News from the North

I write to you from New York City, where I'm spending a week house/catsitting for a wayward songstress, writing and wandering the autumnal streets. Various professional news: The audiobook version of The Blood Price , read by Jeff Harding , is available for download . Go on, listen to the five-minute free sample. Also, Invisible Armies 's US hardcover is finally up on Amazon.com , albeit in stub form. In honour of these things I have tweaked my web site . IA's Canadian and UK mass-market paperbacks will also be coming out in 2007, in May and September respectively, along with Blood Price 's German translation (probably), and Dark Places 's Japanese translation (I think.) Publishing is a long and drawn-out process. Sometimes I like that. Sometimes no. Meanwhile, I'm pleased to officially announce that DC/Vertigo and I have agreed in principle on me writing them a graphic novel tentatively titled THE EXECUTOR sometime soonish. This doesn't mean it's a don...

"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. "He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry and Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack. - Siegfried Sassoon

In Shanghai, after a somewhat Kafkaesque flight from Lhasa via Xi'an. Shanghai is busy and bustling and neon and huge. The forest of skyscrapers I saw being sown ten years ago in Pudong has since grown into their towering, glittering adolescence, and the rivers of bicycles have dried into mere streams, replaced by mopeds and cars. The Bund is still cool. Expats are everywhere and practically everyone under thirty seems to speak a little English. Nanjing Road is a pedestrian mall thronging with stores and crowds, and if you're a Westerner, also full of hawkers offering knockoff watches and bags, and "students" eager for you to visit their "art galleries," and if you're a Western man past dusk, pimps and hookers galore. I haven't seen a single Internet cafe; there's been a government crackdown (can't remember if the pretext is "fire safety" or "they are depraving our young!") but the place I'm staying has a couple free t...

Of course Tibet was never the idyllic Shangri-La of myth. Fourteen hundred years ago, its armies conquered half of China. Seven hundred years ago, when Tibetan Buddhism was the state religion of Kublai Khan, the monks were bitterly resented by the Chinese, who were forced to food, shelter and convey them at their own expense, and who were executed if they so much as raised a hand against a man in a saffron robe. And if you'd come here before the Chinese invasion seeking a land of spiritual bliss and meditative detachment from the material world, you'd have been barking a long way up the wrong mountain. In 1943, German mountaineers Heinrich Herrer and Peter Aufschnaiter escaped from a British POW camp in India and made an amazing journey across the Himalaya and into Tibet, where they stayed for seven years . Herrer describes a charming, friendly, welcoming country - but also one ruled by a corrupt theocracy that wasn't above using howitzers on rogue monasteries, and tha...

New business model: I shall hire myself out as Official Expedition Recorder to extremely wealthy travellers embarking on challenging expeditions. I mean, hey, I'm young, I'm fit, I've been around the block, I'm an accomplished writer, I'm a sometimes-useful techie, I take the odd good picture - who else you gonna hire? All I need is a Rolodex of centamillionaires with a yen for adventure travel and an eye on posterity. And if you could all just get right on getting me that, that'd be great, thanks. So, yeah, I'm in Tibet. I'm going to described the train ride in rather excruciating detail, as there's not a whole lot of info available online for would-be passengers. But first of all, here are the pictures . Riding High on the Rails Preparations are pretty straightforward. I arrived in Beijing and headed straight to BTG Travel (recommended by Lonely Planet, right next to the Gloria Plaza Hotel) in the I-thought-forlorn hope of scoring both Tibet per...

What a difference a decade makes. On the train from Ulaan Baatar, after we finally escaped the vast, blasted gravel-and-sand plain of the Gobi Desert, after bogies were changed and passports were stamped and we finally entered the Middle Kingdom - in my case, for the first time since March 1997 - we rolled to a 10-minute halt at some nameless station in Inner Mongolia, and I laced my boots up and wandered out onto the platform to stretch my legs - - and I stopped dead. Because I knew that smell, I remembered it in my bones, in my deep cortex, smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory. The platform smelled like China. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. And maybe it was just jasmine and cheap cigarettes. But for just a second I froze in my steps, remembering. You'll forgive me if I wax nostalgic a moment. (Heck, it's not like you have a choice.) The very first time I went seriously travelling, nine and a half years ago, I backpacked solo across China for a mo...

