Bakker XI: Spoilers for PoN and TJE

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

How does everyone feel about the title? I loved "Neuropath" as a title, but can't quite decide how I feel about "Disciple of the Dog"

On topic of titles, he mentioned on his blog that he's thinking of naming the book after White-Luck Warrior "The Unholy Consult" which just sounds too much of a generic fantasy title to me. His fans managed to convince him to change "When Sorcerer's Sing" to "The Thousandfold Thought" (which is my favorite title of them all) I've heard, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some peer-pressure changing his mind on this one too.

It is hard to brainstorm better titles without knowing what happens in the book. He will hopefully change the title a second time.

[Galactus]

I never really saw much meaning behind the choice of snakes as divine when I first read that passage, but it isn't that surprising from what I know of the symbolism of serpents in mythology. In Abrahamic religions snakes were linked to deceit, but in many other mythologies snakes were associated with protection, healing, immortality, and nearly divine wisdom in many other religions.

What strikes me as interesting is that the mythology in which snake worship was practiced were mostly Cambodian, Buddhist, Native American, Hindu, and various mythologies of African descent. I don't see a lot of influences from any of those belief systems in the series. If I remember correctly serpents were symbols of immortality in ancient Mesopotamia and a few other cultures in that geographical area, but since most of the religions in the book seem to be primarily based on Abrahamic religions I do find Bakker's choice of snake divinity interesting.

Since he seems pretty well versed on the mythologies he used as influences I think it's safe to assume the deviation for snake divinity was chosen on purpose, and merits discussion.

The greeks had the snake sacred to Demeter, IIRC, and there's a couple other examples of snake-veneration from te Near-east.

And of course, the line between "holy" and "demonic" is often very, very thin indeed.

[unJon]

The greeks had the snake sacred to Demeter, IIRC, and there's a couple other examples of snake-veneration from te Near-east.

And of course, the line between "holy" and "demonic" is often very, very thin indeed.

The Ouroboros is Egyptian/Greek and imported to Gnosticism.

[Cantabile]

I still think The Horns of Golgotterah would be much better than "The Unholy Consult".

The Horns of Golgotterah seems a little more cliché fantasy-esque than The Unholy Consult to me personally. What made Prince of Nothing catch my eye while browsing a bookstore was "The Thousandfold Thought"'s title, as well as "The Darkness That Comes Before." and the series itself I suppose. I am not sure I would've ever noticed "The Horns of Golgotterah" on a shelf.

Then again I can be a picky bastard and sometimes it just takes me time to get used to shit.

I'll totally second "In the Halls of the Rapist King" or maybe Bakker can just finish this whole sexism discussion in one blow and have it, "In the Halls of the Rapist King: Dicks Are Better Than Chicks"

Hell, that title might get him into the literary spotlight. Bad press is good press.

[unJon]

I think it's an interesting question of whether anyone has any agency at all in Bakkerworld. The whole theme of the Darkness that Comes Before is that people act for reasons that they do not understand and do not control. If the Dunyain are correct, only a self-moving soul has agency at all. Everyone else is just like billiard balls on a table bouncing around in predictable patterns as they hit each other, but none of the balls understand that's what is causing the movement.

Tie this in with the non-man name for "gods." I believe they referred to them as "agencies" in TJE (possibly misremembering). Remember from TJE that Non-Men are obsessed with "becoming." What if their obsession is with becoming an agency. Sort of like becoming a self-moving soul. Using their entire life to become a god, mold the outside to them. Turns out, for various reasons that they screwed it up pretty badly, created topoi in various places, damned themselves, etc.

What if, the Bakkerworld gods or agencies, actually felt threatened by the non-men. Felt threatened when the Inchies turned them immortal. Genesis 3:22 (New International Version): And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." Suddenly the Non-Men are immortal and intellectual. Now they may actually have an opportunity to threaten the gods (not to get too Raistlin Majere here :rolleyes:). So what do the gods do? They declare a holy war on the Non-Men. They stir up humans, institute the Tusk, Break the Gates and flood Earwa with a bunch of humans whose holy book says they need to exterminate the Non-Men.

It's like the Wight in the Mountain said to Cleric, how could the Non-Men forget, and Cleric says he never did. Maybe Cleric is on his own campaign to "become" an "agency."

