Category Archives: Blog


Greg Egan – Axiomatic:
2. The Hundred-Light-Year Diary

I completely forgot that I wrote about the first story in this anthology.

I read a few pages of the third story, “Eugene,” before realizing I skipped the one in between. So here we are again. I wasn’t planning to write about this, but I feel I have to since this story is all about a recurring theme that I obsessed over for some time. The non-branching flavor of time travel that is the core common idea of Arrival, Tenet, Dark, Watchmen and so on.

I’ve exhausted the theme and I’m not even going to attempt a recap here, but I can offer a few more comments specifically on the story here. Again, the concept is exactly the same, just “dressed up” differently. What annoyed me the most in the stories like Arrival and Tenet, is that they implicitly embrace an ideology that makes science “magical,” going against the principle of what actually is good science (and good science-fiction, as an extension). Sure, science-fiction is not science, but I really dislike when it advocates openly for magical thinking. It feels like brainwashing propaganda. A complacent celebration of human stupidity.

My hope with Greg Egan, whose reputation I absorbed from the internet would be all about HARD sci-fi, is to find at least a clever perspective. Something I did not consider, and maybe something that could have broken down my certainties about this whole concept. Well, it didn’t happen in any way. But at least he goes a tiny step further. When the potential for this type of time travel is discovered within the story, it’s at least not automatically embraced as an unassailable truth, as it happens in both Arrival and Tenet. But IT IS actually getting tested. That’s what happens within science: you challenge the idea. You try to prove it false, so that the world shows it true.

To my disappointment, the story here doesn’t go further than that. It at least tries the scientific approach, but the result of those tests is just as magical and hand-waved away as in Arrival. The answer is once again a vague “feeling”:

“I couldn’t discipline my reflexes”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“At first, just …clumsy. Uncoordinated. […] I felt like opening it.”

In a similar way, and even more disappointing for me, Egan tries to at least address even the possibility of a purely mechanical experiment, so that human stupidity (of feeling) wouldn’t sully the results. But here’s all we get from that angle:

People have talked about automating the whole process […] but nobody’s ever done it, so perhaps it’s impossible.

Well, at least I appreciate this brutal defeat, rather than simply ignore these counter points. Where Ted Chiang FLEES the important questions, in order to sell his complete bullshit, Egan instead seems at least aware of implications, and he’s trying to tell a different story, despite the unsolvable imperfections at the core.

There are a couple of aspects that salvage this story into a decent one. The first is that he shapes the methodology so that it MAYBE could work. The idea behind this kind of mental manipulation comes from the concept of human consciousness as a secondary epiphenomenon to the activity of the brain. Basically means that your choices in life PRECEDE consciousness. What actually happens is that occluded processes in the brain make a choices, then that choice, already fully done, arrives into consciousness, and then consciousness works hard to “confabulate” a rational reason.

I could – almost always – find a good reason to write what I knew I’d write.

It’s as if consciousness is reverse-engineering a process it has no access to, and just guess an answer. Then fool itself into thinking that itself caused it, appropriating that process, its responsibility, even if in truth consciousness only arrived on the scene after the fact. For Bakker’s readers this is nothing new, and obviously more of an appealing idea to work with, here.

But again, my main criticism on this concept of time travel had nothing to do with consciousness. It has to do with simple physics. Information can’t be abstracted away, it has to be carried by some kind of medium. It needs existing in some kind of physical format. Ink on a page, impulses, binary data sent through light, electric signals. WHATEVER. It needs to be registered onto something. I’m not going all over this again, but when you deal with this type of recursive time travel, the SUBSTANCE that you bring back is substance that gets ADDED. I don’t grasp and pretend of even knowing the mathematical basis of all this, but I know enough to be able to wrap it up consistently.

Philosophy sucks compared to mathematics (and science in general) because it’s very imprecise. But mathematics often fails in front of philosophy because it’s very often PARTIAL (a good example is politics and economic theory, they are hard core mathematical models, but they all fail because they only slice and represent only a part of the world, they shine a spotlight that always loses the whole). The same happens here.

Same as what happens with representation of simple problems like the Liar’s Paradox (“this sentence is false”). Always assumed and analyzed as a PARADOX (contradiction), but only because you selectively removed something from the crime scene: time. The actual “solution” to the Liar’s Paradox, when you face it in its complete form, is that the sentence alternates infinitely between a true and false state. First run is true, second is false, third is true… And so on, as infinite recursion. This system, for obvious reasons, never closes. The recursion is infinite. But you can’t then stupidly COMPRESS it into a contradiction. Since you understand that it infinitely cycles through two incompatible states (true and false) you then hammer it down into a general incompatibility: true and false at the same time. A contradiction.

So again, it’s not that philosophy comes out superior to mathematics, but philosophy helps understanding that the mathematical model you applied to a certain scenario IS INCOMPLETE. Go get a better model.

At least Egan tries giving it a better shape. If in Arrival the signal was essentially visual (like a flash of memory, a richer experience), in this story the message is text. Therefore somewhat more plausible for avoiding contradiction. You would be told what you’re going to say that day, and you maybe would say it accurately, but there’s a lot of wiggle room between a textual description and the actual real image/video. You couldn’t PERFECTLY imitate something you’ve seen, even if you tried. But if it’s just text coming back, then the transition from signal to execution becomes SOMEWHAT more plausible.

