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

[themerchant]

Reading that excerpt again (from the point i quoted) the kid must have been important for a Dunyain to get himself in that state protecting him. I'm sure if he didn't want him alive he'd be dropped like Leweth.

[JGP]

I guess it would depend on how many went in, and the inner workings of the Halls themselves. From a design stand point, it makes little sense to me that the Halls are just a rabbit warren in the dirt. Their layout may be easily deciphered by a Dunyain, sure, but even so if they're as big as is being suggested by the text the Dunyain aren't going to want to have to leave the Halls every time they want a drink or something to eat, I would think. 

[jurble]

5 minutes ago, themerchant said:

Reading that excerpt again (from the point i quoted) the kid must have been important for a Dunyain to get himself in that state protecting him. I'm sure if he didn't want him alive he'd be dropped like Leweth.

My initial interpretation was that Korengus was just running on Dunyain programming to save the Dunyainling - the program can't be abandoned, after all.  But given the dude's missing half his face and barely survived, one kid was all he could secure.

 

But maybe the kid is particularly valuable.

[themerchant]

Not sure if it's stated or just implied, don't Dunyains have to wander the Thousand Thousand Halls and the folk who can't master it wander and die?

I might be wrong though. I'm sure it is portrayed as a question that needs an answer. Maybe when Kellhus is doing the logos training, allows him to ask the question properly?

Sorry rather vague, I think this might be in TDTCB.

[JGP]

Hmn... that's kind of ringing a bell, but aren't weren't Whale Mothers in the Halls? Or am I conflating some under city of Ishual with them?

[Baztek]

yo, could someone post a spoilered summary of the Great Ordeal, or just the twists? this is the only fiction series that I enjoy anymore but with how much I laugh at GoT fans getting absolutely livid over spoilers I don't have a leg to stand on with sticking to my spoiler embargo.

[lokisnow]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Right - that's exactly it, and it was put in specifically to address a concern that @Maiahad raised in the Bakker and Women (and several other Bakker) threads. Before that it was an open question - why wouldn't you use these sorcerers to demolish the hell out of the landscape and put in superhighways given how important overland travel was in antiquity? And the answer was that the moral importance is bigger of a deal than the utilitarian importance some times. I personally can buy that for something like the Scarlet Spires who are the rulers, but the Imperial Saik I would think would get used as builders for some grand imperial project from time to time. 

also, I think Bakker said he was also interested in the idea of reaching a point on the map where the "roads ran out" in one of the WLW or TJE era interviews I think.

But yeah. Kellhus would have recruited The Few who were sons of tradesmen and trained them to know just how to cut roads, stone and build bridge foundations with magic.

However, I doubt he'd have been able to marshall resources to build a road much further than Sorweel-town (I'm not sure if I can remember offhand the difference in name between Sorweel-town and Library-town). for the simple matter that he needs to initiate supply trains to facilitate the magically enhanced Road Building.

So if you're going to have massive road construction teams they need updated supply lines into the road material resource rich regions. Then you need to build the roads from those regions towards your final destination. Say Conriya is such a place, you start building out new supply chain roads in Conriya, have them converge at a port town and also strike a road north with the idea of building the modern road all the way to Sumna.  This also facilitates troop movement as you're likely to have larger numbers of your great ordeal army from the side of the three seas that wasn't directly involved in Kiyuth and the subsequent Jihad.  Additionally, you may want to be engaging in parallel road construction on the western three seas side, although it may be slower as it seems more resource poor and rely on ships for many supplies.

The length of this road is approximately the length of a road up to where the Great Ordeal currently is. And you have to also continually be tapping new asset regions within your primary resource zone, or tap secondary regions to reduce supply lines for road construction. 

And The Great Ordeal would put extreme stress on your new road construction, so it may not hold up as long as you want it to do. 

So before you can cut a road to where the great ordeal wants to go, you have to cut an equally capable road from resources to origination point. 

 

[lokisnow]

And let's not forget that the Few number around 1000 total-ish for a population of 100,000,000 ish, right? They're rather rare (of course, only as men, but if not every candidate was swayali bound, the 1000 untapped women-of-the-few would be well suited as road cutters).

Even still, the "King's Road" of the three seas I outlined in the above post would be sufficient economic stimulus to cause a massive decades long economic boom. That means a baby boom. That means more of the few are born. particularly if horny and lonely and very high status sorcerer foremen/forewomen cutting roads have a lot of money and status to spend on 'personal' time.

I wonder if Kellhus issued floating currency or kept to the gold standard. he'd not be happy with the shocks to the monetary system that additional gold or silver mining initiate.

[Kalbear]

Man, turning the great ordeal into an analogue of the Iron council...that would have been so fucking cool.