Not sure where I'm going with this. More some stream of consciousness thinking about themes I feel are somehow tied together. More in this vein--When Bakker says that the metaphysics of Earwa is "true" contra Happy Ent, let's postulate that true doesn't mean mutable based on belief. All the evidence we have seen so far is that the metaphysics that is true, is the old multi-god religion.

1) That's what the tusk literally says. The tusk purports to be written at a time when the gods actually walked the earth, and lays out the multi-god theory.

2) We've actually seen Yatwer walk the earth. Not as some facet of the one god, but you know as herself. The cult of Yatwer actually seems to have some powerful skillz. Never seen anything like that from the Shrial or the one god religion. (We have seen this from Fanimry, i.e., the Psukhe, but maybe that is straight up magic and not truly from the gods. :dunno:)

3) What we've heard from the demon that is actually from the Outside in TTT. Basically that the demon controls a portion of the Outside and could give eternal damnation to the sorcerer that practices Daimos (sp?). As if the demon is a petty god. It's own "agency" in its limited space Outside.

4) This ties in with the TTT glossary description of the various types of gods (I know that viewing the TTT glossary as objective truth has its own problems).

5) Anyone think of other examples?

We have absolutely no textual evidence to think that Inri Sejenus reinterpretation of the Tusk is correct. No evidence that the shift in belief caused a shift in the Outside. (Is this true? Anyone have a counter-example?)

So where does this leave us. Maybe Mimara's Judging Eye, isn't absolutely true objective sight of damnation. Maybe it's the gift of some particular "agent" or god. How that particular god views good/bad. Which, I don't know. Yatwer? Some other?

And if we accept for the moment the Anjecis (sp?) conception of the Outside, that as you go out farther, it becomes more malleable to the "will" of the agent, you can see kind of neatly how Kelhus would try to become a self-moving soul. The way to do it, is to "become" and "agent" at the farthest level of Outside, the only place where your will can be implemented. Where you can decide based not on the Darkness that Comes Before, but on the Darkness that you create and force to be reality.

Anyway, just some random thoughts.

[Mathis Waters]

Almost done with the first trilogy. Some disorganized thoughts:

• I don't really get the impression that Bakker is sexist, and if I hadn't known otherwise, I would have assumed he self-identified as a feminist. I can see how others would get different impressions, though.
  
• There was less rape than I expected - I thought there would be a good chance that I'd have to put the book down from overload.
  
• The most sexist-seeming thing was the sheer amount of headtime the female characters spent simply being in love with Kellhus. (Men do this too but it seems to predominate less.) Serwe didn't appear to do anything else throughout all of TWP, and as a reader, I was glad to see her die. I'd be awfully sad to see Esmi or Akka or Proysha die (which is why he shouldn't be afraid to kill them off.)
  
• The Inchoroi should bore me, what with their one-dimensional evil, but in practice they get a lot of tension out of their mysteriousness.
  
• Ideally there'd be less sex than there is, but if not, Bakker should probably find words for sex organs beyond "phallus" and "peach."
  
• It's enjoyably dissonant to be going along, finding people like Proyas complex and personally likable, and being reminded, oh yeah, they're murdering hundreds and thousands of people for being Muslim Fanim. (Insert your own joke about Obama here.)
  
• Why don't more novels with thought-out secondary worlds have glossaries?
  
• I'm very much looking forward to reading the rest of this, including the books that haven't been written yet (unless the Judging Eye inexplicably sucks.)
  

[Curethan]

In the light of Mimara's confusion-inducing scene with the chorae near the end of TJE, is there anything more to be drawn from Moe's death scene wherein Cnaiur rocks up just in time to give him a rubdown with a chorae before he dies?

PS @ Unjon - we see Cnaiur channeling the war god (whatever his name is) in TTT IIRC

[Cantabile]

I'm very much looking forward to reading the rest of this, including the books that haven't been written yet (unless the Judging Eye inexplicably sucks.)

The Judging Eye is as brilliant a novel as any in Prince of Nothing series, though Akka's entire arc I found to be the crack in the gem.