Ulaan Baatar: a godforsaken outpost that time forgot in the middle of Mongolia's squalid, all-but-abandoned wasteland, right? Guess again. This is a thriving, humming hub of commerce, teeming with German breweries, Korean restaurants, French bakeries, Irish pubs, Hollywood movie theatres, American missionaries, billboards advertising mining equipment and Western cosmetics, horn-honking traffic jams of Hyundais and Mercedes and Land Cruisers, plentiful cheap Internet cafes (600 tögrög/US$.60/hr), new construction everywhere you look, and the Mongols themselves slouching about in laid-back Western-cool brand-name black and denim, tattoos and coloured hair - there's even a goth scene. There's money sloshing all over the place in today's UB. Looks a bit like an overheated bubble economy to me, but what do I know? the lost boys of ulaan baatar It's not a pretty city. In fact it's an impressively ugly one. Most of the buildings are still Stalinist blocks. The str...

I write to you from Irkutsk, Siberia. Yes, it's more than just a territory on the RISK board. (Though incidentally it's considerably further south than in the game. The Trans-Siberian, like the Trans-Canadian, stays fairly close to the country's southern border all along its route.) It's famous for ... er ... not a whole lot, other than being the place of exile for many of the Decemberists aristocrat-revolutionaries, back in the day. Krasnoyarsk is quite a cool city by Siberian standards, not least for its convenient location a mere 7km north of the Stolby Nature Reserve, a trip to which answered in part: why is the life expectancy of Russian men so low? (60 years - extremely low for a country so wealthy - compared to 74 years for Russian woman.) It's not just the rampant alcoholism, the vodka-drinking for breakfast, the continuing classification of beer as a soft drink. It has a lot to do with the fact that, so far as I can tell, Russian men disproportionately ...

It's when you fight your way through the hordes and out of Moscow's metro and walk into Yaroslavsky Station that the sheer scale of the journey starts to really hit you, when you look at the time-zone markers under the diagram of the rail network, and the way those numbers mount up as the track sweeps eastwards: +6, +7, +8. Eight time zones. A third of the world. On the platform, in the night, the #2 "Rossiya" running from Moscow to Vladivostok seems to run on forever, although it's actually only a train of some 20 cars - "wagons" in Russian. Your first-class wagon is near the middle of the train, and your two-bed compartment boasts saffron drapes and mirrors, a selection of Cyrillic-language newspapers, a radio and even a television - although the only channel it gets is CCCCC, the Closed Circuit Corridor Camera Channel, to save you from sticking your neck outside your door. Mikhail and Natalya, your provodnitsas , or car attendants, introduce thems...

So this is Moscow. Eh. You can keep it. Mostly it's a sprawling labyrinth of concrete towers, shopping complexes, BMWs and construction cranes. My timing probably has something to do with my reaction - the Kremlin is closed to the public this week, the Bolshoi is entirely wrapped in scaffolding and canvas - but I'm confident I'd take St. Petersburg over this town any day of any week. There are some cool bits. The metro is indeed magnificent (but its grandeur is threadbare, and it's full of barricades that herd people into seething bottlenecks.) GUM, on Red Square, is surely the world's most beautiful shopping mall (but it's still a shopping mall.) The sculpture garden across from Gorky Park is quite cool (but Gorky Park itself is disappointing; most of it is occupied by a tacky amusement park.) The Kremlin, St. Basil's, and the Alexanderovsky Gardens are a bit like having a colossal fantasyland castle in the heart of the city (but sort of throw the gloomy...

I am posting from an Internet cafe inside St. Petersburg's rather staggering Hermitage Museum. I know, I should probably be looking at art. But one can only walk down so many colossal galleries, passages and corridors, beneath fifty-foot-high ceilings carved and gilded and filigreed and hung with chandeliers the size of Volkswagens, past what seems like half of all the world's classical (ie pre-1920) art, before one needs another breather. To paraphrase my travelling companion M., one gets the sense that Peter the Great took his chief architect to Versailles and the Louvre, then turned to him and said, "You see? Like that. Only much bigger ." I'll probably upload pictures and expand this into a real post tonight. eta: OK, pictures tomorrow. Most Russian internet cafes aren't so good at the extra services. So I could totally live here. I mean, if I spoke Russian. And if it was always summer. It's all monuments and palaces and gardens (not parks) and orna...

Dump any notion you ever had of Russia as a drab and dowdy place. St. Petersburg is swimming in colour, seething with life. I've only been here a day now, but it's already staking a genuine claim to becoming my favourite European city. That despite the fact I got pickpocketed in the metro this morning - for the first time ever anywhere - amidst the press of the shoulder-to-sholder crowd. Fear not, all I lost was a day's spending money (R800/US$30); my ID, credit cards, and US$ stash are tucked away rather more securely. And a good thing too. The puppet theatre where I am staying is, alas, closed for renovations. (Had I known this, I would have stayed elsewhere, but it's comfortable enough in a Stalinist-hostel kind of way. I have my own room; I'm kinda too old for dorm beds nowadays.) Arrival Mild culture shock hit before I ever got out of the airport: I ordered a Pepsi to change money, and got a Pepsi Cappucino, coffee flavour cola, which tastes pretty much like...

