The False Sun- Bakker

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

fucking insane, lockesnow, but I love it.

ETA: By the way - What is the up w/ the very false sun itself? I'm a little confused as to why this Atrocity Tale is named after it. From my reading it's just a cool artifact that Titurga brings with him, but I'm not getting what its significance is.

My first read through, I thought the Inverse Fire was some type of fusion reactor and hence, it's the False Sun. I don't know how to square that with all the metaphysical "see your own damnation" stuff though.

[jurble]

It's just a cool artifact. Maybe the Consult never recovered it, and Kellhus will excavate the High Round for it.

[Borric]

I imagine the inverse fire as something akin to the star trek warp drive field.

You can enter into it to experience the outside (and what awaits you at death) while remaining safe and protected in life.

If you are destined for purgatory, then i should imagine the memories of that experience would be motivating.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

I imagine the inverse fire as something akin to the star trek warp drive field.

You can enter into it to experience the outside (and what awaits you at death) while remaining safe and protected in life.

If you are destined for purgatory, then i should imagine the memories of that experience would be motivating.

So kind of like the Warhammer 40k warp drive?

[unJon]

fucking insane, lockesnow, but I love it.

ETA: By the way - What is the up w/ the very false sun itself? I'm a little confused as to why this Atrocity Tale is named after it. From my reading it's just a cool artifact that Titurga brings with him, but I'm not getting what its significance is.

It's both literally the Diurnal and also the thematic tie at the end of the story, when Shae sees the sun and thinks of it as the false light in the infinite night. A nice tie-in to Shae's belief that the truth is utter dammnation.

[Borric]

I understand the No-God as a pretty late invention. He will walks 1000 years later and is destroyed by the Heron Spear. The Inchoroi were on Eärwa for millennia before the No-God, and the Consult existed for 1000 years before the No-God.

Now, I find it quite plausible that the idea of the No-God is a result of Shaeönanra’s ingenuity. It basically does two things: First, it mind-controls all the weapon races of the Inchroi (which have been around for millennia at that time, working according to their specifications, and quite without any No-God). That’s pretty useful in a war of extermination. Second, it stops the cycle of souls. I’m not quite clear about the significance of that.

Stops the cycle of new souls being born. What of the souls of the dead at this time?.

Did they get stuck between the two?, and end up as the wraith did in Cil-Aujas.

Did the nonman king die at the time the no-gods was active?.

[Sci-2]

Did the nonman king die at the time the no-gods was active?

I don't think so. I think what allowed him to cross the gates of Hell was that the mine was a topos. Perhaps the dead Inchies will cross over right before the gates all shut as the No-God cuts the population down to 144,000.

[Spring Bass]

Having just re-read White Luck Warrior, I'm not convinced that the Nail of Heaven is drastically brighter in pre-First Apocalypse times compared to the "current" period in the books. There's a fair number of passages where it's described as being very bright, casting blue or silvery light, and getting brighter the farther north the Akka & Friends go. I think it's just an exceptionally bright polar star, like having Rigel or Deneb within a couple dozen light-years of Earth instead of hundreds to thousands of light-years away.

Wow. That's some heavy stuff. Fuck. The Consult is an incredibly fascinating villain.

They're the best kind of Big Bad: monstrously evil, but with understandable motives.

[Kalbear]

They're the best kind of Big Bad: monstrously evil, but with understandable motives.

Eh. I think their motives are a bit less transparent than is being put out. They're interesting but we know so little about the Consult that to call them understandable is flawed, and what we have seen has them as bumbling, farcical idiots quite often. Again, this is the group that decided to send the one thing into battle that would win them the war even though all they had to do was wait. They literally had to do nothing at all, and they chose instead to fight.

Now, what would be interesting is if the first Apocalypse didn't go down like folks say it did. What if the No-God didn't die but decided to stop for some reason? What if it failed for entirely different reasons than the Heron Spear? What if Seswatha's been lying to the Mandate all this time, and his 'dreams' are carefully constructed fabrications to allow him to manipulate the world for thousands of years - or better yet, what if that's the Consult's doing? There are a lot of bedrocks that we consider to be sacred and true, but many could be completely wrong or very exaggerated.

