Bakker's TGO Excerpts II: Mining our Merest Fraction [Spoilers]s

[Kalbear]

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See, the thing you want to say is that you get that there are a lot of misogynistic organisations in the world and really the degree of abuse isn't the issue - so suspension of disbelief issues here do not matter, the Dunyain men could have been abusing women in some other way in their fanaticism to become god. That you recognise that if whale mothers aren't possible, that doesn't mean the Dunyain women would actually have been treated just fine and dandy. And acknowledge that just focusing on the detail of it would seem a way of avoiding discussing whatever abuse they would receive and instead focusing on closing the fiction up tight so it can be packed away. That you get that people who care about women's rights will simply rationalise how the Dunyains pursuit ends up at some level of abuse (unless one wants to rationalise that Dunyain community would treat women just fine, I guess - in which case discussion would be about that rather than the whale mothers perse).

So Callan, carry that through to its natural thought.

The Dunyain men could have been abusing women in precisely the same way without the women being misshapen whale mothers. Right? Point of fact, that was literally my first statement - that abusing women that look and are human women is actually more emotionally affecting than having whale mothers. (ran this by my wife and daughter, both agreed). 

So now let's unpack the next one. Why is focusing on this detail avoiding discussing it when we've already agreed that it's horrible and in fact are debating why it isn't as horrible as it could or should be? 

But more importantly, take that to the next conclusion: what is the point of Bakker doing this? Bakker could have easily chosen women that were, well, women. They do not need to be deformed so that their phenotype more closely matches their purpose; it certainly isn't the case with the Dunyain men, after all, who look so similar to an ancestor 2000 years ago that people can recognize the similarity. I doubt very many people would have stated anything about it if it wasn't mentioned. So why mention it? Bakker clearly has a reason to deform, right? 

So what, pray tell, would that reason be? Why did Bakker choose deformed whale mothers and normal Dunyain men? Why was the fitness function for men to look almost precisely like they did before? (example: if I breed Corgis to look like Corgis, I get more Corgis. If I breed Corgis and select on intelligence, I will almost certainly not have Corgi-looking things a few generations down the road). If your answer is basically to find the reader who cares less about the suffering and more about the fiction - well, I guess that's your perogative to think that. It certainly isn't a particularly charitable interpretation, especially when the first suggestion about it was that it wasn't as affecting as presented because of the implausibility. 

 

[Kalbear]

An aside: talking with my wife about this in detail some tonight was interesting. She did a lot of animal husbandry work in her life - dairy goat farm. I provided her the initial parameters and some selection criteria - namely, that the males would be selected primarily for intelligence and physical ability (though not particularly strength) and some emotional characteristics that would be hard to test for until later in the life cycle. The females would be primarily selected on one major trait - the ability to produce many viable offspring. What was interesting was that she almost had me convinced that I was wrong. Her first idea was that within a few short generations the women would likely have a larger, extended rib cage (this would also be influenced by nutrition, as it is in dairy animals), would have significant fat deposits on their butt and hips, and would almost certainly be going for twins. They'd probably favor a longer gestational period too. And possibly be forced like bulldogs to go for c-section births only. Good milk production as well. Some measure of non-stress abilities in their brain - more placid, more docile, because those affect natal success. Sounds pretty close to the whales, right? And remember, I didn't mention what the whales looked like to start this conversation and she hadn't read this - she had simply been told the selection characteristics above. 

Problem there is the males. The males would likely be smaller - twins are more likely, so they start smaller, plus you get more success with smaller births in general. And you're not selecting based on strength of the body. Possibly bigger head relative to the body simply because of nutrition; while they wouldn't have some alien-like head, they'd have a smaller body relative to their head as their brain would take a lot more nutrients, and that in turn would make birthing difficult. Genitalia would select to be smaller - without any kind of competition on breeding, having larger genitalia (to remove competing sperm) is unnecessary and not particularly selective. Changes would happen fairly soon - within 10 or so generations - but then they probably wouldn't get that much better unless other genetics were introduced. 

The idea of a polyploid or a sport was introduced, and that might work too, but it would be really unlikely to be just on the X and not affect the Y whatsoever. It would also represent no human sport that we have ever seen, or no instance of a polyploid we've ever seen. 

The big oddity brought up was, interestingly, nutrition. Which gets back to Kellhus apparently not knowing a single fucking thing about it and eating acorn paste, and how idiotic that was. 

