White-Luck Warrior IX

[Francis Buck]

That's interesting about RSB not wanting to reveal the third series's name because it's a spoiler. Kinda makes me think think Kellhus might become the No-God after all. I mean so far both trilogies have been a reference to Kellhus, so if he really does become the No-God, then it would make sense that the series would simply be called that. Plus it does have a sense of progression to it...from Prince, to Emperor, to God. It's a little obvious, but then not everything can be a crazy anti-twist (or can it?).

Is this third series really going to be another trilogy? Seems like a lot. I thought I heard him mention that it might only be two books.

[marwyn]

That's interesting about RSB not wanting to reveal the third series's name because it's a spoiler. Kinda makes me think think Kellhus might become the No-God after all. I mean so far both trilogies have been a reference to Kellhus, so if he really does become the No-God, then it would make sense that the series would simply be called that. Plus it does have a sense of progression to it...from Prince, to Emperor, to God. It's a little obvious, but then not everything can be a crazy anti-twist (or can it?).

Is this third series really going to be another trilogy? Seems like a lot. I thought I heard him mention that it might only be two books.

As it stands, it's projected to be a duology. But afaik the Aspect-Emperor series was a duology as well and then expanded. And in fantasy land there is of course plenty examples of stories that 'grow bigger in the telling'. RSB isn't saying anything either way, just that right now he plans to make it a duology but that it could go either way.

[Sci-2]

I wonder if the Consult always planned for there to be an Ordeal to Golgotterath. Why else would they need skin spies? If the only thing they needed to do was turtle until the No-God was built, why send out agents that can result in unification against you?

[Kalbear]

I wonder if the Consult always planned for there to be an Ordeal to Golgotterath. Why else would they need skin spies? If the only thing they needed to do was turtle until the No-God was built, why send out agents that can result in unification against you?

Ever are rape aliens deceived.

Men look upon spacefarers and think them unto gods; think they are immune to avarice, immune to vice, and especially immune to irrationality. They see these creatures composed of lust and pendulous phalli and olfactory anal powers and believe them wise, clever, calculating. And ever do men ignore the evidence that would put lie to these beliefs, seeing confirmation when there should be negation, evidence when there should be only gaping holes in their knowledge.

Men see creatures whose existence is devoted to the belief that they are damned and thus must destroy the world, and think them rational actors.

Men see creatures who plot to seal world upon world to the Outside with the same plan again and again, and do not think them insane - they instead value them as persistent and obedient. As if these were virtues to ply a soul!

Men see creatures who plan to destroy their enemies by killing their women while making them immortal and do not mock this for its obvious stupidity - instead, they value this as a clever plan of biological warfare.

Men see creatures who create weapon races that are only loosely bound by lust and desires while copying the basic form of their foe and think this reveals cleverness, when the true observer knows one is not clever if all you can do is copy. And what use is a weapon that you cannot control?

Men see creatures that can impersonate humans and then see their revelation as proof that they plan within plan, all the while ignoring the simple truth - the aliens are dumb and did not anticipate being caught.

Men see all these things, and because they are bound by thoughts of what has come before they do not see the truth. Men are primed to think that aliens must be smart, atheistic, rational, deliberate beings, beings of fantastic intelligence and control. When the answer is simple: open your eyes and see the truth. See that the aliens are zealots, crossing worlds to destroy other races because of an irrational belief they cannot prove. See that the aliens are idiots, unable to use their technology for more than the most basic tasks, using it like a child uses a microwave - because it is the machine that goes 'bing'. See that the aliens are desperate, grasping at straws with what little resources they have left. See that the aliens are incompetent, as plan after plan fail in the most basic ways.

[Sci-2]

Men see creatures whose existence is devoted to the belief that they are damned and thus must destroy the world, and think them rational actors.

True, the Inverse Fire could be nonsense. Or, even if damnation is real, the Inchies may not have been damned.

Men see creatures who plot to seal world upon world to the Outside with the same plan again and again, and do not think them insane - they instead value them as persistent and obedient. As if these were virtues to ply a soul!

The plan itself is bullshit? There is no sealing the world? Now that would be awesome. Cruel, hilarious, but awesome.

Men see creatures who plan to destroy their enemies by killing their women while making them immortal and do not mock this for its obvious stupidity - instead, they value this as a clever plan of biological warfare.