As it stands now, however, the Consult is a pretty stupid enemy. They're interesting and vile, but they're pretty dumb.

[jurble]

We know Achamian dreams the truth at least in the second trilogy. In the first trilogy, his dreams seem to go awry. If the true dreams of the second triology actually extend back into the first trilogy, then I think it's possible that the dreams the Mandate dreamt normally might be false. However, Achamian mentions in the first trilogy that errors have been noted in the dreams before and that the libraries of Atyersus are filled with people trying to find hidden meanings in dream errors.

[Kalbear]

We know Achamian dreams the truth at least in the second trilogy.

No we don't. We have no idea what the truth is. We don't even know the mechanism of dreams.

At best, what we know is that his dreams pointed him to the map case of Ishual. We don't know that his dreams were literal history or if they're being manipulated.

[Sci-2]

Interesting, I was thinking last night how I find Akka's new ability to jump into memories of different dreamers rather annoying. Feels like Bakker is taking the easy way out by giving us new past PoVs, kind of like Kellhus's new fire watching ability.

The original magic was very grounded, and now we are moving into mystery magic that echoes ASOIAF. It feels jarring IMO, but I am happy to be proven wrong if all this has an explanation in UC.

[jurble]

Eh, I think the map proves his dreams true. Though, I suppose Kellhus could have sent Imperial trackers with a map-case to hide it in the coffers, or teleported there himself.

But, that is beyond his predictive capabilities. Sauglish isn't conditioned ground- as far as we know.

[Kalbear]

Eh, I think the map proves his dreams true. Though, I suppose Kellhus could have sent Imperial trackers with a map-case to hide it in the coffers, or teleported there himself.

But, that is beyond his predictive capabilities. Sauglish isn't conditioned ground- as far as we know.

Kellhus doesn't have to do either. He simply has to know that a map case exists and what it looks like. Since I'm making the argument that the dreams are somehow planted (as Moe planted dreams into the Dunyain before this) the knowledge of a map of Ishual and what the case looks like is all that's necessary - and that could have come from any number of sources that only Kellhus has access to. Including the fact that he comes from Ishual; they could have easily had a copy or the map themselves that was provided.

Heck, why wouldn't Kellhus have wanted to talk with the dragon? It's not like one blind, mostly dead dragon that apparently likes to exposit instead of eat would have been a threat, but it would have been really useful for Kellhus to talk with. Him dropping by to drop off the map case might not have been such a hard thing. Wouldn't Kellhus have wanted to go to Sauglish anyway?

[Callan S.]

The original magic was very grounded, and now we are moving into mystery magic that echoes ASOIAF. It feels jarring IMO, but I am happy to be proven wrong if all this has an explanation in UC.

There seems to be a trend of people wanting to know the rules of magic - is this a new trend or has it always been that way?

[Sci-2]

There seems to be a trend of people wanting to know the rules of magic - is this a new trend or has it always been that way?

I think it is more a question of consistency, though here I gladly acquiesce the issue is my perception of said consistency which can easily change once TUC comes out.

Originally we have that magic's power is related to clarity of meaning, with the caveat that the Mark is related to errors cropping as one attempts to approximate Creation.

Mimara's Judging Eye is interesting, and may be one of the coolest things to come into fantasy in awhile, but her connection to Consult prophecies is hard to get excited about because it has had no build up. In WLW it sees not only damnation but specific fates and even past sins. That Mimara never mentioned this, even in monologue, during TJE means that we may have more revelations about its powers come TUC that have been hidden from us but not from her character.

Beyond Fire Watching, we also have the Nonmen's belief that they can walk through the Outside into Oblivion. The spaces between the gods thing, the darkness that is ignorance - yet Akka specifically says Cleric sounds too much like Khellus and not the Nonmen cults he knew of...yet it seems now Akka is wrong, and there is not only a religion but a practice that may or may not allow one to escape damnation.

