Empire Rising

As in the late Robert Jordan (1).
I never actually read any Jordan. He was always so ferociously ubiquitous. By the time I became aware of the phenomenon that was Robert Jordan, everyone around me was reading book 6 or 7 of The Wheel of Time and the utter weight of literature placed an effective barrier to my ever starting. I was once badgered into buying volume 1 from a second-hand bookshop in Reading, but in the face of such a Herculean task, to scale the sheer face of Jordan without Sherpas, I never cut the leaves. (2)
So, he is dead then, as Gandalf said of Balin. (4). There is something about an author dying that cuts deep and, although you’ll think it special pleading, something about a fantasy author that cuts in particular.
Well, justification for that outrageously self-serving statement: when I was a kid I loved dinosaurs: who doesn’t? What dinosaurs taught me, though, was the concept of extinction: nothing lasts forever. If the idea of a five-year-old with a fundamental grasp of things like extinction seems scary, remember that modern kiddies get Tweenies, for whom extinction is surely too good a fate.
I was always very aware of lost things, worlds that were gone, monsters and ages past. When we sang, at my C of E school, Struther’s When A Knight Had His Spurs, it was not the jolly, inspirational (5) hymn to me, but a descent into loss and tragedy: “Though back into storyland giants have fled, and the knights are no more and the dragons are dead.” It was unjust, was what it was. I think that most fantasy fiction readers have a sense that the world around them isn’t what we saw on the ads before we bought (6). That’s what escapism is all about. For that matter, a lot of fantasy (as opposed to much science fiction) is escapist escapism: even the characters are frequently hearkening back to a golden age now lost.
When an author dies, the stories stop. This isn’t entirely true, of course. There are the books written (7), and that is more posterity than most people get. They shall have new readers, and they shall live again, and for particularly successful or well-loved authors, perhaps the world and characters may be taken up by other hands, for good or ill. I believe that The Wheel of Time will see a conclusion, and I hope that Jordan’s notes are sufficient, likewise the skills of his replacement. Still: the stories which were once living, which resounded to infinite possibilities, are now stilled. A darkness has fallen over them. With many authors, of spy thrillers or murder mysteries, say, the coffin contains certain characters who will never abstract another secret from the Russians or solve another case. For a writer of fantasy fiction, the coffin contains worlds. At the moment of cessation, a shadow falls over all those imagined places: the knight reins his horse in and looks to the gathering clouds, the dragon folds its wings for the last time, the giant sits and feels the cold growing. Their god has died. Surely, out there in the not-quite, they know it.
All nonsense, yes, but can there be authors who haven’t felt the character buck under the harness. Minds of their own, they have, or at least they have some corner of their creator’s mind that is theirs and theirs alone, and owes nothing to the control of conscious will. They die, and their worlds die, all their places, seen and as-yet-unseen. One day the sun does not rise on them, and they die. (8)
It is possible to feel grief and mourning for things that never were. Such is the wonder of the human psyche.
When David Gemmell died, I heard the news when I was at a LARP event, in the tavern. Whispers spread through the room, One could hear the shock. I hope that he would have been happy, had he known that a long tent full of men and women in mismatched armour, aclutter with swords, bows and axes, raised tankards of mead and plastic glasses of beer in his name and his memory.
Now Jordan is dead, and though I have not yet read his work, I can still feel the loss. Other authors that I have read are ageing. The inevitable, after all, is only a matter of time. All those worlds, like candles...

(1)   And also, by way of paraphrase, the late Douglas Adams

(2)   There is a Robert Service poem, to go utterly off topic (3) where the poet, starving and near-penniless, discovers one of his own books in a junk shop going for a pittance – not just one of his own, but the inscribed and signed copy he gave to his lady love of the time. The bittersweet moment comes when he discovers that the 1000 Franc note he left inside as a gift is still there, as the faithless woman failed even to open to book or, as Service puts it, “The trollop didn’t cut the leaves.”

(3)   Save that I am, I suppose still talking about writing

(4)   Or at least as Ian McKellan said. I can’t for the moment be bothered to go to my Tolkien.

(5)   Well, given the circumstances, inspiration aplenty, just not as the lyricist intended.

(6)   And you can never find the receipt.

(7)   And Lord knows, surely I started writing, at least in part, so that some part of me would have a chance of lasting. Fear of extinction is a wonderful motivator.

(8)   The mantra of Oliver Postgate: "When Bagpuss goes to sleep, all of his friends go to sleep as well." What an innocent thought, and yet, like so much Postgate, how nightmarish to consider with an adult’s eye. One imagines the Mice desperately dragging steaming mugs of coffee to the yawning, dreary-eyed saggy old cloth cat, desperately prodding him with sticks while Gabriel and Madelaine sing the loudest ditties in their repertoire and Professor Yaffel pecks and pecks each time the great cat (9) seems to drowse, and all because their fates are helplessly linked to his. The closing of his eyes brings unwilling oblivion for each of them, and who can say when, or if, he shall awake again?

(9)   I’m not sure how I’ve now conflated Bagpuss and Aslan.