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

[unJon]

53 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

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

Hmmm. Moenghus and Koringhus. Share a same suffix nghus. So what does Kori mean? In Greek it means "maiden".  Have we found our Dunyain feminine?

[Hello World]

Kind of a long shot but, MG, Werthead, Pat, H. etc... Do we find out  if Theliopa is named after a character that's yet to be introduced?

[Kalbear]

I so miss @larrytheimp for posts like this regarding the lack of control on the No-God.

Quote

 

Shae: Hey Aurang, buddy, you installed the ocular return unit in the NG before you let him out of the garage right?

Aurang: That was the giant cock? Yeah, of course. I put three extras on just to be safe.

Shae: No, this was more like, uh, eyeballs and stuff so it can see what it's doing.

Aurang: ...uh... cock?

Shae: So--

Aurang: --giant cock.

Shae: We're so fucked.

 

And @Maithanet later:

Quote

 

Shae: So...how confident are we that the NG is invulnerable?

Mek: Absolutely, unless they have any of those laser weapons.

Shae: And all those weapons are accounted for, right?

(cricket cricket)

Mek: What? I was busy killing one of my relatives that day.

Shae: I can't believe I joined this team.

 

 

[lokisnow]

2 hours 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?

Because it's a lie meant to be accepted and believed. If you label him the survivor these two invaders (achamian and Mimara) won't go looking beyond what they've been allowed to see and can be escorted out or to their dooms.

[Kalbear]

And in seriousness, someone asked about if you can enter the 1kx1k halls before you're trained - and the answer is nope. Or at least it is 'a mystery'.

Quote

 

“Indeed it does, child. What is the name we give to the dark sources of thought?”

“Legion. We call them the legion.”

The Pragma raised a palsied hand, as though to mark a crucial waystation in their pilgrimage. “Yes. You are about to embark, young Kellhus, on the most difficult stage of your Conditioning: the mastery of the legion within. Only by doing this will you be able to survive the Labyrinth.”

“This will answer the question of the Thousand Thousand Halls?”

“No. But it will enable you to ask properly.”

 

 

[lokisnow]

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

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. 

pieces of rail are mass produced usually in rather long sections as every joint is a point of weakness. However length means they're rather flexible and bendy all things consider, this is why Sherman's elite crews of engineers could "wrap" the forty foot long rail sections of southern railroads around trees. So rail is very efficient transport but also rather fragile and easy to sabotage. There's a reason rail wasn't cut across the west until systematic genocide-by-starvation and forced relocation to concentration camps depopulated the west of hostile native forces.

And of course rail lines would never hold up to magic.

Additionally, rail implies an enormous amount of iron ore mining and coal mining and mass steel production to generate the rail not to mention the deforestation necessary to supply the ties or the complex engineering and necessary manufacturing capability of a locomotive or rail cars. There's a lot more complicated steel work involved there. All of these are also massively labor intensive and that amount of available labor is not really possible absent innovations in farming technique that increased yields and decreased the labor necessary per unit of land under cultivation, no plows or other farm machinery available means your crop land lays fallow as laborers move into the new more lucrative year round industry. Insufficient crop cultivation and your population starves. Your population starves, no great ordeal.

[Kalbear]

Well, fine. I can destroy your dreams too!

SANDERS 4 EVA

[lokisnow]

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

+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.

Oh you should definitely read a natural history of dragons by Marie Brennan. It might be the best thought out secondary world I've ever read in a fantasy book.

[Kalbear]

Thanks, I'll check that out.

More evidence of crackpot causal loops. The "the false as well as the true" prophecies. This was something mentioned by Sci in a prior thread, but he didn't go this direction. How do you know that a prophecy is true? Sci thought it had to do with the Consult winning the magical belief lottery, which made sense. 

But what if that has nothing to do with it? What if the Consult know how the whole thing ends? Or at least, that things do end. They know that the prophecy is 'true' because the prophecy is something like 'something in the future comes back and does something that we witness in the past'. 

This kind of speaks again to the concept of the No-God as existing outside of the benjuka plate (I know, I keep bringing it up and it's my pet theory. Fuck you.) If the Consult know that there is a time and place outside of the benjuka plate they can tell which prophecies are real and which are fake. Furthermore, if they know that Mimara is the key to creating the No-God, which exists outside of the causal loop and which they create, they clearly need to protect Mimara too, right? Because, 2000 years ago, they witness Mimara blowing up the No-God and ending the world. They might not know who Mimara is at that point, but they do know that Mimara is going to go back in time (or at least they'll be able  to perceive her) and her interacting with the No-God ends the No-God. (and presumably, causes the apocalypse). 

So to them, it's a real prophecy because they know everything is deterministic and if this happens at the plains of Mengedda, for whatever reason, it'll have to happen in the future at some point too. And they've been hunting for her for 2000 years. They've needed to make sure that they knew when she appeared. They even probably have a really good idea of what she looks like, so Esmenet appearing on their radar might be a pretty big deal to them too. 