You're assuming they did this on purpose. Or they underestimated how much the Nonmen would care about the part of their species that didn't have penises. After all, aren't the Inchies misogynists taken to their ultimate conclusion?

Men see creatures who create weapon races that are only loosely bound by lust and desires while copying the basic form of their foe and think this reveals cleverness, when the true observer knows one is not clever if all you can do is copy. And what use is a weapon that you cannot control?

Yet the control over the skin spies far exceeds that over the Sranc, Bashrag, and Wracu. The skin spies actually do what the Consult want.

Men see creatures that can impersonate humans and then see their revelation as proof that they plan within plan, all the while ignoring the simple truth - the aliens are dumb and did not anticipate being caught.

Why have skin spies at all then? Why not turtle in Golgotterath until the No-God is remade? Seems to me they needed to manipulate the Three Seas into something. I suspect this something is a mass number of souls required to make the No-God.

Souls, after all, are breaches of the Outside into the world. I suspect the No-God requires a mass number of these breaches to make a big breach.

See that the aliens are zealots, crossing worlds to destroy other races because of an irrational belief they cannot prove.

This would be interesting, but something tells me the resources and effort required means the Inchies must have some inkling about what they are doing. Yes they can't prove it definitively, but I suspect they've strong reasons both for thinking they are damned and that Earwa is the promised land. Otherwise they'd have rationalized staying on another world.

See that the aliens are idiots, unable to use their technology for more than the most basic tasks, using it like a child uses a microwave - because it is the machine that goes 'bing'. See that the aliens are desperate, grasping at straws with what little resources they have left.

I agree with this, and am less inclined than HE to think the Consult knows what it is doing. I suspect the analogy is more like everyone who knows nothing about computer architecture using their comps.

See that the aliens are incompetent, as plan after plan fail in the most basic ways.

Can you elaborate on "fail in the most basic of ways"?

[jurble]

I'm telling you, the Inverse Fire is just some virtual reality video game set in an infernal setting, like Diablo or something.

[Kurr]

That's interesting about RSB not wanting to reveal the third series's name because it's a spoiler. [...]

This doesn't make sense to me. How will waiting until after TUC make the name any less of a spoiler? Is he assuming that all readers, past and future, are all at the same place in the series, so that when he's ready to release the spoilery name, it will no longer be spoilery?

The spoilery name of the third series is always going to be a spoiler. Why make it a spoiler at all, if you're so worried about it being spoilery?

[Curethan]

When the answer is simple: open your eyes and see the truth.

Stop with the E.A.M.D. you damn sock poppet.

3rd series wil be called;

'How I learned to stop worrying about the semantic apocalypse'.

We have organic honey where I work and it smells like arse.

[Marcus Cicero]

It is presumably a major spoiler for the plot of TUC, so once this book is out, it might not be spoilery any more.

Only for people who read the book right away. Plenty of people will stumble onto the series later on and be spoiled by the name of its third act.

[Sci-2]

Bakker is keeping the name hidden from the current readers. Yeah, it'll probably be a pseudo-spoiler just like Aspect Emperor is a pseudo-spoiler for PoN.

I'm pretty sure, given that Kellhus has purposely put Zeum on war footing, that the Ordeal fails to stop the No-God from rising.

The reasons why Kellhus will allow this to happen are what make TUC interesting.

[Happy Ent]

That was funny, albe.

Regarding this, though:

Men see creatures who plan to destroy their enemies by killing their women while making them immortal and do not mock this for its obvious stupidity - instead, they value this as a clever plan of biological warfare.

They did stop the circle of souls, which is (as far as I understand) their main objective. No Nonmen are ever born again.

(Why it was easier to kill just the women and leave the men immortal, rather than kill the whole population? I have no idea. Nonmen are not dumb, however, and the Inchoroi did promise immortality. Would the Nonman Nonhealth Nonauthority have detected a plague that was too obviously genocidal? Who knows. We don’t have enough information about how the womb plague worked, or what the Nonman civilisation was capable of.)

[Sci-2]

I assume they harvested power from stars?

Or they, in addition to looking for the Promised Land of worlds, also stopped over at other worlds and stripped those planets for resources?

eta: New thought. Kellhus seeks to ensure the destruction of a good bit of the Consult's head honchos, but still wants the No-God to rise. The largely leaderless monsters will still be controlled by the Black Heaven, but this gives enough of a delay to accomplish whatever Kellhus wants to accomplish.

