Kevin's Watch

With Angus' guidance, Ciro was led to believe that death was his only redemption. There was no effort on Ciro's part to try and save himself from this fate. He firmly believed that he deserved to die. Those seeds were planted by his guilt and harvested by Angus. With the desire to live, could have an alternative plan been in place so that he didn't have to be out there when the singularity grenades went off? This crew managed to overcome far worse scenarios and live (albeit barely) though them. Angus took away Pup's desire to live. That to me was unexcusable. He was just a kid, he deserved a second chance.

Suicide at least is a choice. Even if influenced by Angus he had it in his mind beforehand. Once he's dead he feels no more pain. At least he went happy, he felt he had a purpose, he fulfilled that purpose. Angus gave him a reason for his suicide. Ciro was suicidal anyway, suicidal people tend not to enjoy life and I'm sure that having a valid reason to commit suicide made Ciro happier in the act.

I think it was an act of kindness, dying for a reason is much better than just dying.

So if you had a close friend or relative who was feeling suicidal, you would rather let them make that choice than try to convince them otherwise? Kinda figure that if that's what they want to do, why should anyone stop them?

Please, don't ever take a job at a suicide prevention helpline...

If you're in a state as bad as Ciro, living would be worse. Giving him a reason to die was a kindness.

Sib could have been saved, too, by keeping him and Nick aboard Trumpet, but the results of letting them go were crucial. Imo they were all soldiers in action, no matter how heroic or inadequate.

Selling of the people to the Amnion.

After rape, you have a chance to heal. With the Amnion, it's final.

Thanks Murrin. I seem to be very bad at getting my points across recently...

Just because the selling of human beings to the Amnion ended up being what saved humanity doesn't mean it was right. This is just the way that Donaldson likes to tell stories. What I think is interesting is that all of Angus' evil acts caused the human race to be saved, whereas covenant's one evil act (the rape of Lena) has had constant repercussions that time and time again threaten the land and punish covenant. He pays for it over and over again. Almost every problem the land has faced since covenant got there was caused by that one act. Everything from the breaking of the law of death to Trell's attempted desecration, to Troy's appearance in the land to indirectly the breaking of the law of life are caused by the rape of Lena.

Once again, regardless of what you think of Euthanasia or suicide, the fact that Angus felt something for the boy, whether healthy or not, marks a complete change in his personality for the better. He knew Ciro's pain, and gave him a method for using his burning desire for self-destruction to save mankind. This marks a huge change in character.

definately those he sold to the amnion, at least he was justified in his own mind in what he did to morn, his dominance over her allowed him to keep his sanity

against the people from viable dreams... he had no justification, and all he could do was forget it in his own mind

The Dreaming makes a good point... However atrocious and heinous Angus' past crimes were, they all ended up in one way or another saving human kind. At least the crimes we were told of...

Naturally this doesn't justify the crime commited at the time. Angus could of course not know what would happen down the line as a result of his black-hearted actions...

Between the sale of people to the Amnion, what he did to Morn and the murder of the miners (which we can be sure was not the first murder he commited) I would have to say Morn.

Think about it...

I am absolutely positive that the horror of being injected with something that wipes your identity out and turns you into an alien "monster" will make you go insane with fear, but on the other hand it is a short lived thing that only lasts between the moment you realize your impending doom and the moment you turn Amnion. After that you are no longer bothered by the event and can happily go about scurrying through space on your little Amnion business...

Morn, on the other hand, was ravaged and abused in a state of aboslute hopelessness, perpetuated by what she had already done to kill her own family. He damaged her for life... I think she would have considered turning Amnion at that very time (not later - as we know), had she been given the choice.

Between being raped and tortured for weeks on end or having somebody put a bullet through your head (which is basically what the Amnion injection does - even though you become something else) what is the bigger crime?

I would say the rape and torture for the simple fact that it is a crime you will be scarred with for the rest of your life.

As far as big pictures go... Of course selling your fellow humans to an alien race is a little tacky.

The funny thing is, some years back I was in a deep depression, and thought to myself that being turned Amnion would be an escape. Interesting post, SG.

Loremaster wrote:The funny thing is, some years back I was in a deep depression, and thought to myself that being turned Amnion would be an escape. Interesting post, SG.

Somehow, the Amnion and the Borg remind me of each other. Both our forms of "assimilation" in which to a high degree you lose you individaul identity.

Just one is genetic and the other is machine based. I find the genetic version much more frightening...

I am curious if one could have been the inspiration for the other.

That's interesting considering both SRD and Melinda Snodgrass (long time Story Editor and sometimes writer for STNG) both live in Albq. and know each other fairly well...hmmm....

Vector wrote:I am curious if one could have been the inspiration for the other.

Possibly. Hard to say, though. Both came out at roughly the same time, though I'd wager SRD had the amnion worked out some years before FK was published (1991).

Danlo - interesting info!

Loremaster wrote:Possibly. Hard to say, though. Both came out at roughly the same time, though I'd wager SRD had the amnion worked out some years before FK was published (1991).

