It's just a matter of time

Last year, schreibergasse set me a meme: choose five fictional characters whose names begin with a given letter and comment on them. It was never posted because, unsurprisingly, one of the comments turned into a miniature essay, after which I felt obliged to produce similar wordcounts for the other characters and while I was stalling, my laptop bit the dust in August and I thought the file was lost. I just ran across a backup copy. (I was looking, of course, for something completely different.) So I am going to post the semi-essay, and then I can feel like marginally less of an LJ deadbeat and go back to writing up George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and considering a post for Memorial Day. The letter was R; the character Ranjit Walker, from Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987).⁴

( After one look at their faces, Vivian knew that Sempitern Walker was going to have to be very boring indeed. )

4. For the record, the other four characters were Raederle of An, from Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976—1979); Captain Louis Renault, from Casablanca (1942); Reverdy Anacreon Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca, from Ysabeau Wilce's Flora Segunda (2007) and Flora's Dare (2008); and Patera Remora, from Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) and The Book of the Short Sun (1999—2001). If anyone does want to read about one of these, tell me now. Remus Lupin, Arnold Judas Rimmer, and the Lord Redlady did not make the final cut.