In an age of Iron clad warlords and peasant fodder, of warfare and cruelty, the story follows a young boy by the name of Wart, an orphan who is adopted by Sir Ector, whose estate is on the edge of the vast Sherwood Forest.

The book is written from the point of view of a modern writer in the modern age, retelling a history. There are many references to modern English culture at the time of writing when explaining events within the story and bringing them into perspective.

On the whole this is useful, but at times it suffers from age, whereby the references themselves have no meaning to the current generation.

The first part of the book is the most fantastical part of the epic, with Wart meeting Merlin, who will become his tutor and mentor. It is also the funniest part of the novel. The old wizard is going backwards in time, and often makes reference to the future, which Wart plainly doesn’t understand. Merlin takes Wart on many adventures, turning him into an ant, a goose, a fish, and Wart meets the comedic and noble King Pellinore who is forever chasing the questing beast. We follow Wart and Kay as they help Robin hood (or Robin Wood) and Marion rescue their kin from evil spirits in the forest.

The book contains too much to cover every happening, but there are adventures abound, in the spirit of a Knightly epic.

As Wart reaches maturity, the world is changing. The King Uther Pendragon has died, and the adopted brother of Wart, Kay, has become a knight, and Wart his squire. They travel to London to fight in a grand tournament, but here Kay has forgotten his sword and Wart is sent back to fetch it, only to find the Inn is locked and shut.

There he sees the sword in the stone, in front of the church, the one who so many have tried and failed to retrieve. Of course this part of the story would be familiar to anyone, and you would have guessed now, that the Wart is really Arthur Pendragon, who will become king after pulling the sword from the stone.

King Arthur, after coronation, wages war on all the dissenting Lords and Kings to bring them under the banner of England. It is at this crucial point, that he reflects on his position, his actions and his conscience, and decides that force, or might, should not be used for it’s own sake, but rather for the sake of justice. This spurs him to create the round table.

Lancelot, at the time of the founding of the round table, is merely a boy, who has travelled to England, enamoured with Arthur and the ideals of the court of the King. He speaks to Arthur who asks the young boy to return from France when he is older to join the Round Table.

The story explores a strange kind of love and idolising by the young Knight that provides much tension later in the story when Lancelot and Arthur’s wife Queen Guinevere fall in Love. A bizarre love triangle.

The story is of course, too long to summarise in this review, and parts of the story might be familiar to most. The thrust of this novel however is Arthur’s attempts to create a Kingdom of peace, protected by his round table and, as he grows much older, a Kingdom of laws while the round table collapses around him by factional fighting.

It is the story of an imperfect ruler, with the noblest of intentions, who is in the end undone by the atrocities of his youth as much as he is undone by the justice that he holds high. He would put his personal feelings aside of love and friendship for Lancelot and Guinevere to uphold the values of the legal system that he had created, sentencing them to death, only to find this choice tear his Kingdom apart.

It explores the nature of humans, their thirst for war, and questions the idea that we may ever be perfectible. It takes Mordred and the Orkney clan not as inherently evil, but as people, bent by past grievances into current violence and malice, and concludes that because we can’t forget the past, we will never have peace. The nature of humans is for vengeance.

It is these themes that spurred me into writing this review, and made the book, after some of the hard parts, a rewarding read.

I had told myself that when Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (online MMORPG) comes out, I would try it out. I had spent a few years of my life playing Mythic Entertainment’s last game Dark Age of Camelot, and my hopes were of a new RPG which borrowed something from Dark Age. Hopefully something that would make me feel at home in the new world.

When the game had finished installing I was to discover that superficially, they had borrowed more from World of Warcraft than they had from Dark Age of Camelot. The Warcraft User Interface was almost an exact template for the Warhammer interface, even down to the quests.

When you look a bit closer at the quests, you get a clue as to what this game is really about. The game highlights on the map the general area of the quest objective. This told me that this game wasn’t designed for those who love wandering around for hours trying to find a dusty sack behind a tree.

Mythic have obviously taken the Warcraft user interface for it’s ease of use, and perhaps out of lack of imagination, but they have created, in my impression so far, a game that is mostly about PvP, the slashing, bashing and zapping of other players.

The game moves seamlessly from quest and monster areas into contested battle zones where quest objectives, and plenty of kills are there to be had. The range of classes unique to each realm and race make for a dynamic and exciting PvP experience.

I have experienced only a fraction of the game so far, but in that time, this game has not disappointed.

Sigmar be your guide… or something I will see you on the battlefield!

I have just installed a plugin to embed flash files into blog posts. A more productive use of the plugin can be found on Lei’s blog (check the blog roll), but here is a test…

When I stare up at the sky at night, through the smog and light pollution I see part of the vast cosmos laid out before me.

The insignificance of our lives becomes apparent when placed alongside the birth and death of stars and galaxies.

I discovered something last week, something I’d never seen advertised. Google Earth 4.2 introduced a Sky watching section that gives users a freedom to explore the cosmos with extraordinary detail. The majority of images probably come from ground telescopes, stitched together in a patchwork of very detailed imagery. There are many images from the Hubble telescope placed on top of these at the right distance and position that let you zoom right in to the spectacular views of the various nebulae captured by Hubble.