The central “morally” problematic conundrum in Arrival is at least mentioned in one paragraph:

A residue of ‘seemingly avoidable’ tragedies remains, though, and the people who know that they’re going to be involved react in different ways: some swallow their fate cheerfully; some seek comfort (or anaesthesia) […]

There’s a note to this section I’ve scribbled that reads: filtering and grouping. I sometime wrote obscure stuff that is meaningful to me at that moment, only to later leave me in frustration when I can’t figure it out anymore. Thankfully this time I remember. It’s again fusing different layers together. If there’s future knowledge about some person dying in a car accident, then this knowledge, adhering to the initial concept, has to be precise. Down to the physical particles of the world. Physics. It’s all written down precisely. The ‘filtering and grouping’ in my note indicate that our recollection or description of an historical event, isn’t THE EVENT. But only a selective filtering and grouping of parts of reality that we deemed important. It’s a slice of time and events that have been CULLED of most of their details. “A person died”, sure, it happened. It was the sensible part of that event, but the circumstances are all written in, time and physics. The MENTAL STATE, atoms in the brain, the chemistry is ALSO part of this “picture.” Nailed down. So, the idea of “breaking a leg” and “breaking a leg while under anaesthesia” AREN’T the SAME event (“I broke a leg”). They can be in the vagueness and imprecision of human representation, or in the abstraction of human language (“that happened”), but they aren’t within the context of time travel that leaves no space for variations. In Arrival, and I assume in Tenet too, this is a giant unanswered and even unacknowledged problem. Here instead the idea is that reactions to future knowledge are already “embedded” in the fabric (the future HAS affected and modified the past, over and over again). Leading to the idea of a fully maximized and optimized world (same as the cycle of true/false in Liar’s Paradox, but we already know that this type of loop never reaches a “maximum”). An idea I already examined in the past and still doesn’t work, but that is at least less brittle compared to Arrival and Tenet.

Even the idea of human brain as a magical black box is addressed a questioned properly:

Knowing the future doesn’t mean we’ve been subtracted out of the equations that shape it. […] If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? […] Some mystical intervention called the soul… but then what, precisely, would govern its behavior.

There are no answers here (the concept is flawed), but at least there are QUESTIONS. Saying “the soul did it” isn’t an answer, it’s just a goalpost being moved. Just another screen hiding the answer.

Though there’s a passage that gave me the impression Egan didn’t quite “get it”:

The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our souls;

Correct: uncertainty. Knowledge of the future would erase uncertainty. And if the system is perfectly known, then human action is just another mechanisms embedded within. Fully mapped.

by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human. To them, ordinary people are literally the walking dead: meat puppets, zombies.

NO. This here is the same error I explained above about the Liar’s Paradox and how it gets wrongly abstracted (so losing detail, sliced) and then compressed and hammered down. From an alternation of true/false, into a superimposition of both, true/false AT THE SAME TIME. The same here because it’s a compression of implicit and explicit patterns. Tho I guess this needs a more eloquent explanation, of what I mean…

No one, absolutely NO ONE ever gets to decide between right or wrong. This is not a philosophical concept, only a practical one. Every single human being to ever exist has ONLY been able to choose right. “Wrong” is not an option. It’s not part of free will, and it’s been one giant, widespread silly misconception. If you are omniscient and were to navigate a system fully known to you, then you would automatically lose “free will,” because that omniscience compels you to always find the perfect optimized path matching whatever goal or desire you have. Like Bakker’s “Shortest Path.” As a good universal principle: omniscience precludes free will. This also causes very common dilemmas about omniscience and omnipotence. For example the typical “Could God create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?” Again, the “pattern” at the core of this all, is once again recursion (as will be repeated here below).

Knowing everything means you know what you want, why you want it, and the shortest path, given a system. Even if you try some path of avoidance, then the avoidance IS WHAT YOU WANT. For reasons that need to exist, even if you just want to contradict yourself. The non optimized path you deliberately decide to take is the OPTIMIZED path of your desire for following a non optimized path. You can’t escape this labyrinth. Omniscience is always a trap you can’t escape from. In a very similar way, back to the quote above, “right or wrong” are contingencies of reality that YOU FIND OUT. The reason you HAVE CHOICE is because you don’t fucking know if what you’re about to do is “right or wrong.” You find out after the fact. Do you bring the umbrella? Is it going to rain? You have a choice BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW. If you knew (akin to omniscience), then you’d bring the umbrella. Because you’d know that it is going to rain. You can’t be “stupid” about it.

Even when you try fighting the system, you’re still being played. Because you’re only thinking it’s the right thing to do. So you TRY doing the WRONG thing, because you think doing the wrong thing is THE RIGHT THING TO DO. You just can’t escape this labyrinth.

So again, the core of the concept that ENABLES free will is not choice between right or wrong. You are always compelled to do what’s right, or what seems right in that moment, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (including laziness). Free will is about choice due to outcomes being hidden away, by lack of information, and so drowned deep in UNCERTAINTY. You have free will because you don’t know shit, therefore you have to guess. And only later you find out what was the correct choice, and maybe regret a mistake. The MORE you know, the LESS choice you have.

All this of course radically destroys all concepts of merit and self determination. But it’s just how the world works, and what human beings are. No one chooses wrong. No one chooses evil. Everyone tries doing the right thing, at all times, set by circumstance and the narrow point of view that makes limited information. You can once again abstract this with misapplication of language. You can say “I would have done differently compared to him,” but your circumstances are not his. You information is not his information. You’ve culled the data. You’ve created yet another perspective. A slice, partial. All whole systems are wholesome, because there’s no correct conceptualization of “wrong.” Nothing is ever wrong, same as contradictions can’t actually happen in the real world. It’s a perceptival abstraction, a culling, that makes things appear as wrong. Language. Otherwise things are just things. There is no morality embedded in the fabric of the world.

The meaning of all this is that free will is not some precious additional power. But a loss. Free will appears as a loss of information. A loss of knowledge. You are free (from the strictures of the system) because you lose the ability to see the chains. Those chains cease to exist, so you become free. And the IMPOSITION of this blindness FORCES the freedom of moving through the world as if independent. Because again you are blind to the force that moves you. So, if you can’t see the force that moves you how can you move other than choosing how to move on your own? There’s nothing else in sight that can help you.

I guess in the end Greg Egan did nothing to address and solve the central dilemma, but at least didn’t completely ignore it. But more importantly, there’s a story to tell here. I’m not going to spoiler it here, it’s a story just 18 pages long, actually quite rich of ideas. As you approach its conclusion you expect that something is going to challenge the status quo, as the story seems to drive there, a sort of act of rebellion. But the twist is completely different. It stops being a story about time travel to become a story about what humanity truly is.

