Here are some pix to go with the previous post. All taken on Pulau Tiga, better known for being the site of the first Survivor reality TV show – but I knew the place long ago…
As you can see, it is still lovely. (Photos can be clicked on to enlarge)
The sunsets….
The beach….
The forest….
My daughter….
And now it’s back to finishing the proofs of The Shadow of Tyr. Sigh.
Life’s tough, isn’t it?
Home being Kota Kinabalu. Just spent three days on Tiga Island (now apparently known more as Survivor Island). We used to holiday there over twenty years ago – when there was no hotel or mod cons. No tourists or ferries either. We’d go snorkelling in the bay facing the mainland where the corals reefs were pristine…and our footprints would be the only ones on the sand. No plastic rubbish.
Alas, no more. The reefs – in part – are a mess. Not quite sure what the problem is, but fish bombing might have produced those kinds of dead holes… People (hotel staff and guests) were fishing from the jetty, and I saw one fishing boat right close in shore. Did not see any Park Rangers or patrols. And there are several notices saying all animals are protected. Maybe fish and corals aren’t animals?
Nonetheless, we had a great three days. The beaches are mindbogglingly beautiful, the island forest is superb and snorkelling over the remains of a reef is still a wonderful experience. There were stingrays and clams and fish galore – and one or two spots where there were still living staghorn corals. I do wonder though, why no Sabahans care enough to stop the devastation of the reef.
It is National Day tomorrow. Everyone is flying their Sabah and Malaysian flags from their houses and cars. That is how they show their love of their country, rather than by preserving the state they live in or the environment – not even in a Marine Park. Not even when coral reefs are so important to the survival of edible fish species. I guess I’m just a weird orang putih who has my priorities all wrong…
Maybe they’ll be happier eating imported beef burgers.
Photos to follow.
My daughter on the way up Kinabalu.
When I climbed Mt Kinabalu, back when I was in my late thirties, we had to take all our own food up with us. Nowadays they have a restaurant. And the food has to get up there somehow….like this.
And then we came down from the mountains and went to the islands.
If you had a bad day at work and the weather was lousy, eat your heart out you poor things….
Came down from the mountain last night. Off to the Marine Park near Kota Kinabalu today.
My daughter – back in the early eighties – was the youngest kid to climb Mount Kinabalu under her own steam. (She made the top before I did that day.) She was on the front page of a local newspaper under the headline: “Tigress of Kinabalu”, a tag which I am sure she wants to forget.
Now she has just done it again some 25 years later. Fortunately, the morning they made the peak was brilliantly clear.
This time I didn’t go. Knees won’t tolerate that kind of thing any more.
And now we are off to soak up some sun and sand and sea water.
Some time ago, Cheryl Morgan announced that she will soon be ceasing to publish her online zine and review site and blog, all to be found at www.emcit.com . Which I was upset about, because I loved the site. If you wanted to know what was going on but live in a non sff environment on the far side of the world, well, emcit was a great place to drop by every day and find out. I loved her reviews, because I knew that if she liked a book there was a good chance I would too, especially fantasy. I even loved Cheryl’s acerbic bite, especially of any idiocies that came her way. The site will be missed, and I do hope that our paths cross in the real world one day and we get to meet.
Anyway, she has, over the past year or so, reviewed The Isles of Glory trilogy and today her review of the final book, The Tainted came out. Read the whole thing here. (It does give away the ending of Gilfeather, though – so if you are still reading book 2, better not read the whole thing!)
She begins like this:
One of the best things about publishing Emerald City has been to be able to watch new writers gradually improving, book-by-book. Glenda Larke is an excellent example of this. Reading through her Isles of Glory series …has led to my becoming more and more impressed with Larke’s ability.
And ends the review with this:
But you see the point. This is not the stuff of formula fantasy. Larke is not just telling a light and fluffy story of heroism, she is telling us things that she thinks are important. My spies in Australia tell me that her new series continues the trend of improvement. I’m looking forward to it.
The Tainted was a shortlisted finalist for the Aurealis Best Fantasy of the Year (2004).
There is still discussion going on here on my post below on nuclear power matters. I guess what the anti-nuclear lobby can’t convince me of – not even getting close yet – is that there is a viable alternative. “Viable” being the operative word.
I am still trying to finish editing the proofs of The Shadow of Tyr – and the polish of Song of the Shiver Barrens is still beckoning.