No matter how often I travel, the day before I'm always hit with a sudden panicky bolt of holy crap I'm going to _____ tomorrow! And today is such a day. In this case the blank is filled in by "Los Angeles." No, that wouldn't normally cause such panic, or indeed count as travel at all - but this time I'm taking the Long Way Round. In particular, I'll be going entirely overland from St. Petersburg to Shanghai, primarily via the Trans-Mongolian branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway. I'm reasonably prepared. I have acquired visas, and booked flights, and accommodations for the first few nights, and even train tickets for the first few and last few legs. But, er, I haven't actually packed yet. Hey, there's always tomorrow morning, and it's not like I carry much with me. I'll be blogging and hopefully flickring from along the way, as time and availability of Latin-alphabet keyboards permit.

Today I am a man podcaster .

Believe it or not, there's a (slightly mixed but mostly positive) review of IA in the mighty Economist this week. They dissed (and if you ask me, kind of missed the point of) the second half, but I am still exceedingly pleased: Danielle Leaf, Mr Evans's protagonist, is not a professional spy, but an everywoman. An anti-globalisation activist, she is suddenly thrown into a violent and dangerous world where she must draw on every reserve of skill and courage to stay alive. Mr Evans is a vivid guide to the shrill, self-righteous universe of the anti-globalisation movement. He is strong on street-fighting tactics, how to deploy the violent anarchist avant-garde against the police, and on the intricacies of computer hacking. Yet curiously, a promising plot about a cynical mining corporation falters about halfway through the book, giving it a sense of peaking too early. The second part, in which Danielle and her hacker friend Keiran are tortured and held prisoner on a boat controlle...

Not that HarperCollins told me about any of these - don't they have a clipping service? - fortunately, I have a friend who works for the CanWest empire. Calgary Herald: If you're the sort to get easily paranoid, you may want to approach Jon Evans' latest book with caution. [...] Evans has created a new genre, the travelogue as fast-paced action thriller. Invisible Armies is certainly fun, with its quirky characters and lively plot, but it is also a smart and thoughtful look at the politics of activism, the pervasive power of big business and the global street war that is being waged between the two. Vancouver Province: Montreal-based Jon Evans weaves the unlikely components of globalization and corporate exploitation of the Third World into an unpredictable, frightening thriller. [...] There's a kind of appealing chaos theory to Evans' books, which tend to unfold in ways surprising to veteran thriller readers who think they can figure out where things are going. G...

I've gone and added a links page to my site, full of the smiling faces of various colourful friends of mine. Haven't updated the site menus yet, so for now you can only get there from here.

Am back from a whirlwind month (Muskoka, London, Paris, Cape Cod) and expecting another in September (London, Sweden, the Trans-Siberian) but August will be quiet. Which is good, 'cause I got a whole lotta Book Four work to do. While I was away, Quill & Quire (sort of Canada's answer to Publisher's Weekly) ran a very nice review of Invisible Armies . Meanwhile, in Australia, my publisher Hachette (motto: 'We Also Make Cruise Missiles') has issued a Publisher's Promise for Invisible Armies , which, is, basically, a money-back guarantee; if you buy it and don't like it, they'll refund the purchase price. This special label will only ever appear on a select few titles that we are confident readers will enjoy, they say. I am pleased. And my hometown newspaper ran a (front-page!) feature on me. A fair-use sample: To Evans, truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction. But it certainly does make for great fiction material. The 33-year-old Waterloo ...

Attention Canadians: Chapters/Indigo have decided in their infinite wisdom that Invisible Armies is a "Great Summer Read", meaning you get 20% off if you buy it now. Also, Blood Price has just come out in mass-market (pocket-book) paperback, with a really cool cover that alas is not yet online. Now back to the World Cup semifinals. Let's just not talk about the accuracy of my quarterfinal picks.

I just sent the first (OK, third, but first for public consumption) draft of my fourth novel, set in Africa and very tentatively titled Absolute Darkness , off to my UK agent and publisher. Sure hope they like it. As always at this stage I have lost all perspective and have no idea whether they will or not. But enough about work. Let's talk about the important stuff: the World Cup quarterfinals. Argentina-Germany : This should be a good game - the hosts, who have rampaged over all opposition, against a team so classy and dangerous it leaves Carlos Tevez and Lionel Messi on the bench. The teams have similar records here, having both scored ten goals and conceded four. But don't let that fool you into thinking they're evenly matched. Germany did this against Costa Rica, Poland, Ecuador, and a Swedish team that failed to score against Trinidad and Tobago; Argentina has played Holland, Mexico, and a bloody good Cote d'Ivoire team. Despite Germany's home advantage I'...