This type of time-travel doesn’t work, yet appears endlessly fascinating simply because it’s built akin one of Dennet’s “intuition pumps.” Whereas classic time travel is a loop that split into new branches every time it comes back, this other “solid” type of time travel is fully built on recursion. The reason why it TRIPS our brains is because, think about it… What is the very first device conceptually and fundamentally built on recursion? The brain. Consciousness. Your own brain tries to conceptualize and think itself. I wrote about this so many times: the thinking you (subject) observing yourself as an (object) of observation. Creating the split in two subject/object (a delusion, because the split doesn’t truly “exist”, but is only perceived). The recursion, the “strange loops” in Hofstadter works. The same loops that are then inappropriately generalized through language into paradoxes. Language that is imprecise and inaccurate, a map that is not the territory, but only a parallel of perception. Representation. In this case, events recollected, versus events as they actually happened in their physical form. The idea that you can cull reality (through perception) without consequences. (and so the idea you can cull information through language, and create a paradox, or abstract away information in a time travel story so that when time loops back that information is either “intangible”, or already pre-embedded, culling away the notion of the recursion…) In the end, all bad “translations” between different human languages. Philosophy and mathematics, not “wrong” in themselves, but when moving concepts back and forth, stacking translation errors.

If in Arrival it was the “power of love” that lead to the avoidance of contradictions (abstracting away the moments of happiness and sadness in life, then hammering them down into a single whole, declaring, “that’s my life, I accept it”, so why don’t you ask that same question to an immigrant who drowned young while trying to survive, as an example, and see if they answer you in the same guise), here instead it’s more of a general compulsion (as seen above), an inner desire that feels itself already perfectly aligned with the desire “of the world.” So… TEST IT ON ME. YOU CAN’T COMPEL ME. I AM DESTRUCTION. I LIVE VISCERALLY TO PROVE THIS WRONG. And… see… someone with a truthful scientific mind like me just couldn’t exist in that world. The world itself has to conspire against yet another “tabu.” Avoidance. Magic.

I guess science-fiction writers aren’t necessarily good philosophers.

P.S.
As written in the book, the story here was originally published in January 1992. Ted Chiang story, according to the wikipedia, first appeared in 1998. There’s a very good chance that Egan didn’t invent the concept (it appears in Watchmen, at least, but it’s not as much of a close call as it is between Egan and Chiang). The other relevant story from Ted Chiang is from 2005, you can read the summary from the wikipedia, I read the full form and it’s not much longer. If it sounds completely stupid it’s because it is. I’m still in awe of how he could write and publish it…

Actually, I’ve now read again that story from 2005 (What’s Expected of Us), and the device there is perfectly coherent with the story by Greg Egan. So we now have both the context and the test. It’s disguised as a problem related to free will, but it has nothing to do with free will. It’s about causality. And it’s again proven wrong because it perfectly reproduces the Liar’s Paradox, both its erroneous representation (contradiction) and its solution (endless recursion, alternation of two states). One one hand you have the classic interpretation of time travel, where each loop back creates a new timeline, so a new “branch”, and, if you keep the recursion going, infinite timelines. On the other hand the “culling” and misrepresentation of the problem (the translation error), where information going back is added to one single loop, that is always the same loop. Therefore a paradoxical overlap, a contradiction.

William the Blind

Just linking to a worth-reading article, on William T. Vollmann.

William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”

His publisher of thirty years.

It’s more complicated than that.

For starters, when he first turned it in, A Table for Fortune was 3,000 pages.

The way Vollmann tells the story about delivering A Table for Fortune to Viking suggests it wasn’t too different from other books, which tend to be long and complex and to pose new challenges about form and content: some heckling about length, cost, headaches and all the rest. “After seven hundred pages,” Vollmann reflects in the Harper’s piece, “[the novel’s] protagonist remained unborn, and my editor found that tedious; on the phone he got sharp about it.”

He nodded along with their points. Heard them out.

Took the feedback home with him and considered it. One thing they suggested was that he remove a long storyline about the CIA’s activity in Angola during the 1970s where they tried unseating a Marxist-Leninist government that would’ve made a good Soviet asset. They sold weapons, propagandized, and recruited mercenaries in an effort to create civil unrest and install a Western-aligned nationalist party.

It’s a blight on the history of the CIA. Not only for its colonialist jockeying but the fact that it failed. Angola aligned with the Soviets. Still, at the behest of President Gerald Ford, then President Jimmy Carter, the Agency showed data to prove that it was hopeless — same way, Vollmann says, that “president after president” had fed young Americans into the Vietnam War just a few years prior despite conclusive certainty, from the start, that there was nothing to gain.

They didn’t care, he says. All they wanted to do was “bloody the Soviets.”

Which might all be true, was Viking’s point, and it’s certainly very interesting — but what’s it got to do with our characters?

And so Vollmann read the whole book again. In earnest. Looking for places he could take stuff out. Storylines that served no larger purpose.

When he finished up and sent the new draft back to Viking, it was 400 pages longer.

Enjoy.

Who’s Jonathan Maberry..?

A little interlude. Sometimes I’m a victim of my whims. In this case I’m well out of my usual area of interest, but I’m also drawn to large, interconnected projects, even when that interconnectedness is just a thin excuse. Where typically most people would recoil, because time is precious, I react in the opposite way and I’m drawn in. The discovery of yet another giant “hobby” that makes a world by itself.

So here I causally stumble onto another writer I’ve never heard about before, that would not generally be very interesting to me, as a writer of mostly thrillers blended with some horror vibes. Thrillers in general aren’t my thing, and horror was more meaningful when I was a kid, even then always the more conceptual side, like Lovecraft, or the artsy-gritty, like Tobe Hooper. Or Hellraiser, or Society, by Brian Yuzna. For me horror was always either aesthetic or concept. The reason I stumble on this other writer is because the concept of one of his series is actually cool: a fantasy setting with Lovecraft’s horror blended in. Not even some monsters in that style, but actual Cthulhu Mythos explicitly referenced. I guess not having copyright helps with that type of adoption.

