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Perl & XML is now totally and officially released, if it wasn't before. A call for reviews showed up on use.perl.org this morning, but since the first few were people looking at the online table of contents and then writing cynical cranksterisms based on that alone, I haven't paid it much attention. At least there were monkey jokes. If our book grants nothing to the world beyond more monkey jokes, then all our work shall not have been in vain.

Andy got his comp copy and immediately noticed that he and Arcus were missing from the acks. I said to him as I said here: Ergh. So, yet another reason to fight to keep the Macnut contract... I'll have second chance this year to write an ack section and stuff in all the names I missed this time. Hmm, when I get a round tuit, I shall make a personal errata section of my P&X page, and they shall be it.

I did manage to finish those chapters, hey hey. I'll get the verdict after the weekend. Meantime, I find myself lined up to write three Network articles, which ain't bad at all. I'll be happy if I can bang one out this weekend.

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Wedding update: Earlier this week I finally phoned Peter and presented my dilemma to him. He said that, yes, he'd be disappointed but understanding if I chose to go to my friends' wedding that I was planning on before his event suddenly appeared. I said I would give him my decision later, and hung up thinking: "and now my mom will call me." This happened a half an hour later, and wow, was I taken to task.

Again with their equating the concept of "friends" with "poker buddies" or something similar, leading to flabbergastation that I would even consider attending one of their celebrations over my brother's. I let it go. It was clear that not attending Peter's thing would be held by my family as an unspeakably grave insult, far worse than I had thought. It was time, I conceded, to stop thinking about maximizing fun, and start thinking about minimizing damage.

Today, chatting with Leah, I updated her on all this, and she finally said in so many words: Look, I've been trying to tell you, just go to Peter's wedding. MAN (paraphrase) Suddenly that cleared everything up for me. I've phoned Peter to let him know my intentions this evening, and he was near tears with joy. Furrfu. So, that's all right then.

It's still too bad that I'm trading a Hawaiian wedding bash with friends I haven't seen in years for a grim and dusky ceremony involving a brother I barely relate to anymore and a humorless schizophrenic woman. I'm sure when I'm in the pews, I'll have regrets. But now, tonight, I celebrate the loss of a heavy dilemma, and the knowledge that I'll just have to go visit my southern friends under more joyfully random circumstances, later this year.

Farseer

Robin Hobb is an amazing writer. I think the Farseer novels -- I am reading the second book, Royal Assassin, now -- easily qualify as the finest fantasy novels I have ever read.

Well, maybe not so easily, now that I think back. Maragret Weis and Tracey Hickman's Darksword trilogy simply floored me, when I read them in high school. And indeed, I can see elements between these two beloved trilogies that map onto each other... both series feature a main character of a young man who bears a world of internal conflict from the moment of his ill-fated birth (Farseer's hero is the bastard son of a prince; Darksword's hero is born "Dead", without magic ability, into a world that equates magic with life). In both, he is assisted by a mysterious Fool.

But Hobb's books strike me in the strength and definition of all the characters beyond the male lead. There is one clear good guy (the story is told in first-person, after all) and one obvious boo-hiss villain, and they live in a world of interesting people (and other creatures) with their own motivations and goals. Out of this weave of characters rises the main character's paths and obstacles; no mystic quests or mighty magic or sword battles, at least not yet, and I'm loving it.

Maybe someday if I get bored enough I'll try rereading Darksword again, see how they stack up now, after 15 years of reading and growing on my end. Who knows.

(I was about to say "Where fantasy is defined as..." and go on about swords and sorcery as story elements, but then I recalled Ray Bradbury's much more elegant distinction between fantasy and SF; a fantasy story, by its nature, simply can't happen as told, and an SF story could actually happen, someday. Among his own novels, he categorized Fahrenheit 451 as SF, and The Martian Chronicles as fantasy. (While Chronicles had Martians and space explorers and so on, it was really a collection of social-ethics parables with a spoonful of rocketships to help it go down easier.))