ye gods and little fishes

Rain! It's been pouring down gently, in a harmonious, soaking sort of fashion, since yesterday. This is of course my fault: yesterday at around lunchtime I realised I hadn't watered my herb garden for days, causing the sage and vietnamese coriander to flop around like dying fish; as soon as I finished watering, the clouds blew over and the heavens opened. I am a small, localised, rather perverse rain goddess. Clearly.

Apart from the rain, other happy-making things that have recently arrived include (a) my mother, and (b) a completely unexpected and unsolicited copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, with no indication as to donor. I'm not sure if this is a slightly lateral birthday present, or if the person who borrowed my original copy has accidentally dropped it overboard or into the heart of a volcano or something, and uses this anonymous route to sort of not quite own up. Either way, thank you. I'll really get around to reading that now, promise.

Speaking of which, Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic Month! I shall now proceed to cheat. (This is somewhat traditional with these things, I fear). Lois McMaster Bujold should be known to most of you - if you don't read her Barrayar series of more or less postmodern space operas, you're missing out on a hell of a lot of fun. Her Chalion fantasy novels are not strictly a series, although the books are loosely connected - The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt have some characters in common but mostly what they do is explore the operation of a world under a particular religious system. The gods of Chalion are real, believable and fascinating in construction, permeating their world with a beautiful, rational logic. They're based around mother/father/son/daughter archetypes, each with their corresponding seasonal attribute and areas of patronage, and the fifth god, the Bastard, takes up anything that doesn't fit, an escape valve for all this over-determination. I'm madly atheist mostly because I've never found a religion that even faintly works for me on logical grounds; this one fascinates me because it does work, and the gods are meaningful, rational constructions who actually seem worthy of worship. Bujold's characters are as usual vividly drawn and generally likeable, or at the very least understandable; the adventures are tightly-plotted and provide interesting twists, and the politics is woven fascinatingly into the religious backdrop.

In a nutshell: gods, believers, disbelievers. Temples, demons, saints, ghosts, revenants, soldiers, diplomats, queens. Possessions, dispossessions, curses, battles, love stories, slavery, pilgrimages, madness. Giant ice bears. Soul transference. Random Chaucerian homages. Holy zoos. Personal growth. A religion that works. Did I mention the religion that works? Also, she's only written three of them, but admits that logically there should be five, one for each god. She's done the Daughter of Spring, the Son of Autumn and the Bastard. I await the other two with ill-concealed impatience.

Edited to add: Did I say it was raining gently? I lied. It's raining extremely, extravagantly, absurdly, like nine billion maids with buckets are pouring them out at once. I've just driven back from Hout Bay at a snail-like crawl, with red mud and water sheeting across the roads and giant, deceptively innocuous puddles in the corners. There were three cars stopped on the verge in Rondebosch, just after one particularly epic puddle through which all three of them had presumably dashed in a sheet of spray, thus watering their distributor caps nicely and causing the car to choke. Me, I remembered this possibility, and toddled decorously through the puddles, sternly repressing the three-year-old bit of me that wanted to make a splash. It's raining indecently. It's beyond excessive. It's making me incredibly happy.