Looking up the author I found a largish amount of other publications, split in different series. Stuff like action-thrillers, and YA series with zombies. Nothing especially noteworthy. But in one of the comments on the already mentioned fantasy trilogy I read that, as you move between the first and second volume, you realize, if you are familiar with the author, that there are a number of semi-hidden references to the other main series he wrote: “Joe Ledger”. Until those references become rather explicit. But, you see, Joe Ledger is a detective in the modern world, dealing with espionage, conspiracies… those sort of things. How do you link THAT with a fantasy series, especially one where Cthulhu casually walks around? The answer, directly from an interview with the author, is that the fantasy setting FOLLOWS the Joe Ledger modern-time series. It happens some 40k years later, after the world “ended” because of a “successful” zombie apocalypse, followed by a long ice age that reset the life on the planet, until humans appear again and then jumpstart the premise for this “upcoming” fantasy world.

But then the writer wasn’t satisfied, so started writing AT THE SAME TIME also a sci-fi trilogy with spaceships. Fighting once again against Cthulhu. Sadly, at this time only the first (relatively short) novel is out, and in this case there do not seem to be any actual references to THIS one book being in any way connected to the rest. I wonder… because it would be quite an exception.

The more I looked into this, the more I found out how EVERYTHING is connected. I thought at first it was just that silly 40k years connection between Joe Ledger and the fantasy trilogy. Looking at the wikipedia, “Kagen the Damned” is the fantasy trilogy (already completed, the wiki is outdated), the Joe Ledger series has 10 main books, then got an official spin-off “Joe Ledger – Rogue Team International”, as you can see the wiki lists three of them but a fourth comes out in a few days (early March), while the writer is instead writing the fifth… (by the way, remember the already mentioned sci-fi trilogy whose 1st book only is available? The writer is also currently writing… the third. Because the second comes out in May.)

I’m writing all this out of happenstance. I was casually watching this video, until it got to the part where another of Maberry’s book is mentioned, Glimpse. I was watching and thinking… wait, isn’t that name one of those writers I looked up recently? Maybe not, but instead it was. I had done this type of “research” on Maberry weeks ago, to figure out all of this, but this book specifically was left out of the picture because it’s clearly labeled as stand-alone. This time I type in google “maberry glimpse connected” and find a link to this interview: “My other doorway into writing this is the character of Monk Addison. He is a kind of private investigator who carries strange tattoos on his skin. I wrote four short stories about him, and then used him as a supporting character in my novel, Glimpse.” This referring to another standalone, Ink. But if THAT is related to everything else, then it means this one is TOO…

This book, Glimpse (that I continue to mistype as Glister), also has a very interesting first chapter, that I paste here in its entirety:

It’s like that sometimes.
It starts weird and in the wrong place.
This did.
Rain Thomas went to bed on Thursday and woke up on Saturday. She had no idea at all that someone had stolen a whole day from her until she arrived twenty-three hours and forty-eight minutes late for a job interview.
The interview did not go well.

Here we are. What follows is an unedited section of my notes about wordcounts of all the main novels part of this giant tapestry. Again, the connections here don’t really matter, but I like that type of flavor. It’s what gets my attention. Wordcounts here are quick and rough. I usually edit the files because, just as an example, some writers love using “. . .” and using those a lot can actually bloat the wordcount, along with other artifacts, excerpts of other novels at the end of the book, introductions, notes, appendices and so on. The numbers here are instead more roughly eyeballed, but generally still accurate enough. I approximated to -2k words as an estimation. The whole thing comes at over four million words. Not bad.

(as a note, one of the writers in a similar area I tracked was Greg Iles. This is also generally “thriller” but without supernatural or fantasy elements. Just bad men doing bad things. Ends up at seven volumes, the last three more interconnected than the previous, forming an internal trilogy. The last one being a massive 380k words and getting political…)

maberry
ledger
140
158
148
145
145
158
152
165
165
148
= 1.524
152
164
162
dead of
125
120
rot&ruin
110
115
100
112
–
110
95
= 1.365
pine
142
162
175
118 glimpse
122 ink
= 719
kagen
172
210
175
= 557
= 2800
= 4165

Book industry crashing and burning

Completely meaningless given the habit here, but I “announce” I’ll not write about books coming from big publishers unless they are at least three years old.

I’m done supporting this shit.

Only mentioning here the recent Sanderson big book was out the 7th December. The American Tor edition, 10 days later, is completely unavailable in Europe. Not because the copies have been sold out due to demand, but because they were NEVER SHIPPED. Due to a market agreement with the UK publisher. Which is funny since the UK isn’t part of the EU, so why should it monopolize its market?

Not even touching how the cost of books hasn’t simply increased, but multiplied x3 in three years. Reading has become an hobby for the rich.

But still, it’s funny.

My order was just 26 euros at the time, and is currently suspended since no copies were shipped to Europe. Meanwhile the UK edition is available everywhere. In Italian online shops the American edition is delisted, it won’t come up even with specific searches using the ISBN.

I don’t really care, I’m still something like 150 pages into the second book, it’s quite probable I’ll never get to the point of reading the fifth. I just despise this whole situation.

Roll back a few years, I remember clearly I ordered the American hardback of Words of Radiance, it was shipped by Amazon early and arrived one day before even the American launch date. I wrote a post about it.

Years later, Oathbringer took a week to get delivered. Then Amazon killed The Book Depository, in order to better serve its own monopoly.

I’m sorry for the writers, obviously, but I hope these publishers go burn in hell. Bye.

(meanwhile, it took a full year but I got all 15 main books part of Michelle West giant saga, all bought as used copies with the exception of the most recent, that had to be self-published anyway. And so I had to go support her directly on Patreon)

EDIT:
The book arrived on 23 December. On Amazon the book currently looks still unavailable and sold at an insane price, so I suppose they are fulfilling the orders they already have while trying to discourage new ones.

So time for the traditional book review, of the book itself as an object.