I liked this response from her directly though:
 

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Bakkers big problem is that he is treating his male and female populations as seperate and selecting for completely different traits in each population (as well as complex traits with large environmental influences) It doesn't work that way since his breeding populations are required to interbreed to produce any offspring. He took the basic ideas and then fantasized them. Worse, he male fantasized them into "perfect alpha males" and "horrific females."

Now, this does imply a theory above, which is that you might have two populations - the whales and the Dunyain - and they interbreed in some weird way.

[Kalbear]

23 minutes ago, Sci-2 said:

Ah so the Well of the Aborted is located near Chanv production?

Or the site of other Inchoroi, who came from Eanna back in the day instead of another world. 

But yeah - translucent skin, long lifespan, emotional deadness and lack of empathy, heightened intelligence - it sounds like mini-inchies, doesn't it? 

[Sci-2]

44 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Or the site of other Inchoroi, who came from Eanna back in the day instead of another world. 

But yeah - translucent skin, long lifespan, emotional deadness and lack of empathy, heightened intelligence - it sounds like mini-inchies, doesn't it? 

I was just thinking you'd need a massive amount of Inchie corpses assuming Chanv production had been going along for a decent amount of time?

It's interesting to think that Inchies, knowing that damnation awaited them, were willing to endure the procedures that might enable them to wield sorcery [but were more likely to kill them]? Did Sil have some power over his subjects that would be the Tekne equivalent to the Cants of Compulsion?

[jurble]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

 

The idea of a polyploid or a sport was introduced, and that might work too, but it would be really unlikely to be just on the X and not affect the Y whatsoever. It would also represent no human sport that we have ever seen, or no instance of a polyploid we've ever seen. 

 

Actually I thought the same thing, chromosome reduplication would be one step in a mutational pathway  by which the bizarre divergence of the male and female Dunyain could be explained - and it would explain the inability of Dunyain to mate with normal humans e.g. Dunyain females have something like 3 X chromosomes with a whole smorgasbord of mutations.  

This way, the Dunyain male being somewhat normal could be possible, so long as he possesses a single 'normal' X chromosome (the mutant females being carriers 2 weird ones and 1 normal).   We know the Dunyain have a high failure rate - it's possible a large number of infant Dunyain male are straight up monstrosities.  

The mutational pathway for having 3 X chromosomes and the proper meiotic sorting of it would be basically hundreds of thousands of years of praying to RNGesus for the proper mutations, however.  

More likely than getting a functioning polyploid X meiotic system would be fusion of the extra X-chromosome back into one of the X-chromosomes - Giving the Dunyain something like X,Y, X_x as possible sex chromosomes.  XX_x is a whale mother.  XY is a Dunyain male.  X_xX_x is a ?, as is X_x,Y.  (Although, it isn't necessarily the X chromosome we're dealing with here, for all we know Chromosome 13 has turned into an extra set of sex-chromosomes amongst the Dunyain through a similar process).

But why even have chromosomal fusion you ask, why not just have X_a and X_b?  Have superfluous copies of genes just lends itself towards more mutations.  Moreover, only a single X-chromosome is active in a given cell - this is random, meaning women have chimeric cells, sorta!  So, the fusion aids with any necessary fertility gene-doping mutations.

  It requires extremely lucky mutations and the segregation of all those mutations onto the 'proper' X_x chromosome - recombination can still occur between X_x and X because of the homologous sequences.   The X_x chromosome would have be a monstrosity of inversions and other mutations (this is more likely than in a non-fused X-chromosome scenario) in order to have the sequence so divergent from X that recombination doesn't affect it.

BUT, regardless, in this scenario - there's still going to the possibility of XX female Dunyain, which as far as we know, don't exist. 

IF the book confirms that 'normal' Dunyain females don't exist, or are non-possibility, then we're looking at a much more complicated mutational and regulatory pathway towards the development of whale-mothers, which themselves already rely on a crazy set of mutations.  If there is no normal X chromosome amongst the Dunyain, then they have must have a secret Inchoroi genetics lab inside Ishual all along.