No doubt many will disagree with me, but Akka's chapters felt entirely out of place to me in that novel: the characters, the dialogue, and storyline felt far more cheesy and run-of-the-mill fantasy (although still written in Bakker's incredible prose.) Almost like Bakker wasn't quite sure how he wanted to handle the whole Akka tying into the Dunyain plot, so he stretched just getting from point A to point B out as a travelogue. Every one of his chapters felt somewhat of a waste of paper to me. Yes, a lot of worldbuilding etc. was done, and all those characters will get to be used, but for the hundred or so pages that it took up in the novel it didn't actually accomplish or contribute anything vital to the plot.

It stood out so starkly to me because in the Prince of Nothing it felt like every single individual scene in the novels had their place in the plot itself, a masterful lacework of plots interlacing characters interlacing world interlacing plots. A perfect ecosystem of storytelling, where every sentence had its role, and removing a single element would upset the whole. But in The Judging Eye here I felt like an entire character's arc was wasting space.

I still greatly enjoyed reading the novel, and it blew me away as his works always do, but I felt disappointed that Bakker didn't handle that storyline differently.

[Curethan]

I'd like to kick Akka in the balls - perhaps if you take that arc as being pertinant to Mimara and Cleric it seems more relevent.

[Cantabile]

Ah, I had forgotten about Sorweel! His PoV did seem pretty insignificant to the overall plot other than as simply an excuse for giving the reader eyes into the camp etc. and if that was his sole purpose I think it would have been more efficient if Bakker had instead used Kel's son that was on the march, or another PoV that would play a role significant enough to merit all the characterization, as well provide more insight into the politics and mechanisms of the march itself.

Sorweel didn't bother me too much as the entire time I was thinking: Bakker is an ingenious writer, he must be setting Sorweel up for something, he wouldn't waste all of these pages if the character didn't play some sort of pivotal role.

And that remains to be seen, but he should've at least played more of a role in the novel itself.

[Roland_85]

Well, he did get inoculated against Kellhus' face-reading in the end. The gods are turning him into a weapon. I gotta say I really hated that development, as I think he was way too spineless and bland a character to merit super-powers. Plus, I am fervently rooting for Kellhus, even if he ends up destroying the world or whatever.

[Happy Ent]

In the Worst Book Covers thread, somebody has found original Bakkerworld art: post #11 . I don’t particularly like it, but it’s the first I’ve seen.

[Happy Ent]

More Hungarian covers: Kellhus is standing in front of the holy war. Men have correctly fallen to their knees. On the left, I believe we see Conphas’s aide Martemus. What is Kellhus holding up? And where are we? Has he just descended from a Ziggurath?

Fucking Seswatha defends the library of Saughlish against Skafa (or something), most ancient of the Wracu. (Shouldn’t Seswatha still be pretty young?)

Please, somebody, find higher resolution scans of these!

[Curethan]

I like the one of Seswatha. Thx for sharing

[Happy Ent]

I like the one of Seswatha. Thx for sharing

Yes, it does look quite accurate. I just read that scene last night.

As I said, ’watha should be a bit younger (he looks balding and grey-haired), since Sauglish must have fallen early in the First Apocalypse.

Okay, I looked it up now: The princeofnothing wiki has 2147 for the destruction of Saughlish, and puts Seswatha’s birth at 2089. So he 58. I guess that’s fine—if he’s cultivated the Gandalf look, he might indeed look like that.

The walls should be white and the roofs are, I think, copper. Obsidian bases I can’t recognise in the picture. Otherwise, the architecture is very close to how Bakker made me see it in my mind’s eye last night. In the horizon, we see a dark cloud, and The No-God! Dread Mog-Pharau himself walks! (Or am I getting too excited now? Seswatha describes exactly this vista in the dream.) The landscape between Sauglish and the Whirlwind should be spotted with black: whooping Scranc.

We so need a high-resolution scan of this picture!

Artistically, this is competent at best. The Dragons are a let-down, since they should be constructs of the Tekne. I have no idea how they should look according to me, but not like this. Weirder, less organic. More like something you’d find in Mieville’s universe instead of Tolkien’s.

[Happy Ent]

Returning to the cover of Ratnik–Prorok, I’m pretty confident now in my pronouncement that we see Martemus attending one of Kellhus’s imprompta, at the foot of the great ziggurat of Xijoser. At the end of that scene, Kellhus is surrounded by the faithful, yet an assassin tries to kill him.