Starting from the price. I have all the original hardcover, so I can list them as they were:
– The Way of Kings: $27.99 August 2010
– Words of Radiance: $28.99 March 2013
– Oathbringer: $34.99 November 2017
– Rhythm of War: $34.99 November 2020
– Wind and Truth: $39.99 December 2024

A note about the “acknowledgement” page, it was usually quite long and interesting to read. In book 5 it’s still long, but it became just a simple list of names.

The cover illustrations, I like Whelan well enough, but his illustrations are hit and miss for me. Certain ones are exceptional, others not so much. The cover of the first book is impersonal and with nice colors. I like it, it feels like the dawn of a new series. It gives a nice sense of scale and the worst thing about it is that it’s all covered by words. Also, that style of more lean armors looks way better than the bulkier weird things that got shown afterwards. The second book cover is instead quite terrible, which is funny because the colored internal illustration, again by Whelan and depicting Shallan is WAY better and should have been on the cover. The cover itself is of a bland and of a sickly yellow, the illustration lacks detail. It’s just bad. The one for the third book is okay, but the sword looks weird, and then it’s just a plain, anonymous wall with a swirly thing that seems to come from her hand but not really. The illustration is fine, the subject chosen quite bad. The fourth book is good, it has good colors once again, it is weird in a good way, but it feels some kind of threshold left/right. Too rigid. It suffers a bit for not feeling a real organic landscape, but something cut and pasted. And here it comes the last book, that seems to recall the first, but failing. The colors are all washed out, it would have looked better with more contrast. The platform takes too much space and looks plain. The whirlpool thing is all unaligned for some reason, the “eye” at the top, the cone below and the hand. The mountainous environment makes for a more oppressive place compared to the first cover, but it’s also more common and anonymous. It’s an okay cover for a fantasy book, just not a good one.

From the third book, the soft cover “fold over”, however it’s called, got a colored map of the world. Print quality got actually better here. Makes a jump between book 3 and 4, but it is again slightly better in book 5, with crispier colors.

It’s good they kept a consistent style through all the books, but the spine of the fold over went from an horizontal title to a vertical one, from Oathbringer onward (if publishers knew what they were doing, they’d sell updated folds over as an accessory, people would buy them). But if you remove it, the actual hardcover is consistent all the way through, looking really nice side by side. Book 2 stands out because it’s quite thicker, despite the lower number of pages, as we’ll see later.

For the internal cover illustrations, the first book had maps, with excellent printing quality, the second book has a spread illustration looking really good, from the third you get these tarot-like illustrations, but last two books the printing quality is not as good because the illustrations are way too dark and lacking detail because of it. Probably more directly related to the original illustrations being overall darker in this last book, that doesn’t translate well on paper.

A note about the “hard” cover, and product quality in general. The books became progressively more expensive, but feeling a bit cheaper in quality as well. The hard cover in this last volume is actually thinner than book 4, you can feel it. But even overall, the binding, the paper, it all got cheaper.

As written above, when you look at them side by side book 2 is the bigger by far, merely because it uses similar paper of the first, but slightly heavier. From book 3 onward the paper is of a different kind, smoother, but got another downgrade with this book 5. That’s why despite being 1300 pages it still look just as thick as the previous, the paper is almost a veil, extremely light. This seems to affect printing quality as well. Looking at the black and white map at the beginning, the printing quality across all volumes got progressively worse, and especially bad in this last volume. The coasts all around the continent have become an unreadable deep-grey smudge. Though it could be unrelated and simply a random variation of the printing process, hard to say if it’s actually a difference from book to book or just between printed batches of the same. The rest of the illustrations spread through the pages look generally fine.

I’ve watched already some non-spoiler reviews on youtube, enough to actually have a good idea of what’s the deal. I don’t like the constricting nature of the 10 days structure and it’s usually a bad idea in general because the story has less room, no matter how large is the timespan. It puts things on rails and as a reading experience it feels diminished. But I’ll also link some comments by Werthead that were both quite scathing and funny to read. Whether positive or partially negative, all I heard about the book is quite aligned.

Overall, could be better and could be worse (still commenting just on the physical object here, not the story). In the end they kept the style and it’s acceptably consistent. And for me (I’m perpetually 160 pages into the second book and every several months I start again from page 1, but I like that initial part overall better than all of book 1), it’s nice knowing that whenever I feel like there’s so much to still read and space to stretch.

Deconstructing Atlas Shrugged –
Chapter 5 – patriarchal kingdom

This is a follow up to the first part, a part that was already hijacked from that short story by Greg Egan…

At the time of writing this I’m already back on track reading Bakker, and I don’t intend to stop. Continuing Atlas Shrugged is compelling, but I can’t delay Bakker once again. After that, I plan to do some kind of read along for Erikson’s Forge of Darkness, knowing the author should be back writing the final part of that trilogy (I was about to link the first part here, only to realize I only wrote the beginning unedited and unfinished three years ago…). But who knows. I also have 1Q84 to finish at some point.

I’m 110 pages into Atlas Shrugged. I had read parts of it, years ago, but I usually stalled around 60 pages. This is the first time going a bit further, and it’s a really interesting and stimulating read. I really enjoy it, makes me think. It creates a quite ambiguous and strange mix because of how much “philosophical” distance I have. Meaning that I also want to engage with the text, rather than reading it more passively.

This will focus on the first part of chapter 5, despite I had relevant things to say about the preceding three chapters as well.

Let’s start from the elephant in the room. This initial section of the book is mostly preoccupied of looking back at the past of the characters. Chapter 5 in particular is about the story of Dagny Taggart and her influential childhood friend, Francisco D’Anconias. Francisco comes from a noble, rich family, but he’s an overachiever and an extremely successful person even as a kid, and not directly due to his family. even during his vacations he goes to work, hard, hiding what he’s doing from his father. He’s purely driven by his own ambition, and already at very early age he sees his family more of an obstacle to overcome, than a support. The author makes it very clear that whatever this kid achieves is due solely to his own drive and determination rather than… circumstances. And this is all seen through the eyes of Dagny Taggart, who’s made of the same substance, the same drive in life, and so sees Francisco as both an inspiration and a challenge. As if it’s a game where they try to surpass each other, a symbolic duel that even becomes material at some point.