 

[Bastard of Godsgrace]

" And for a heartbeat the proposition escaped him, and he thought only of the way the glacier reared like the back of a beautiful woman. "

 

Ha! This quote is from TDTBC, the scene when young Kellhus is training in Ishual. After he thinks that, the Pragma hits him for losing concentration, but the point is child Kellhus knows what a beautiful woman looks like (and finds it attractive). A continuity error or is Scott hiding something? Or is "a beutiful woman " supposed to mean a whale mother? 

 

 

[Callan S.]

Sorcerer salt could just be treated as valuable simply as a rare commodity - like rhino horn. Though I guess it's a 'meaningful' universe so maybe it can't just be superstition.

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

4 hours ago, Bastard of Godsgrace said:

" And for a heartbeat the proposition escaped him, and he thought only of the way the glacier reared like the back of a beautiful woman. "

 

Ha! This quote is from TDTBC, the scene when young Kellhus is training in Ishual. After he thinks that, the Pragma hits him for losing concentration, but the point is child Kellhus knows what a beautiful woman looks like (and finds it attractive). A continuity error or is Scott hiding something? Or is "a beutiful woman " supposed to mean a whale mother? 

 

 

Yea, as I was never a fan of the Axlotl tanks theory, I had pointed to that quote long ago that the Dunyain had normal women in their community.

I see how this whale-mother thing is being dissected. As i, have absolutely zero knowledge of breeding and what it would take for this to be even possible. Remember though, we're not done in Ishual, as Pat said it was the first chapter of the Ishual thread. Maybe there will be more? 

Chanv=dead Inchoroi, the thought had occurred to me before. Maybe Chanv is just simply a product of the Tekne and the Inchoroi are the true producers of it. But, that doesn't make sense either, does it? If they introduced a drug to Earwa, it would be to shorten lives, not extend them.

ETA: Can't you just picture Shae and Aurang in the bowels of Golgoterreth cooking up Chanv? Like Meth labs, they have a bunch of Quya and Sranc setting around tweeking and toothless. Hey, their very productive for the Consult. A little paranoid, productive nonetheless. Lol, it cracks me up thinking about it. Shae, the Walter White of Earwa!

[Ser Bryar Ashford]

IIRC there are crater rings in the area between Eanna and High Ainon that look just like the ring mountains around Golgotterath...

[Gasp of Many Reeds]

In answer to Kalbear regarding the non-dwarf status of Dunyain men and Kellhus' nutrition ignorance: it hasn't been made clear what the Dunyain eat. Given the hostility of the climate and terrain around their holdfast, it's questionable that they would be able to get a great range of crops and foraged plant foods from the local area. Which suggests they may be supplementing with some non-natural food stuff similar to chanv and qirri. Perhaps they are born small when born to whale mothers, but develop their admirable physique through their nutrition regime. Perhaps the milk of whale mothers is super nourishing, like that of seals?

Note also the tendency of non-Dunyain women to produce conjoined-twin monstrosity things, which suggests one element of Esmenet's suitability for Kellhus is her body's ability to suppress the duplicating tendency in Dunyain gestation, which kills or renders barren most non-whale mothers.

[Werthead]

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IIRC there are crater rings in the area between Eanna and High Ainon that look just like the ring mountains around Golgotterath...

And in the Three Seas themselves, and off the north-western coast of Earwa.

[jurble]

Maybe Bakkerplanet was the victim of orbital bombardment - the Inchoroi aren't the enemy but the weapons of a higher species which uses macro-level biological warfare in the form of weaponized colony ship missiles.

[Darzin]

This is what we get in the appendix about where Chanv comes from.

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Jekhia—A tributary nation of High Ainon, famed as the mysterious source of chanv, located at the headwaters of the River Sayut in the Great Kayarsus. The Men of Jekhia are unique in that they exhibit Xiuhianni racial characteristics.

The fact that the people are Xiuhianni and are as far as we know the ONLY Xiuhianni  living in Earwa certainly makes it seem that Eanna is important to it's production somehow. Speaking of Eanna do we have any idea what is going on there like at all? As far as i'm aware we don't even know their religion. 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Darzin said:

This is what we get in the appendix about where Chanv comes from.

The fact that the people are Xiuhianni and are as far as we know the ONLY Xiuhianni  living in Earwa certainly makes it seem that Eanna is important to it's production somehow. Speaking of Eanna do we have any idea what is going on there like at all? As far as i'm aware we don't even know their religion. 

