so I bought it and walked past the lake and under the lodge's cedar archway and took the meandering elevator up to the fifth floor.  The windows of the condo, a tower room, gave a panoramic view of the valley and I started reading after dinner as the light faded behind the mountains. 

The story started on a road in a wood in a mountainous country that didn't seem too terribly different from the one in which I was sitting.  Like any good fantasy story it started in humble, sleepy peace and slowly led its characters into danger, darkness, and hidden grandeur.  I read that night until my eyes burned.  The book is over 800 pages long and I think I read it in under three days.

Robert Jordan died before finishing the 12th and final book of the The Wheel of Time, the epic that started with The Eye of the World.  The final volume would have been titled A Memory of Light.

To some, fantasy fiction is a genre to be enjoyed only by children and questionable adults, fanboys and girls who are unlikely to have been popular before, during, or since high school.  But I pity those who never felt the thrill of adventure between the pages of a paperback, who never read under the covers with a flashlight at night, who never wished there was something more mysterious about the world, something left to be discovered. 

The New York Times obituary quotes a 1996 review by Edward Rothstein: "Even a reader with literary pretensions can be swept up in Mr. Jordan's narrative of magic, prophecy and battle."

Rest in peace, RJ.

For up to date information and to read words from his family, see Jordan's blog on Dragonmount.com.

I've been wanting to talk about William Gibson's Spook Country since I finished reading it.  I found a recent post over at Snarkmarket linking to an interview with Gibson in The Onion A.V. Club, where Snarkmarket's Robin Sloan commented on the usefulness of the term "baroque" in describing today's music and literature.  The original interview is here. 

"Baroque" to me is a nebulous word: it has specific artistic definitions and derivative colloquial ones.  Its modern definition is, as Wikipedia says, usually a pejorative one, meaning overly elaborate.  But as applied to Gibson (who uses it himself to define the genre noir as being "a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism"), I think it can be used in a more appreciative way.

Baroqueness seems to imply a penchant for wallowing in decadence, and Gibson's novel, if it has a theme, focuses on how our world has become simultaneously very complex and also very simple.  How to new generations who have grown up with it, technology has ceased to be in any way elaborate or amazing and has instead simply become the way things are:

"Cyberspace" as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix "-electro" to make things cool, because everything was electrical. "Electro" was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think "cyber" is sort of the same way. The things that aren't cyberspace seem to comprise a smaller set than things that are.  (Link)

I can't say that Spook Country spoke to me personally in the way that Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition did, but maybe that's because Pattern Recognition dealt with a post-9/11 period of flux and disillusionment, whereas Spook Country, though only three years later, finds us more comfortable in our instability, adjusted and at ease.  This book deals with the secret, scary things that are going on behind the scenes, and seems to say that our relative comfort is inadvisable.

On another note, I did like what Gibson had to say about his writing style:

AVC: There's a sense in Spook Country that your three protagonists are living through a fragment of a much larger story. There's a lot going on, and they're part of it, but they're not the main part of it. That seems to be a trend in contemporary fiction: stories that take place on just the outside fingernail of something much larger. Did that occur to you at all while you were writing?

WG: I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.

Gibson calls it a new realism.  Instead of writing the big picture, authors are writing the little one, the "real" one.  How anti-baroque.