The problem, the elephant in the room, is the strong, sexist undercurrent… Ayn Rand was a woman, and in the book makes sure to write the example of a strong, successful woman, Dagny Taggart herself. Yet, there’s some kind of idealistic deference to male power, that itself risks to become “objectivist,” something that just is. And that’s again the problem that I commented during the first part: whenever you backtrack the causal chain, you usually end in a place that “just is.” It’s not objective, as part of reality, it’s just convenient fiction, that, as fiction, needs only to be stated to be true. No motivations needed.

Through these pages there’s no sexual tension between Dagny and Francisco, the only tension is purely intellectual. Yet, I turn the pages and there’s something slowly building up. To the point it edges on the creepy.

But when a thin sheet of paper fluttered down to the floor and she bent to pick it up, she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. She picked up the paper and turned back to her desk.

I mean, times are different, but you really have to try hard to see this passage as some sexual provocation… Yet this is still the effect while reading. What is going on here? What’s that “anticipation” for?

Dagny is working late through the night. Francisco comes in…

“What are you doing up at this hour?” she asked.
“I didn’t feel like sleeping.”
“How did you get here? I didn’t hear your car.”
“I walked.”

And what does he? He sits there, silently, watching her working like the creep he is.

He did not seem to want to talk. He asked a few questions about her job, then kept silent.

He sat in a corner, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, waiting.

Hours pass, he watches her working, until morning:

She glanced at Francisco: he was looking at her, with the same smile.

Waiting, like a snake fixed on its prey.

When it’s time to get home she moves toward her car, but Francisco blocks her and asks her to walk through the woods. It’s implied she’s exhausted for having worked through the night, but she doesn’t like to sleep and doesn’t feel that exhaustion:

Each night, she drove the five miles from the country house to Rockdale. She came back at dawn, slept a few hours and got up with the rest of the household. She felt no desire to sleep. Undressing for bed in the first rays of the sun, she felt a tense, joyous, causeless impatience to face the day that was starting.

So they walk through the woods.

She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.

They came to a clearing.

And.

They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it.

Okay, we’re in romance territory here, more or less, but:

She felt a moment’s rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor’s intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.

In the end this is a consensual act, the writer explicitly makes it so. But the writing is quite problematic regardless. The problem is in that sexist undercurrent. In the legitimization of that power and influence that Francisco has over Dagny. No matter how “objective” you try to make it, it’s still creepy.

She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most — to submit.

Write that on the cover, will you?

Her strongest, willful character, the one that embodies her philosophy and morals, in the end finds her purpose: to submit to a man.

“Francisco,” she asked him once, in sudden astonishment, “I’m your mistress, am I not?” He laughed. “That’s what you are.” She felt the pride a woman is supposed to experience at being granted the title of wife.

It’s quite an eloquent example of how a patriarchal culture runs deep to the point of being assimilated. This is indistinguishable from identity. There is no “wrong” here because any alternative has been erased. There is no other state of being, there is no other choice. You have to read the whole chapter to understand the full impact of this, because Dagny is no standard woman. She is almost masculine, she hasn’t blended with other women and girls her age. She has no interest in men and the one time she tries she ends up bored and disappointed. She deliberately refuses success and approval.

She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought — and never worried about it again.

She is driven, by herself, AGAINST the norm. Her track is her own track, and yet she CHUGS DOWN that sexism as the sweetest wine.

To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat — Dagny’s bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one’s half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this — thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling — was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved.

This passage, and whole chapter, is incredible not for the banality, but for the exceptionalism of it.

“Why should you care about the others?”

“Because I like to understand things, and there’s something about people that I can’t understand.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve always been unpopular in school and it didn’t bother me, but now I’ve discovered the reason. It’s an impossible kind of reason. They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I’ve always had the best grades in the class. I don’t even have to study. I always get A’s. Do you suppose I should try to get D’s for a change and become the most popular girl in school?”

Francisco stopped, looked at her and slapped her face.

How obnoxious you must be to act like that? Sure, he’s written to be righteous and have a point. But to SLAP your friend on the basis of a hint of weakness? How fucking OBNOXIOUS and totalitarian. Can’t tolerate any error. We must be PERFECT through and through. Exhibit even a minimum of humanity, of doubt, of weakness, and get SLAPPED HARD by this paragon of absolute virtue that is Francisco D’Anconias, aged fifteen.

Jim, who’s the literal evil in the book, almost sounds reasonable when pitched against the sheer absurdity of the situation:

“All those airs you put on, pretending that you’re an iron woman with a mind of her own! You’re a spineless dishrag, that’s all you are. It’s disgusting, the way you let that conceited punk order you about. He can twist you around his little finger. You haven’t any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don’t you shine his shoes?”

“Because he hasn’t told me to,” she answered.

Once again, the moment you question Francisco “circumstances”, they always come back… to magic.

No matter what discipline was required of him by his father’s exacting plan for his education, no matter what subject he was ordered to study, Francisco mastered it with effortless amusement. His father adored him, but concealed it carefully.

A master at everything. A man born with an affinity to success. How? Why? These questions simply disintegrate in the face of the “what.”

He had started working at the foundry as furnace boy, when he was sixteen — and now, at twenty, he owned it.

Fiction.

His financial talent was called phenomenal; no one had ever beaten him in any transaction — he added to his incredible fortune with every deal he touched and every step he made, when he took the trouble to make it.

Francisco found it natural that the Taggart children should be chosen as his companions: they were the crown heirs of Taggart Transcontinental, as he was of d’Anconia Copper. “We are the only aristocracy left in the world—the aristocracy of money,” he said to Dagny once, when he was fourteen. “It’s the only real aristocracy, if people understood what it means, which they don’t.”

Natural Born Killers Geniuses.

Since this is all of a political nature already, let’s get POLITICAL, shall we?

The purpose of this post is quite simple, but the irony for me is how banal the counter argument is: in what science the same starting conditions produce different outcomes?

This is very much in topic here. You wonder why I read Bakker now? Ayn Rand is all about backtracking the causal chain until you find the magic of make believe. Bakker is all about backtracking the causal chain until you find truth. The darkness that comes before, that everyone tries to hide or ignore.