But my daughter is coming tomorrow. Yay!!!!!!! So guess how much work I am going to get done in the next few days. I haven’t seen her since I went to sff Worldcon in Glasgow last August and we then went on up to the Orkneys. Expect blogging to be sporadic over the next 10 days.
Photo taken by Trudi Canavan on the Orkneys: Paul Ewins, myself and daughter…
Imagine this. You are English and live in London and want to go to Scotland. You get stopped at the border by the Scots and they ask to see your passport, and then tell you can stay 3 months – as long as you don’t work.
Or perhaps you are a New Yorker wanting to go to California, or a Sydneysider hopping across to Perth…same thing; you get stopped at the border, or as you get off the plane.
Weird, huh?
That’s Sabah for y0u. That’s right…come to Sabah and you, a Malaysian, have to go through immigration. When I told my husband that I could stay until the middle of next year no problems, he refused to believe it and insisted that I go to the Immigration Dept to see if that was correct. So, muttering under my breath, I made the trek, and double-checked.
That’s right dear – Me the foreigner can stay here in Sabah with less hassle than you the West Malaysian can. So there.
We give them respectability here. We don’t call them anything as crass as witchdoctors. They are bomoh, and they even have the gall to recite Islamic prayers and talk about the will of God. Give them some gifts, or a donation (they rarely ask for a set amount, or even for anything at all), and they will happily lie in ways that will end up killing you if you believe them. And no one ever calls them to book. No one charges them with murder.
But some of them are murdering Malay women. And we let them get away with it.
Many, many years ago I went to a session with a bomoh in a suburban house near mine. Among the many there that night was a young woman who had just been told she had cervical cancer and she was to come in for treatment/surgery. Instead, she’d come to the bomoh to ask if she really did have cancer. He was in a trance, and told her she didn’t have cancer, just gastric problems. I wonder about that women to this day. Did she believe him and not go back to the hospital? Quite possibly. Which means she’s dead now. I should have spoken to her, and I didn’t, although I did express misgivings to someone else there that night.
In yesterday’s paper a Malaysian doctor (ethnic Chinese) was brave enough to stand up and say some things out loud that should have been said long ago. These are some of the statistics for the University Malaya Medical Centre that were quoted in the article (The Star, Thurs 17th p17).
40% of Malay breast cancer patients seek treatment too late , compared to
15% of ethnic Chinese Malaysians
Survival rates for breast cancer patients after 5 years:
For Malay women: less than 46%
For ethnic Chinese Malaysians: 63%
For ethnic Indian Malaysians: 57%
And why do Malays go to hospital so late?
Because the lying b***’s of bomohs have told them traditional treatment can save them with 100% certainty – without surgery, chemo or radiation. Of course, their chicanery doesn’t work, and the dying women then go to hospital, too late for proper treatment. Many of these women, by the way, are educated. They just haven’t learned to leave superstition behind.
Why do we let these murdering criminals get away with this confidence trickery?
Because they are culturally acceptable? Because they pretend a direct line to God? Because none of the dying, betrayed women do anything about it, but allow other women to die after them? Because Islam teaches acceptance and submission to fate? Perhaps someone can explain it to me, because it just makes me furious.
The odd thing is that because I write fantasy, there are some people who think that I believe in ghosts, the supernatural, and things that go bump in the night. I don’t. I write fantasy, I don’t believe in it.
The Demon-haunted World by Carl Sagan should be required study for every highschool student the world over. It teaches how to see through the nonsense to the fallacies.
The other day my husband, Noramly, went back to Kuala Lumpur to give a talk on nuclear education and public information at a seminar in memory of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear bombings. He is, btw, the Chairman of the Nuclear Licensing Board for Malaysia – the regulatory body that keeps an eye on all nuclear energy applications for peaceful uses in the country – everything from x-ray machines upwards. He was at one time a Deputy-Director General of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
After the seminar during question time he was asked about what is required if Malaysia goes nuclear – which questions he answered. We didn’t expect the furore that started up, particularly in the blogging world from our neighbour Singapore! Apparently it worries them to have a nuclear reactor anywhere nearby.
The most extraordinary comment was from someone who apparently decided there was some terrible symbolism at announcing Malaysia was going nuclear on Singapore’s National Day!
“…do I see announcements regarding a potentially dangerous source of energy made on Singapore’s birthday? Ironic, I didn’t know that our neighbouring country’s leader (sic) are not so smart that they dont realize the potential implications on announcing such information on certain dates. I’m not implying anything here, but to make such a controversial announcement on another neighbouring nation’s birthday, think about it!”
