Kevin's Watch

Three thoughts that flew into my mind:

(1) The skurj are (correct me if I'm wrong!) Earthpowerful, but diseased. If the Worm eats some of them, would it get sick? Or what if it ate the Staff of Law? Would Vain-con bits not sit well with it? In other words, what kind of weird stuff could you feed the Worm trying to get a reaction other than doomsday?

(2) Could the Auriference's true name be used to mess with her participation in Her? Like, could you use it to command her to break off from Her? Or is she like Kenaustin Ardenol when he became the Guardian of the One Tree, in a position where her true name has no power over her anymore? And what, if any, might the relation between her true name and Her true name be?

(3) "... so distant that even the Giants had never visited them..." How the frakk massive is this planet? The Giants have been sailing for what, 9,000 years or something, if not longer? Humans circumnavigated and mapped the globe in less than a millennium.

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:
(3) "... so distant that even the Giants had never visited them..." How the frakk massive is this planet? The Giants have been sailing for what, 9,000 years or something, if not longer? Humans circumnavigated and mapped the globe in less than a millennium.

Hmm, has SRD stated anywhere that the Earth's a traditional ball bouncing through the void? Considering that the stars are actually demigods of a certain ilk.... I recall some passages where the world became formed around the napping Worm, yet within a set of eldritch laws of physics, nothing really prohibits it resembling a cosmic pretzel or a runcitruncated tesseract. The Soulbiter's an imprecise, possibly mobile(?) tract of sea. Wouldn't necessarily try to apply conventional logic to this realm.

Neither there exist accounts of the world's precise age. The Giants must have lived/sailed far longer than 9000 years; if an individual's life measures up to 2000-3000 years, that's merely a couple of generations, excluding those ancient eras when their fertility had not yet diminished.

Frostheart wrote:Hmm, has SRD stated anywhere that the Earth's a traditional ball bouncing through the void? Considering that the stars are actually demigods of a certain ilk.... I recall some passages where the world became formed around the napping Worm, yet within a set of eldritch laws of physics, nothing really prohibits it resembling a cosmic pretzel or a runcitruncated tesseract. The Soulbiter's an imprecise, possibly mobile(?) tract of sea. Wouldn't necessarily try to apply conventional logic to this realm.

Granted. Distance being the reason given for the Giants' not getting there was what threw me off, but maybe Vidik Amar is like Valinor, inaccessible without a certain avenue of approach...

Neither there exist accounts of the world's precise age. The Giants must have lived/sailed far longer than 9000 years; if an individual's life measures up to 2000-3000 years, that's merely a couple of generations, excluding those ancient eras when their fertility had not yet diminished.

Covenant flashbacks "hundreds or thousands of centuries" at one point, suggesting no less than 20,000 to 200,000 years.

Donaldson believes that "the underlying assumptions of fantasy are not so rational: they are, in a sense, a-rational (rather than non-rational or irrational), arising as they do from that aspect of the human mind which creates dreams." [GI]

Arational - not based on or governed by logical reasoning.

Irrational - not logical or reasonable.

Non-rational - which is not able to be explained by reason.

So, how could something be arational but not irrational and not non-rational?

In my mind, this means that in fantasy, there is logic to how things proceed, but you can't reason backwards to why things are the way they are. Logical analysis only goes so far. Eventually, you bump into the wall of "it is because it is".

Which is why the Giants never mapped the entire earth. And why everyone speaks Covenant's language. And why no one ever invented gunpowder or combustion engines. Like a dream, the world is the way it is so that you will be in the situation that you are in. It is designed backwards, not forwards. Everything in the past happened in order to design the present exactly as it is. That's the only "why" that signifies.

wayfriend wrote:In my mind, this means that in fantasy, there is logic to how things proceed, but you can't reason backwards to why things are the way they are. Logical analysis only goes so far. Eventually, you bump into the wall of "it is because it is". Like a dream, the world is the way it is so that you will be in the situation that you are in. It is designed backwards, not forwards. Everything in the past happened in order to design the present exactly as it is. That's the only "why" that signifies.

This is a really good explanation, and doesn't Donaldson even say he designs his stories from the ending in reverse?

Yes, he did. But he designs his science fiction stories backwards, too.