If the starting conditions are the same, what is that makes men successful? What darkness was enacted in between?

THE GENIUS! THE CREATIVITY! THE WILL!

(the bullshit we tell ourselves to feel great)

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind — and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

The art.

And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”

Kellhus sipped his bowl of anpoi, watching the man.

“So this is how you conceive me?”

“This is how all Zaudunyani conceive you! You are out Prophet!”

Behave like one.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat – seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.

There is a head on a pole.

Taste, one of the Sons says to him. Drink.

Greg Egan – Axiomatic:
1. The Infinite Assassin

I’m currently in a turbulent reading phase, while I keep delaying Bakker’s last stretch. I started a number of different books, resumed Janny Wurts only to go back and re-read the first 100 pages of book one, slowed down on Michelle West but still going, started again with Gene Wolfe, this list could keep going for a while. Then I went into sci-fi phase, meaning I started looking into stuff, especially what’s considered interesting in the “hard” category. Eventually narrowed it down to:
– Greg Egan, Permutation City
– Peter Watts, Firefall (Blindsight + Echopraxia)
– Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

Read some 20-30 pages of each to get an overall feel. Greg Egan convinced me enough that I decided to backpedal to Quarantine and Axiomatic. This last one is a short story collection, so here we are.

But as I said it’s a turbulent phase, and that means my way of coping with recent events has been to once again starting to read Atlas Shrugged. And I really like it. It’s still a fascinating read, the writing has a strong sense of purpose and it matches well the whole philosophical theme. On that front she succeeded, and it makes for a compelling read.

My attention is obviously on the subtle (?) points where the whole thing falls apart, when it comes to meaning and truth. I think she does a good job shaping a believable antithesis. The starting point of view is Eddie Willers, and what defines him is being a neutral point. He observes and perceives some disturbing changes. Something is in motion, but it’s on the outside. He himself represents a sort of stability: he does “whatever is right”, and “he thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise.” […] “Simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren’t.”

The antithesis in this chapter is James Taggart. His physical description already establishes a not-so-neutral stance for the writer, but let’s ignore the unsubtle parts. What the writer wants to establish here is a scenario where there’s some problem (a railroad not functioning) and there’s a very obvious path to solve it. James Taggart is elusive, that’s the whole point. He circumvents the solution and makes excuses. “They never seemed to be talking about the same subject.” This is a critical line, because it’s used by Ayn Rand as a fault, and yet it can also turn the whole thing around…

But here comes Dagny Taggart, who represents “the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.” An obvious counterpoint to James, who’s always indecisive, always stalling, always unfocused. But James makes some good points:
“We ought to help the smaller fellows to develop. Otherwise, we’re just encouraging a monopoly.”
“I don’t see why we should want to help one man instead of a whole nation.” Countered with: “I’m not interested in helping anybody. I want to make money.”
On the matter of using a new alloy that has never been tested: “The consensus of the best metallurgical authorities seems to be highly skeptical.” Countered with: “I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them.”

For all the calls for “objectivism” it seems that the whole evidence is founded on lapses. Every time we backtrack the causal chain we find that objectivism in this book is rooted in subjectivity. We have two counterpoints in this chapter, one is Rearden, the maker of this new metal, and another is Ellis Wyatt. Both of them are enshrouded in mystery: “Ellis Wyatt’s father had managed to squeeze an obscure living to the end of his days, out of the dying oil wells.” The oil wells are dying, but: “now it was as if somebody had given a shot of adrenalin to the earth of the mountain.” “He had discovered some way to revive exhausted oil wells and he had proceeded to revive them.”

“Some way.”

I don’t remember if later on these positions are given some substance. I think there’s more detail about the Rearden Steel, so I’ll see when I get to that part. But for now all the “movers” are of a magical nature. And that’s where the philosophy falls apart. Same as it happens with a magical trick: information is withdrawn. The magician catches your attention and focuses where he wants it, while hiding a meaningful move, so that you end up with the experience of an impossible contradiction. But there never was a contradiction, you just missed some data. A piece of the picture was hidden away.

So we’re back, “they never seemed to be talking about the same subject.” Because James Taggart understood (in this re-enaction of thesis and antithesis) that things don’t exist in isolation. The world is connected. When Dagny states that “I want to make money”, despite the blunt, brave intent, is the fact that such an answer begs the question. It never stops there. Money isn’t a thing on itself. The fact that she’s in a position where she can make money, isn’t a thing on itself. There’s always “another subject”, not because of evasiveness, but because of depth. The whole moral and practical stance here is superficial, and it works only because it’s fiction. It’s a book. Therefore what is lapsed is completely absent.

We’ll see where it goes, but for now it aligns fairly well with my belief that capitalism is “fiction.” It’s a moral justification that exists entirely on omissions. On focusing the attention on some aspects while deleting others. It’s a fictional construction because it’s a selective perception and description of the world. It’s an artificial, self-serving reconstruction, that will eventually crash itself against reality. As someone said: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

The book still has a long way to go. This first chapter simply repeats the same trick of mistaking action for knowledge. But since this is a book, and the writer has complete control on the knowledge within, then action can be made to appear equivalent to knowledge. No questions asked.

But this post is supposed to be about Greg Egan short story :)

In some way, the premise of the other book I started to read, “Permutation City”, is close to the short story here. In both we’re dealing directly with a kind of multiverse. The difference is that in Permutation City it’s built of simulated copies, whereas here it’s an actual multiverse of possibilities that is made concrete by the existence of a drug, “S”:

One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling reality, it’s always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.

Whereas Permutation City is immediately focused on the moral implications and conscious perception, here it’s all brushed away to try chasing the rabbit down the hole, and see what’s on the other side.

18 pages in total, the story is very straightforward even if the context very vague. “The Company” is some kind of institution trying to keep some order, and the occasional appearance of these “whirlpools” caused by dreamers who take that “S” drug, and causing reality to fragment and spiraling out. The assassin has the task to put this chaos to an end, by going right into the eye of the storm. All the movement of the story is about statistics: maximizing chances of success after colliding with a fragmented reality.