Boy, have a news for you, my blogging friend. First of all, my husband is not exactly one of Malaysia’s political leaders. Secondly, he made no such announcement. He merely answered questions along the lines of – why would Malaysia have to go nuclear and how many reactors would that entail if it did? Thirdly, he had absolutely no idea that it was Singapore’s National Day, and would have thought it utterly irrelevant had he remembered. Singapore, alas, is not central to the concerns of most Malaysians. Sorry about that.
As usual, there is much emoting when it comes to nuclear issues. And very little common sense.
Do I want to live down the street from a nuclear power plant? Nope, not particularly. (I actually do live within spitting distance of a nuclear research reactor when back in KL – and have lived there for 20 years). But I would much prefer a nuclear reactor down the street than a coal-fired power plant, which kills far more people, and creates far more health problems and environmental damage. The truth is that a nuclear power reactor – one that is not designed to produce nuclear weapons – is clean and one of the least environmentally damaging forms of power that there is. The waste is easily stored and monitored, if only people would be sensible rather than emotional about it.
People, however, want to able to live in their energy hungry world and yet refuse to live with the consequences. People who live in, say, sunny California use clothes dryers, for heaven’s sake. Lord, we even use leaf blowers instead of good old fashioned rakes. We use power like there was no tomorrow, continue to selfishly bring too many kids into the world already bursting at the seams, but no one wants to acknowledge the consequences – that sooner or later our present (polluting) sources of power won’t be available to us. Use solar power, they say blithely, without ever having studied the difficulties and disadvantages of that; use wind power, hydro power…etc etc. Yep. Are you aware that a dam in Malaysia silts up in 20 years because of the tropical rainfall? What then? Are you aware how much land and biodiversity you drown when you build a dam? Where is your sense in all this?
Ignorant people refuse to study the problem unemotionally. Yes, I do know about Chernobyl. I was out picking raspberries with my children in the Vienna Woods the day the plume of radioactivity blew into Austria, unknown to us all at the time. But I am pragmatic and unemotional. If you want to live the way you do now, you have to take the risks that go with it. If you don’t want risk, then stop using up the world’s resources the way YOU do now. Weigh up risk and advantages and disadvantages and your responsibilties, and make informed decisions based on facts. Not on the idea that nuclear = bombs and is therefore bad. Not on the idea that a country like communist Russia – where they built cheapo reactors without containment, for god’s sake!! – is the norm.
The future of our world depends on making decisions that are wise, and no wise decisions can be made by people using their emotion responses rather than the facts. I am not – note – saying that everyone should go nuclear. But as an environmentalist, I think it is the best option for some countries and – yes – for the world’s environment. I certainly don’t recommend building reactors without containment. I don’t recommend throwing nuclear waste into the ocean as happened in the past. I want common sense and I want facts and responsibility. Then I’ll decide.
I had the proofs of The Shadow if Tyr, book 2 of The Mirage Makers delivered to my door this morning. These are the first glimpse an author has of how a book will look after publication – the layout has been done in the chosen font, the title/dedication/maps are in place, and so on. They come in double uncut pages.
And it is the job of the author to go through them, line by line, and check that everything is as it should be. It is usually the last look an author gets before the book goes to print.
In days gone by, when typesetters set the type letter by letter, this particular process was of paramount importance because mistakes could occur by the hundred. Nowadays when the basis for the “typesetting” is the digital copy the author supplies themselves, it is not quite so bad – but the handwritten changes made at copyedit have to be checked very, very carefully, to make sure they all made it into the final version. And if you want a mistake free book (well, as close as one can get and still be human) it pays to do a careful check of everything.
The book is due to come out in January, so we are well ahead of schedule.
But I am three-quarters the way through my first major overhaul of the next book, book 3, Song of the Shiver Barrens. And I desperately want to get that out of the way, so I can send it on to my beta readers.
So I am vacillating. What to do first? Book 2 – due back at HarperCollins asap – or Book 3, due at HarperCollins on September 4th which is when my editor gets back from her overseas vacation. (Well, she called it a vacation, but I note that she went out of her way to meet my agent for the first time last Friday. I am waiting in trepidation to know what was discussed then…).
And my daughter – whom I haven’t met in a year – is due in next Monday. Oh for a cloned me…