[Spring Bass]

Triskele, it's also possible that by the time they arrived on the Promised World, they were at the end of their rope, with advanced age screwing with their ability to maintain their technologies. I doubt they meant for the Ark to crash into a mountain and kill the vast majority of them in the process.

I'm almost wondering if "the mysterious third series with a spoilerific title" is a myth. Maybe he's actually planning to end it with the Consult winning everything.

[Sci-2]

Nah, we have set up with Zeum being put on war footing. TUC isn't the end.

[Maithanet]

This is a random thought / question.

Are we then to assume that the reason that their technology waned on Earwa was because for the first time they actually met an opponent that they had to go to war with and mostly lost that war? All of their engineers were killed in the Cuno-Inchoroi wars? So Aurang is like "Well, shit, Shae, I fucking told you that all I did was man the mess hall. I don't have any clue how Glorkta designed that big old production line for weapons of light w/ interchangeable parts."

I thought the big problem was their spacecraft crashing, with only a small portion (didn't they at one point say it was "less than one percent"?) surviving. Obviously, these aren't the hand picked survivors, and it's quite possible that the entire engineering/bridge sections were destroyed, and all of the survivors were a few cooks, infantrymen and hentai artists.

Hence having access to great technology, but only a vague understanding of how it works and little/no capacity to repair it.

Even with the Nonmen having magic, the Inchoroi would have destroyed them with their technology, had it not been for the spacecrash.

Do we have any sort of idea of how big the Incu-Holoinas is? Super Star Destroyer sized (7 miles long)? ID4 city sized (~20 miles long)? ID4 mothership sized (250 miles)?

[sologdin]

yeah, everything but the brig was destroyed in the crash--the most notorious sex offenders of the inchoroi B-ark only are escaped alone to tell thee.

[red snow]

I thought the big problem was their spacecraft crashing, with only a small portion (didn't they at one point say it was "less than one percent"?) surviving. Obviously, these aren't the hand picked survivors, and it's quite possible that the entire engineering/bridge sections were destroyed, and all of the survivors were a few cooks, infantrymen and hentai artists.

I had a giggle at "hentai artists". The way you describe this set up has me thinking this could be the weirdest alt-fan ending to battlestar Galactica yet - although i get the impression Moya from "farscape" would better suit the inchoroi tech. Thank God the Transformers didn't behave like this when their ark crashed into Earth

[Spring Bass]

Do we have any sort of idea of how big the Incu-Holoinas is? Super Star Destroyer sized (7 miles long)? ID4 city sized (~20 miles long)? ID4 mothership sized (250 miles)?

The Ark is described as "three thousand cubits in length, five hundred in width, and three hundred in depth" in the TTT Akka "Seswatha goes inside" memory. If you figure that a "cubit" is about 1.5 feet, then the Ark is 4500 feet long, 750 feet wide, and 450 feet deep (or in diameter if it's cylindrical).

Even if half of that is buried under the ground, it would still be an impressive sight (particularly for a society that doesn't have skyscrapers). Other descriptions we've got of it make me think that it tapers out near the end before expanding out into the twin engine bells (the "Horns of Golgotterah").

[Maithanet]

The Ark is described as "three thousand cubits in length, five hundred in width, and three hundred in depth" in the TTT Akka "Seswatha goes inside" memory. If you figure that a "cubit" is about 1.5 feet, then the Ark is 4500 feet long, 750 feet wide, and 450 feet deep (or in diameter if it's cylindrical).

Even if half of that is buried under the ground, it would still be an impressive sight (particularly for a society that doesn't have skyscrapers). Other descriptions we've got of it make me think that it tapers out near the end before expanding out into the twin engine bells (the "Horns of Golgotterah").

Thanks. I'll look up the passage when I get home, but does it seem possible that a significant portion of the ship was destroyed, and this description is only of what remains? Because while large, that isn't really big enough to hold an entire civilization (or at least much of one). For comparison, the Pentagon is wider and deeper than that, and while it certainly isn't 4500 feet tall (even counting the unknown number of basements), it seems like they'd be running out of room pretty quick.

[Francis Buck]

Speaking of sizes, I've wondered many times just how big the Three Seas are? Like say, how many miles/kilometers is it from Golgotterath to Nilnamesh (or whatever that far southern civilization is called?).