We also know...hmm. We also know that Akka can see the past in some weird way. Maybe they're illusions or implanted memories, or memories of Nau-Cayuti - but he can see them, and possibly in some weird way interact with them. So...what happens if Mimara touches Seswatha's heart and gets the dreams, too? Can she go back and participate in these dreams in some way? Can she experience them? 

Can she look at the No-God of the past and see it with the Judging Eye, and blow it the fuck up then and there? 

[Callan S.]

Eh, I think the series avoids petty lies - especially from the dunyain. It's truth (and careful ommissions) that shines and burns.

I'm biased toward a particular outcome, but I wonder if 'the survivor' is within a context - like the only defective to have survived.

[Gasp of Many Reeds]

20 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

But what if that has nothing to do with it? What if the Consult know how the whole thing ends? Or at least, that things do end. They know that the prophecy is 'true' because the prophecy is something like 'something in the future comes back and does something that we witness in the past'. 

This kind of speaks again to the concept of the No-God as existing outside of the benjuka plate (I know, I keep bringing it up and it's my pet theory. Fuck you.) If the Consult know that there is a time and place outside of the benjuka plate they can tell which prophecies are real and which are fake. Furthermore, if they know that Mimara is the key to creating the No-God, which exists outside of the causal loop and which they create, they clearly need to protect Mimara too, right? Because, 2000 years ago, they witness Mimara blowing up the No-God and ending the world. They might not know who Mimara is at that point, but they do know that Mimara is going to go back in time (or at least they'll be able  to perceive her) and her interacting with the No-God ends the No-God. (and presumably, causes the apocalypse). 

Do we know if Bakker is a fan of Wolfe or Moorcock's time-travelling saviour model? 

[Happy Ent]

8 hours ago, Kalbear said:

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

Great idea for fan fiction crossover. Go for it.

[Happy Ent]

3 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Because it's a lie meant to be accepted and believed. If you label him the survivor these two invaders (achamian and Mimara) won't go looking beyond what they've been allowed to see and can be escorted out or to their dooms.

Well, currently they are doomed. No need to escort them out. Remember that Akka used charcoal markings to track their passage. Those will at this time have been erased, or (better yet) modified by Koringhus and Monkboy. So Akka and Mim are completely at their mercy. (Which is why they waited so long to announce themselves in the first place, of course.) The best Akka can hope for is to incinerate the two — oh, I thought of something! He could try to capture Monkboy and apply the Cants of Compulsion. But I think the odds on that aren’t good, and Akka knows this.

——

Other thing: I am getting more and more obsessed by ideas of open versus static societies [1,2], and I think that our regular musing of the form couldn’t–they–just–do–this (for instance, have sorcerers build roads) are captives to the fact that we live in open societies. What Bakker does right (and GRRM completely misses) is that his society is peopled with static thinkers. If history is any guide, the ability of people to prevent progress, to actively build social institutions and moral defence mechanisms that prevent the spread of good ideas, is one of the defining characteristics of the human condition. (The Moai on Easter Island are perhaps the most impressive monument to that trait, the excruciatingly slow development of axes and knives another.) So there is no mystery about the lack of sorcerous roads. The non-adaptation of obviously good ideas of potentially monumental impact throughout human history is staggering. Not progressing is what we do, it’s cognitively and socially very hard, but we’re good at it. 

[1] Deutsch, Beginning of Infinity, 20something

[2] Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 19something

[Hello World]

9 hours ago, Callan S. said:

Eh, I think the series avoids petty lies - especially from the dunyain. It's truth (and careful ommissions) that shines and burns.

I'm biased toward a particular outcome, but I wonder if 'the survivor' is within a context - like the only defective to have survived.

How is he a defective if the logos shines brightest within him?

[Gasp of Many Reeds]

18 minutes ago, Hello World said:

How is he a defective if the logos shines brightest within him?

The Logos also burnt pretty brightly in Inrilatas; crisped pretty much the rest of his psyche. Maybe Koringhus is similarly suffering from Logos.overdrive.

[Hello World]

But all we have to argue for him being a defective is his looks. Why should the Dûnyain care about that?

[Kalbear]

43 minutes ago, Hello World said:

How is he a defective if the logos shines brightest within him?

And who is telling you that?

[jurble]

The little boy is actually Korenghus.  Kellhus teleported back to Ishual to breed some time during the Unification period.   He rode the fake Korenghus as his stallion and directed him through the shortest path and their survival.

[unJon]

The real question is whether the boy or "Maiden Stallion" Koringhus is the third POV for this storyline. I'm voting the boy.  

[Hello World]

36 minutes ago, Claustrophobic Jurble said:

The little boy is actually Korenghus.  Kellhus teleported back to Ishual to breed some time during the Unification period.   He rode the fake Korenghus as his stallion and directed him through the shortest path and their survival.

Nah. The boy is the real Samarmas. Kori could be Leweth.