Star Trek Episode Description: Q-Who wrote:In a conference, Guinan tells the crew that the Borg destroyed her world, that they are a collective intelligence (a mixture of organic and artificial life), and that they cannot be reasoned with (1989).

The above description comes from an episode released in 1989. Already this brief excerpt is reminiscent of the Amnion. The Borg are actually already being set up in season 1988 in "The Neutral Zone".

The role the Borg play in the Star Trek universe is really so close to what the Amnion represent. An outside alien "empire" that can not be reasoned with due to their entirely alien way of thinking. And they are slowly encroaching on human space.

In reality, it does not really matter to me other than out of curiosity. The story that SRD builds out of the using Amnion is really "sui generis", is so much more interesting/original than anything Star Trek has given me.

I think the idea of "a collective intelligence that cannot be reasoned with" has been around for a long, long time. Look at Invasion of the Body Snatchers or H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds--the idea of losing one's identity into some creepy collective consciousness is just about as old as dirt. The connection between two writers who know each other socially coming up with two versions of the idea at approximately the same time is awesome, but the idea itself isn't new.

It's basically a question of individual freedom versus a "hive-mind" (cf. Ender's Game). In the case of "Invasion" it was about the Red Scare and commie brainwashing; in STTNG, it was about Western cultural homogenaity; in the Gap Series it was about the abdication of personal identity as a means of avoiding personal responsibility.

That's what makes the idea so seductive, and so frightening. SRD hit the nail on the head, I think--the Amnion take the "mob mentality" to its furthest extreme. They can take over anybody they want, and so they do--but the "they" is all of them, and none of them. Not one of them is personally responsible for the actions of the whole people. We can blame Hitler for the Holocaust, but how many people did he, himself, kill? He didn't kill 6 million people all by himself. The genocide in Rwanda didn't happen in a vacuum--individual people, under the influence of unreal loyalties and imagined wrongdoing, committed those atrocities. That's why the idea of the Borg, and of the Amnion, and of the Nazis, and Rwanda, is so damn scary. Agressive collective consciousness is not limited to fictional machinery and genetic reorganization.

Vector wrote:

Loremaster wrote:Possibly. Hard to say, though. Both came out at roughly the same time, though I'd wager SRD had the amnion worked out some years before FK was published (1991).

Star Trek Episode Description: Q-Who wrote:In a conference, Guinan tells the crew that the Borg destroyed her world, that they are a collective intelligence (a mixture of organic and artificial life), and that they cannot be reasoned with (1989).

The above description comes from an episode released in 1989. Already this brief excerpt is reminiscent of the Amnion. The Borg are actually already being set up in season 1988 in "The Neutral Zone".

The role the Borg play in the Star Trek universe is really so close to what the Amnion represent. An outside alien "empire" that can not be reasoned with due to their entirely alien way of thinking. And they are slowly encroaching on human space.

In reality, it does not really matter to me other than out of curiosity. The story that SRD builds out of the using Amnion is really "sui generis", is so much more interesting/original than anything Star Trek has given me.

Possible, but as Myste said, the idea behind the Borg is nothing new (I might add that ST writers took elements of the Cybermen from Dr Who and used them for the Borg - 'resistance is futile', the cybernetic transformation [the process is eerily similar] . . .). Hivemind races have been around for many years - Stapledon, Heinlein, heck, even the Tyranids from Games Workshop (absorbing the genetic knowledge and memories and adding it their collective consciousness and matter) which were created before the Borg.

But I agree, it is a mute point; the Amnion are more original and interesting than ST's races.

Actually, on a side note, and in reply to the actual topic of this thread. One of the actions which I felt was horrific, and yet was not really presented that way in book - was the destruction of Billingate and all of the thousands of low-life that lived on that planetoid.

Admittedly, the people destroyed were the dregs of society, and yet it certainly contained its share of victims that ended up there probably through simple misfortune of fate.

Such as the woman/spy that Nick seduces and forces to reveal the location of Davies. Nick spares her, but presumably she gets killed along with the destruction of Billingate. And I am sure there are countless other such people - did they deserve to die - even if they were living in violation of Human Space treaties ?


But then again, this is not Angus' action, since he is being compelled by his welding, designed by Lebwohl, and ultimately approved by Warden Dios (with the implicit approval of Holt Fasner).

UrLord wrote:how can you separate any of those? They are all essentially the same act...(except for the killing of Norna, which I don't consider a crime at all)

I am currently re-reading the Gap series. I didn't remember having ANY sympathy for Angus from my first reading of the books, but now I reread them after having become a father, and read the sequence where Angus remembers being tied down in his crib and tortured by his own mother, and I cringe. That would turn anyone vindictive and untrusting. That said, he still has a choice to stop the cycle of violence, and doesn't choose to.

Loremaster wrote:I think selling the people to the Amnion was the worst. Rape is atrocious, but being converted into Amnion is worse.

The one-on-one violence of his rape can be somewhat ameliorated by our knowledge of his own abuse as a child, but I can't see any psychological justification for selling people into hideous mutagenic slavery.