Mind you, this is awesome, but we should have known earlier. No one in the first trilogy gave us much expectation that gods such as Yatwer are real but then She creates the WLW, which apparently walks through probabilities.

I may have missed a lot of text where we were given advanced knowledge of these metaphysical and magical realities, but it feels to me that the rules keep changing. Thankfully Bakker has raised the stakes to such an insane level that these leaks don't really remove too much anticipation.

[Curethan]

No we don't. We have no idea what the truth is. We don't even know the mechanism of dreams.

At best, what we know is that his dreams pointed him to the map case of Ishual. We don't know that his dreams were literal history or if they're being manipulated.

True dat. Moe used dreams to get Kellhus sent from Ishual in the first place.

Cnaiur was having weird dreams of Moe that might well have been manipulative that are mentioned two or three times in TDtCB. (Fairly sure it was a Moe dream that caused him to be in the right place to find Kellhus iirc...)

Akka got mind-melded by Kellhus back in PoN with the purpose of 'talking to Seswatha'. He doesn't need to have been to Sauglish unless the map case is a complete fabrication - he concievably knows whatever Akka thinks he knows about what Seswatha knew.

No need for any inconsistencies - dream/magic/manipulations are firmly established possibilities.

[Spring Bass]

I wouldn't put it past Bakker to make the Seswatha Dreams unreliable. God knows he's harped on the dangers of personal certainty in belief for a long while, and Akka's dependency on the Dreams was fairly certain until they started to recently unravel.

That said, I wonder if it's more likely that someone is messing with him magically, such as the Consult. There's rather interesting parallel between the end of the Shae flashback (where Shae is in the Golden Court, about to look up into damnation) and the Nau-Cayuti Dreams that Akka is having in WLW, where he's in the captive line entering into the Golden Court topos. Someone might be trying to force him to face a vision of damnation head-on.

Now, what would be interesting is if the first Apocalypse didn't go down like folks say it did. What if the No-God didn't die but decided to stop for some reason? What if it failed for entirely different reasons than the Heron Spear? What if Seswatha's been lying to the Mandate all this time, and his 'dreams' are carefully constructed fabrications to allow him to manipulate the world for thousands of years - or better yet, what if that's the Consult's doing? There are a lot of bedrocks that we consider to be sacred and true, but many could be completely wrong or very exaggerated.

That could work, although my personal thought was that the No-God simply wasn't under the Consult's control while it was "active" - it chose to take the field. That would tie in with the WLW "What Has Come Before" section, which describes the Consult as "making themselves slaves so as to better destroy the World" when they awoke the No-God.

[Curethan]

Again, it may have been necesary for Mog to be part of the final slaughter in order to close the world rather than tactical stupidity.

Mengeda became a topos because the no-god fell there.. or because of what he was doing before it got zapped/failed.

We simply don't know.

Then again the inchies seemed to put themselves at risk more often than was strictly necesary too - it's probably part of their nature (e.g. wearing corpses as armour seems less than optimal imo :P)

[Maia]

They're the best kind of Big Bad: monstrously evil, but with understandable motives.

I dunno, their over-the-top evilness makes them less interesting in my eyes, not more. While I agree that experience of damnation might make them prepared to commit any cruelty to escape it, I don't see why it would make them also revel in cruelty for it's own sake.

I found the explanation about how Nonmen would commit atrocities just to be avoid losing all memory of things/people much more compelling and interesting.

Again, this is the group that decided to send the one thing into battle that would win them the war even though all they had to do was wait.

Not to mention that they are lead by guys who gave Nonmen immortality so as to cause the womb plague instead of:

a. just dumping plutonium or whatever in their drinking water

and

b. starting their extermination program with the weaker, but more quickly procreating humans.

and continued using the baroque stuff like weapon races, etc, instead of much simpler, but incomparably more effective poisons and microbiological agents.

There seems to be a trend of people wanting to know the rules of magic - is this a new trend or has it always been that way?

Personally, I always felt cheated when authors explained their magic systems in some detail and then, instead of working within them, started to handwave stuff and inflate magical powers of the protagonists right, left and center. Robert Jordan was the prime example of this.