Somewhere distant, almost too far to touch, men cried out. Martemus watched the Prophet turn his head, reach back with a golden-haloed hand, and seize a flying arm, which bore a fist, which gripped a long and silvery knife.

The book cover is really weird, but as far as I can tell, Kellhus might be holding up an arm with a knife. It’s not a very accurate picture of the scene. (That would be no problem, I like artistic license. But as far as I can see, the arm just fades out and makes little sense.)

[Tears of Lys]

Returning to the cover of Ratnik–Prorok, I'm pretty confident now in my pronouncement that we see Martemus attending one of Kellhus's imprompta, at the foot of the great ziggurat of Xijoser. At the end of that scene, Kellhus is surrounded by the faithful, yet an assassin tries to kill him.

The book cover is really weird, but as far as I can tell, Kellhus might be holding up an arm with a knife. It's not a very accurate picture of the scene. (That would be no problem, I like artistic license. But as far as I can see, the arm just fades out and makes little sense.)

Well, obviously it's moving too fast for the artist to capture. :P

If I were retired right now, instead of having to squeeze my enjoyment of fantasy and artwork into spare minutes here and there, I would dearly love to capture in acrylics some of how I picture these scenes. Being able to see others' interpretations of some of these scenes produces in me a combination of excitement, glee, and hilarity.

Squee!

[Happy Ent]

So, here’s what I want to see:

1. Akka uses the Gnosis against Conphas’s schoolmen. A wide angle, most people are just tiny specks, we see it from the ranks of the columnaries. Conphas’s army: regular blocks of men. Above them, floating, tiny schoolmen who are just shadows in their rock-shaped, glowing wards. The scene is dominated by huge suns falling from the sky, and lightning (golden and silver). On the other side, among ruins, stands Akka in blinding geometries.

2. Akka against the Scarlet Spires in the library. A cramped, close scene full of toppling bookshelves, and burning books. Akka’s face is a mask held against the sun.

3. Duel scene: Cnaiür fights the things called Sarcellus, with the cirumfix in the background.

Stuff I can’t visualise: Kelly holds Cnaiür over the abyss.

[Tears of Lys]

See, I can visualize the scene with Kellhus holding Cnaiur over the void quite easily. Although, the leverage issue is a bit problematic. No matter how strong you are, you would still have a difficult time fighting the natural laws.

I would like to see the original campfire scene with the Waathi doll. Wouldn't that be cool?

The scene of Empress Esmenet on the dais with her two children while the abomination writhes and shrieks behind her.

Esme in her window.

Seswatha and Nau Cayuti (sp?) in Golgotterath.

And of course, the Skin Eaters, et al., at the entrace to the Black Halls.

[Happy Ent]

Since we can now see the information about Bakker's talks at Aarhus University, I predict the audience will be filled with fantasy fans, not literature students.

——*——

Why are they deluding themselves so?

Bakker took a few steps forward, carefully measured so the light falling through the windows at Aarhus University illuminated his golden curls.

How like a god I must look to them.

He had talked to them for hours. Not so much talked, as ministered. He had peeled away their preconceptions, exposed their emptiness to them. Eager faces looked up to him, their expressions blank.

His voice filled the hall. "So," he said, "between Derrida and normative self-egalitarianism, where do we stand?"

A quick smile, as if confiding a secret to an old friend.

"In my country, we call that a dilemma."

Laughter, full of relief.

"So tell me," he abruptly turned and fixed the old professor in his glare, "wherein lies the purposive rationality of between symbolic generalisation of rewards and punishments—", his voice had become thunder. "if you are not a salmon…"

Let him finish it. Insight is ever greater when spoken with own lips.

"A salmon," the postmodernist stuttered, "a salmon swimming upstream." He fell to his knees.

Everywhere in the audience, grown men openly cried. Strangers embraced their neighbours, as if this moment, this revelation, was an insight to which they would fix the revolution of the rest of their lives.

Absolute silence.

"Are there any questions," Bakker asked.

Now, I will teach them. Weber. Simmel. Gramsci. Hermeneutics. Representative designs of lethality.

A young man timidly spoke up, as if afraid to pollute the moment with his voice.

"Is Cnaiür still alive?"