Kevin's Watch

To put this is perspective, I read the last book of the Last Chronicles with a really sour taste in my mouth. There are plenty of threads complaining about the LC, but I thought that these (potentially) last thoughts of mine might belong in a separate thread. I thought of this after reading the thread about the 'Reality of the Creator.'

In my opinion, SRD threw away the best and most challenging cosmology of the Land's world when he transitioned from a Creator-driven cosmology to the Worm-driven cosmology. And I think that the answer to the question of why is that the Worm universe is easier to write about. Or, at least, the Worm-driven cosmology allowed SRD to 'create what he needed' story-wise in a much more free fashion.

Under this scheme, the explanation within The Last Dark of why the Creator was not needed allowed SRD to pardon himself for not using the Creator as a character any further. This undermined the continuity of the entire Land-verse.

I don't think he gave up the Creator cosmology. Now, he simply has three Creators. That's hard to portray with one old man.

Zarathustra wrote:I don't think he gave up the Creator cosmology. Now, he simply has three Creators. That's hard to portray with one old man.

If he didn't give it up entirely, it seemingly faded so far into the background as to not be integral to the rest of the story.

As I said in one of the other threads I am coming to understand the seeming contraction of the Chronsiverse™ (:lol:) in the LCs as consistent with the ending of TLD where (as Z points out) we end up with three new Creators.

As I've been thinking about this, a more meta-based explanation has begun to form: fantasy worlds of authors like SRD and Tolkien tend to exist (in my imagination at least) in a single world cosmos. It's as if the world itself manages to contain the entire cosmos (e.g. the Blessed Isles, the Dead in Andelain). There are moons and stars yet it never occurs to me to bother thinking about other planets and stars in relation to the world of the fantasy setting. For me, the fantasy world is sufficient in itself.

What SRD does at the end of TLD is to make that meta-reality overt in a way that I have never before considered in relation to fantasy.*

u.

* As you can see, I'm getting way more enjoyment from the meta aspect of TLD than from the story itself