This tool provides a great tool for anyone interested in space to get access to the night sky without the need of an expensive telescope, and warm in the comfort of our houses.

I’m glad to see that some of the money earned by google is going to things that are for the good of the public.

The vastness, the sheer number of galaxies and the number of stars that must be in each one, and the possible planets circling those suns.

Are we a freak occurrence in a blink of the universal eye or is life not as rare as we imagine? How did the building blocks of life, the enzymes that form DNA come together in such a way as to mark the difference between that which is alive and that which is inanimate?

We might never find out.

Sometimes the hardest part of the journey is the descent.

As the world comes to the realisation that the global supply of oil is on a downward trend, the population will have to adapt to a changing context in which to live their lives. If the current rate of increase in the price of oil isn’t dramatically slowed, there might not be enough time to adapt.

I stress the word “might” because of recent advances in alternative fuels; things like new fast charge and release high capacity Lithium Ion batteries for electric cars, or Bio-Oil produced by genetically modified photosynthesising algae.

Increasing demand for oil in developing countries such as India and China are arguably the main cause of the spike in price, rather than market speculation as some suggest. This demand in a climate of stagnating supply is the key determining factor of price rises.

Therefore whatever solutions come about to shake our dependency on at least the finite fossil crude we pump out of the ground will have to meet these demands in order to maintain peace.

Many of the world’s cities, and many countries like Australia and the United States are built on the assumption that we will always have energy to run our trucks, cars, planes and ships. They are sprawling and lack the infrastructure to move people around, let alone cargo and produce without a cheap fuel source.

We face some great challenges in the coming decades. Our current existence, our comforts and norms are made fragile by our globalised world. The decisions made by those in power and everyone else will determine what the world will look like after we descend from peak oil, at the bottom of Mount Crude.

A well dressed man reaches into the garbage to pick out the daily news. Not the first time for him.

It is a man not afraid of the microscopic life that enters his body. Is he laughing in the face of danger? Or is the average trash can cleaner than we imagine?

Ode to bacteria

Bacteria,… you divide yourself in two then two to spread out far and wide.
So often do you multiply that mutating bugs come out and thrive.
Once bitten twice immune, once mutated could be your doom.

As the winds and rain roar around us the sounds of political chatter emanates from the T.V.

I listen on and off, with waning interest. The American political system is as tedious as I have ever seen. By the time they reach the actual election, I imagine most people have stopped listening to what the candidates have to say.

In fairness though, the system obviously does work when the push comes to shove. The voting turnout in the democratic primaries has been unseen for a long time. As the campaign moves from in-fighting and focuses on the Republican party, as it seems to be doing, there will be new interest generated in the ideas that each side has to offer.

What worries me is something seen not only in the United States, but all around the western world. That is the politics of fear; employing the fear of every-day citizens to consolidate power and to decay civil liberties.

What kind of threat is terrorism? It is hard to counter-act through conventional means, and it’s results can be catastrophic, but the chances of being hit are quite slim. The only threat worth sitting up and taking notice of, is that of nuclear weapons.

Will nuclear weapons fall into the hands of those who would use them indiscriminately? The bigger question is why are there still nuclear weapons? There have been no strong political voices, at least that I perceive, to spearhead the disarmament of the world’s nuclear weapons since the end of the cold war.

Mutually assured destruction only has it’s place as long as nuclear weapons stay in the hands of nation states. This can only last so long.

I fear for the world of tomorrow, not because of terrorists, who are a fleeting glimpse in the history of the planet, but because of the short sightedness of political leaders around the world.

disarm the nukes…

It’s caught me by surprise, snapped me up in it’s jaws.

The crocodile is the workplace, and I’ll be eaten and digested until i’m 60 when I retire in a heap in the warm breeze.

No! I can fight my way out of the belly of the beast and break free into the world still undigested.

The master of my own destiny

rejected by the night. . .

As the train wobbles from side on the old bent up track, the muffled sound of the driver invades my ears. I struggle to hear the music from my ipod, my fingers pushing the white buds deeper into my ears.

The pilot of this great metal snake loves to tell long stories to at least one uninterested passenger. I wonder if these oddly dressed rappscallions find his intrusive brand of informative announcement useful:

The buildings slowly rise from their horizon slumber to reach for the darkening sky. A monument to humanity’s achievement and to a civilisation wounded. Wounded not in economic terms, but in it’s severed relationship to the earth.

We of the great skyscrapers look out (if lucky enough to be by a window) for 8 hours a day, onto a world that breathes and moves. But we feel no wind in our hair, no grass beneath our feet; just the hum of the air conditioner and the background noise of fax machines, copiers, telephones and chatter.

For some it’s a way of life until retirement. Enjoying life when it’s almost too late to really enjoy it.

Of course we could escape and live on the land; the gruelling and challenging task of survival against the elements. But within the comfort of western civilisation, the 8 hour work-day for most, seems to be here for good.

yes that’s what i’d be if i didn’t find a seat. I just liked the aliteration

I spent the last couple of days trying to find and modify a theme just right for the main blog site. I think i’ve made a keeper for now.

Check it out here

It takes a ridiculous amount of time to do a link in html on a phone number pad. I’m almost at work and the blog entry is tiny. Well i’ve been chatting to lei too.