> From: Ticia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Talk on this and another list brings to mind something I've been
thinking
> from the beginning whenever somebody compared the situation to James
Bond
> (in that it is unreal, like a movie, with a Big Bad Bond nemesis hiding
out
> somewhere underground) and which nobody has mentioned so far: we're
entering
> Nikita-ville!
>
> Does the end justify the means? Sometimes it does. You just need strong
> people willing to make those moral choices. And brainwashed soldiers
with
> ninfo on need-to-know basis, who will follow orders without
questioning. War
> is a game of Stratego.
Reminds me about an interview with Robert Jordan I came across 7 years
ago.
(from the October/November 1994 issue of Sense of Wonder, a B. Dalton
publication)
<big snip>
There are a number of themes that run through the series. There's the
good old basic struggle between good and evil, with an emphasis on the
difficulty in recognising what is good and what is evil. There's also the
difficulty in deciding how far you can go in fighting evil. I like to
think of it as a scale. At one end you hold purely to your own ideals no
matter what the cost, with the result that possibly evil wins. At the
other end, you do anything and everything to win, with the result that
maybe it doesn't make much difference whether you've won or evil has won.
There has to be some sort of balance found in the middle, and it's very
difficult to find.
Another recurring theme is lack of information, and the mutability of
information. No one knows everything. Everyone has to operate on
incomplete knowledge, and quite often they know they are operating on
incomplete knowledge, but they still have to make decisions. The reader
quite often knows that the reason why a character is doing something is
totally erroneous, but it's still the best information that the character
in the book has. I like to explore the changeability of knowledge, the
way that, in the beginning, characters see things in one way, and as they
grow and learn more, we and they find out that what they knew as the
truth wasn't necessarily the whole truth. Sometimes it's hardly the truth
at all.
/* El Snippo */