[lokisnow]

speaking of resources, given Sranc are so plentiful, even if the meat is unsuitable to eat, like whales-heh-I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be harvested and rendered for their fat to make candles etc. Useful bones (unless it's all cartilege) and useful hide as well. Cottage industry in sranc organ meats for various laughable snake-oil reasons (obviously someone would harvest sranc testicles on the grounds they cure erectile dysfunction).

just had an idea... using the few to build irrigation tunnels or deeply tap a water table is probably one of the most economically profitable advantages an empire could take. Sure Achamian may be dying of thirst in the desert but he's not going to take two seconds to bore a perfect 600 foot deep well into the water table because you know, morally, he's above being a tradesmen, death by thirst is obviously how any human would behave in that sort of situation, In Bakker world, a sorcerer would never, you know, rationalize a reason why "this time" it's okay for him to spend two seconds doing the work of a laborer if his life is on the line. People don't just rationalize their way into "unthinkable" behaviors, ever, in Bakker-land. 

by the by, given that someone (YAY Kalbear's wife!) if finally paying attention to the nutritional deficiencies of the Dunyain, is there any reason to still assume they are NOT-cannibals as we all default assume? Ever since first reading of the unmasking room, I've often toyed with the idea they would logically be cannibals as well, but this is naturally logically defeated by the fact that they are a uniquely closed culture and the resources needed to turn humans into a reliable stocker of cattle-meat are just not supplied by Ishual, given what we'd know. they'd eat themselves to death far faster than they could ever harvest a sufficient supply of meat. humans reach maturity really slowly and gestation is highly calorie intense process, humans don't have the stomachs necessary to turn grazing forage into usable calories and gestate that way, so it's just unlikely from every vector.

Shoot, they don't even have any grain cultivation, it seems (though of course they have "dunyain steel," so as I said, that means they have ore mining, ore smelting, and fuel sources sufficient to smelt) and acorns do not yield much flour for their weight/size and the size of an acorn means the tree doesn't produce very many acorns per tree. (compare to number of pieces of corn produced by one corn stalk with three ears!) and it's weird they have oak trees next to a glacier at a very high latitude and altitude. so even the acorns don't make very much sense as they can't harvest enough for even a small population to be sustained for millenia. the land constraints are really high on that sort of inefficient cultivation and Ishual is very land-size constrained.

[lokisnow]

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Man, turning the great ordeal into an analogue of the Iron council...that would have been so fucking cool.

I don't get the reference?

[unJon]

18 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

I don't get the reference?

Book title. 

[Callan S.]

11 hours ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

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.

Ah, they are not that direct in their methods. Having people addicted to your drug makes for a fantastic spy network.

Besides...this is a long shot theory - if eating sranc somehow removes the soul, what if chanv does this as well? It's not shortening lives, just removing the devilish meaning from them.

[Callan S.]

2 hours ago, themerchant said:

Reading that excerpt again (from the point i quoted) the kid must have been important for a Dunyain to get himself in that state protecting him. I'm sure if he didn't want him alive he'd be dropped like Leweth.

I think Kellhus's son is a defective.

The facial mutilation (making him look like a terminator, as I imagine it) will make it harder for anyone to think there's remnant humanity in him.

Likely the child is actually the more dunyain of the two. Which again grates against our intuitions.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

I don't get the reference?

Sorry. Iron Council is a Mieville book about a kind of magical wild west/imperialism period, combined with socialism and revolution. But the big hook is the building of the locomotive railways across the great wilds and dealing with the magical consequences. 

I was just thinking about a Great Ordeal that was built around a rail system, not a road system. Where Kellhus modernized enough to get into the industrial revolution too (at least parts of it) and was devoting massive effort to not just build a road out there, but a railroad. About the great armies using steam weaponry, having to fight off Scylvendi attacks and train robberies, turning Sakarpus into a hub like Chicago or Kansas City was, and the slow tension of building the rail line as they went while dealing with more and more mobs of sranc. 

There are some impracticalities - namely, the Ordeal doesn't control enough territory to ensure that the rail lines would stay intact, and it's a lot of effort to build rail lines - but it's also pretty neat to think of, especially if the Few started doing things like building the lines and laying down the unholy tracks across the world, a set of ley lines that gleamed in the sunlight and scoured in the sight of the Few, marking the World and turning it into a scarred, blasted mess. 

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

(awesome stuff about logistics, odd economies and nutrition

+1 to all of that. Wish there were more fantasy stories with these kinds of considerations and care. Hadn't thought about aquifers, though I'd imagine that a sorcerer would be able to get pretty amazingly rich if they could create a mine or even delve for things (they don't need to be the miner, just the one that produces the main shafts). I miss Maia. She'd geek out about this stuff.

[Hello World]

I found it weird at first that the boy referred to him as 'the survivor'. Because isn't the kid a survivor too? Or was he born after the wars ended?

[bakkerfans]

https://grimdarkmagazine.com/blogs/news/111563270-evil-is-a-matter-of-perspective-an-anthology-of-antagonists#.V0eHS9ReTbY.twitter

[Kalbear]

11 minutes ago, Hello World said:

I found it weird at first that the boy referred to him as 'the survivor'. Because isn't the kid a survivor too? Or was he born after the wars ended?

He just follows Koringhus around singing Eye of the Tiger at him.

[jurble]

47 minutes ago, bakkerfans said:

https://grimdarkmagazine.com/blogs/news/111563270-evil-is-a-matter-of-perspective-an-anthology-of-antagonists#.V0eHS9ReTbY.twitter

Neat.

 

56 minutes ago, Hello World said:

I found it weird at first that the boy referred to him as 'the survivor'. Because isn't the kid a survivor too? Or was he born after the wars ended?

He refers to being old enough to remember some of the fighting in the Halls.  But I believe he refers to Korengus as a survivor in his capacity as the surviving Dunyain since the boy himself isn't properly Dunyain, not being inducted into the brotherhood by a pragma.