I don't think we know a single thing about modern-day Eanna at all. Which is actually rather bizarre. There must be passes through the mountains that the men followed in the first place to enter Earwa, so travel between Earwa and Eanna is certainly possible. The lack of contact suggests that either a vast swathe of Eanna is uninhabited wilderness or Eanna was almost entirely emptied of humans in their flight into Earwa.

[bakkerfans]

15 hours ago, Kalbear said:

@lokisnow

The reviews do absolutely nothing for me. They give me no information that I didn't already possess, don't tell me anything about whether or not I'll like parts and not others, or really anything other than 'these specific huge fans really like the thing that they're fans of'. Maybe that'd be different if the ARCs were given to other reviewers instead of generic fans, especially reviewers who had previously not been big fans of Bakker.

Kalbear, is this a kind of "nature of the beast" thing or would you have liked to see something different in the review?  Feedback welcome--I don't usually write that kind of thing.

Also, chanv as salted ciphrang or powdered inchoroi?  I LIKE IT

[Hello World]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

And in the Three Seas themselves, and off the north-western coast of Earwa.

You're saying that this comes up in TGO?

[Kalbear]

11 minutes ago, bakkerfans said:

Kalbear, is this a kind of "nature of the beast" thing or would you have liked to see something different in the review?  Feedback welcome--I don't usually write that kind of thing.

Also, chanv as salted ciphrang or powdered inchoroi?  I LIKE IT

Sure, and I appreciate you asking. Ultimately I think you did precisely what you were supposed to do - as a big positive fan of the series, others big positive fans look to you to determine whether or not they'll be happy about it. Nothing  wrong with that! It's just not what I'm looking for in reviews.

Book reviews tend to be hit or miss quite often in general - there's a reason that for the most part book reviews have been crowdsourced to Goodreads or completely ignored by the likes of Amazon recommendations. In general, what I look for in a review is the reviewer. I'm looking to see whether that person shares my views, and then gauge their opinion and feelings. In that way, you're not going to work for me - your tastes and your view of Bakker and the storyline are going to be incompatible for the most part with what I'm looking for. (and again,this is fine and expected).

For reading reviews for information it's usually to find out something more about the thing. Games reviews are the typical deal I read more of, but they tend to talk about things like mechanics and gameplay and don't have to talk about plot. Books don't work like that for the most part.

I guess I personally want spoilers, discussion about twists that did work and twists that didn't (even if they're not detailed, having some talk about it is better), and discussion about arcs and pacing that may or may not work. As an example - Pat saying that there's a 50+ page battle of Dagliash that rivals anything that's happened in prior books for battle is a great bit of information. Saying that the book ends abruptly with even more cliffhangers is also a good bit of information that helped me. Talking about the prose is another good one that I've seen very little analysis of - and in reviews, typically prose is sampled and referenced as well, and that's not something I've seen so far. 

[Darzin]

22 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I don't think we know a single thing about modern-day Eanna at all. Which is actually rather bizarre. There must be passes through the mountains that the men followed in the first place to enter Earwa, so travel between Earwa and Eanna is certainly possible. The lack of contact suggests that either a vast swathe of Eanna is uninhabited wilderness or Eanna was almost entirely emptied of humans in their flight into Earwa.

Well there is a whole tribe of men there and humans cam from there so it must be somewhat inhabitable. Maybe the  Xiuhianni have a different religion? They didn't invade with the rest of the tribes after all. Or maybe they just flat out worship the Inchoroi. Maybe Eanna will play the same role that Shara did in the Wheel of Time series. 

21 minutes ago, bakkerfans said:

Kalbear, is this a kind of "nature of the beast" thing or would you have liked to see something different in the review?  Feedback welcome--I don't usually write that kind of thing.

Also, chanv as salted ciphrang or powdered inchoroi?  I LIKE IT

Which then begs the question why does Eanna have salted ciphrang or powdered inchoroi?

[Werthead]

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You're saying that this comes up in TGO?

Nope (or not so far), but it was clear on the maps Bakker put online, including his very early draft ones from 20+ years ago.

[Kalbear]

Since the metaphysical rules apparently are based on the rules of "you are what you eat", some ideas for things.

Clearly the dunyain being in the north hunt a lot of arctic mammals, and feed this to the women. 

Also, clearly the reason that Kellhus is holy is because he has been grinding up and eating baby trees. 

It is left as an exercise to the reader what this implies about what Esmi ate.