The problem for me is that, similar to Ayn Rand, if you will, if you backtrack the causal chain you get to the same magical point:

The human body somehow defends its integrity, and shifts as a whole far more often than it should. The physical basis for this anomaly has yet to be pinned down – but then, the physical basis for the human brain creating the delusion of a unique history, a sense of time, and a sense of identity, from the multifurcating branches and fans of superspace, has also proved to be elusive.”

With one point given away to magic, the other wasn’t successful for me either. It turns around a mathematical concept I’m not familiar with, “a set of measure zero.” It is explained through examples a couple of times within the story, but I haven’t pinpointed an actual meaning to it. This is the problem of math, understanding what IT MEANS is very hard. It seems to be a subtlety about an exceedingly rare event, that when considered within the context of infinitely possibilities becomes true, but only in “a set of measure zero.” Which means nothing to me. I only catalogue it as a discrepancy between abstraction and reality. A set of measure zero in the context of statistical approximation, rather than accuracy.

(My problem is that one side the assassin manipulates events through procedure, on the other side the dreamer counters with infinite computation. But as the ending reveals, there are no winners. I don’t understand the “weighting” of chances within the context of infinity… In theory neither should have tried that hard, because the context would have already explored all alternatives. The self, meant as intentional stance, would have been brushed away. There is no choice when all choices are being enacted at the same time.)

But what did it all mean? I’m not sure I understood. From the very beginning I wasn’t totally on board with the strategy of maximizing success. Because, intuitively, in a world of infinite possibilities, not a single one “matters.” There’s a disconnection between the self and the context, something that is explored really well in the first few pages of Permutation City. Here it all seems to degenerate into a sort of fatalism. We get to observe one of the infinite assassins, within one of the possible worlds. I’m not sure what’s revelatory about the last two pages in the story.

It seems the crisis between the dreamer and The Company is always absolute, in the sense that there’s always a balance. Which is how the story started:

At first, those alter egos who’ve developed the skill are distributed too sparsely to have any effect at all. Later, it seems there’s a kind of paralysis through symmetry; all potential flows are equally possible, including each one’s exact opposite. Everything just cancels out.

Here with a trailer.

I guess it’s a journey, and this is one starting point.

Mandate Schoolmen

From Chapter 2:

“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten that you numbered yourself among the skeptics. What is it you say? That we pursue ghosts.” He held the word in his mouth, as though it were a morsel of questionable food. “I guess, then, you would say that a possibility, that we’re witnessing the first signs of the No-God’s return, is outweighed by an actuality, the life of a defector — that rolling the dice of apocalypse is worth the pulse of a fool.”

This is a conversation between three individuals that has a lot of subtlety and actual depth.

For the reader the story has a starting point. It’s the beginning of a book, of course it means there’s a meaningful segment of a story to be told. But for these characters this is just one moment. They are all waiting for something to happen, but they don’t know when. They aren’t even sure it will happen. Even if they have the dreams that are an effective tool that prevents memory to fade, they are still caught in the inertia of daily life (as one of the following excerpts will also confirm).

It’s all kind of suspended in uncertainty, and even skepticism. They have a burden, something more that lets them see the world, and yet they are caught within, transported away same as everyone else…

Nautzera studied his face. “Skeptics,” he snorted. “You all make the same error. You confuse us with the other Schools. But do we vie for power? Do we scurry around palaces, placing Wards and sniffing sorceries like dogs? Do we whine into the ears of Emperors or Kings? In the absence of the Consult, you confuse our actions with those who act for no purpose save that of power and its childish gratifications. You confuse us with the whores.”

Could it be? No. He’d thought it through many times. Unlike the others, those like Nautzera, he could distinguish his age from the one he dreamt night after night. He could see the difference. The Mandate was not merely poised between epochs—it was poised between dreams and waking life. When the skeptics, those who thought the Consult had abandoned the Three Seas, looked at the Mandate, they saw not a School compromised by worldly ambition but the opposite: a School not in this world at all. The “mandate,” which was the mandate of history after all, was not to wage a dead war, or to sanctify a long-dead sorcerer driven mad by that war’s horrors, but to learn — to live from the past, not in it.

Nautzera here seems rhetorical, but he only introduces the powerful idea that is then reinforced in the following paragraph.

This isn’t pride, Achamian voices it just a moment later: The Mandate was a curse! Dispossessed of the God. Dispossessed even of the present. Only the clawing, choking fear that the future might resemble the past.

This is just pure description. There isn’t even choice. The idea of the curse is something received passively, and at best endured. Mandate Schoolmen are condemned to see the world as it is.

“A school not in this world.” Because their “curse” dislodged them permanently from the normalcy. They only get to decide what to do about it. They have a “mandate”, but they also don’t know everything. They live chasing a dream that they know to be true, but they don’t know when, or even if. There’s a deep uncertainty part of it all, enough for Achamian to be accused as a skeptic.

And yet Simas watched him so strangely, his eyes curious with their own indecision.

The reader knows, but they don’t. They know the importance of the moment, but they do not know this is the moment. This obviously echoes back.

These are the times I live in. All this happens now.

It seemed possible.

They know what happened in the past, and their mission is about the present. But they don’t know when it will happen. They are stuck in this perpetual state of preparedness, “chasing ghosts”. But being also themselves caught in the present, they are carried away just like everyone else.

The Schoolmen of the Mandate could never forget what had happened — the violence of Seswatha’s Dreams ensured that much. But if anything, the civilization of the Three Seas was insistent.

The more crowded the concerns of the present, the more difficult it became to see the ways in which the past portended the future.

Civilization is insistent. They are out of this world, yet trapped in it. No matter how strong the dreams are and their renewal, they also get washed away every time. There is this double layer of myth and reality, but where myth is stronger than reality.

Mandate Schoolmen have this double layer as part of their vision. Every moment they have to decide which one makes their own present reality. They cannot fully deny one of the two, and so they live as if suspended: “poised between dreams and waking life“.