Professor pail's Preponderance of Perplexing Puzzles

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Madness

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« on: May 23, 2017, 06:22:33 pm »
Lol. It's come up in Quorum twice now but I felt like it deserved a thread. Here we can collect all the "loose ends" Bakker's left across the series so far, up to and including TGO.

EDIT: Gave the thread a new name :).
« Last Edit: May 30, 2017, 12:02:45 am by Madness »
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Hiro

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« Reply #1 on: May 23, 2017, 06:56:27 pm »
Perhaps something I cannot pinpoint as of yet in the text, but how far did Kellhus prepare for his battle with Golgotterath...did he say scout around there, translocating and all in the years before the Ordeal marched...?
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Madness

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« Reply #2 on: May 25, 2017, 01:16:15 am »
Just for cataloguing for fun and for pail:

- What did Inrau find in Maithanet's apartments?
- Crazy or not: What is Cnaiur talking about in a section of TWP when he "reassembles her face from broken shards?" (badly paraphrasing)
- What's up with Simas the Sorcerous Skin-Spy?

I will keep collecting as pail, Hiro, and others reread.
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TaoHorror

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« Reply #3 on: May 25, 2017, 02:26:53 am »
What the hell is going on in the rest of Earwa? This is only one continent or even just part of a continent. Was it mentioned anywhere this is the only land mass on the planet? Me thinks it would be wild to have a completely different story line for "everywhere else", so see isolated groups of life evolving separably, could really show off some of Bakker's muscle. The Non-men seemed pretty powerful, intelligent and advanced - no explorers among them? Or did they all think the world was flat ...
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Madness

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« Reply #4 on: May 25, 2017, 02:34:50 am »
Bakker always played remarkably coy about Eanna over the years but that still doesn't answer your continent question really.

There are a couple interviews where he's mentioned that "the map runs out" is kind of his logic behind it though.
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Madness

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« Reply #5 on: May 25, 2017, 07:02:01 pm »
"Forgotten mystery" ;) :

Quote from: pail
The real reason for Moenghus leaving Ishual due to the apparent contradiction between Kellhus seeming to not know about Sranc during the Leweth episode (though there was a little wiggle room to argue that he did in fact know of them), but citing Sranc as the reason Moenghus left.
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Hiro

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« Reply #6 on: May 26, 2017, 12:24:48 pm »
Where is the Heron Spear...?
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Wilshire

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« Reply #7 on: May 26, 2017, 11:04:35 pm »
What the hell is going on in the rest of Earwa? This is only one continent or even just part of a continent. Was it mentioned anywhere this is the only land mass on the planet? Me thinks it would be wild to have a completely different story line for "everywhere else", so see isolated groups of life evolving separably, could really show off some of Bakker's muscle. The Non-men seemed pretty powerful, intelligent and advanced - no explorers among them? Or did they all think the world was flat ...

Think ancient times. There is no 'the rest of the map' as far as we are concerned.

At some point this is a story that begins somewhere in the middle. The homeworld of the inchoroi, the rest of Earworld, they just aren't part of it.

That said, those stories are ripe for fanfic.
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themerchant

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« Reply #8 on: May 27, 2017, 03:21:18 pm »
What the hell is going on in the rest of Earwa? This is only one continent or even just part of a continent. Was it mentioned anywhere this is the only land mass on the planet? Me thinks it would be wild to have a completely different story line for "everywhere else", so see isolated groups of life evolving separably, could really show off some of Bakker's muscle. The Non-men seemed pretty powerful, intelligent and advanced - no explorers among them? Or did they all think the world was flat ...

Bakker was asked about this, my recollection of the answer is. Nonmen don't seek to dominate territory like humans would. It's about power over other non-men so their species wasn't interested in traveling as opposed to dominating each other.

I'm sure someone else will remember better than me.

Werthead

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« Reply #9 on: May 28, 2017, 10:44:47 pm »
Quote
What the hell is going on in the rest of Earwa? This is only one continent or even just part of a continent. Was it mentioned anywhere this is the only land mass on the planet? Me thinks it would be wild to have a completely different story line for "everywhere else", so see isolated groups of life evolving separably, could really show off some of Bakker's muscle. The Non-men seemed pretty powerful, intelligent and advanced - no explorers among them? Or did they all think the world was flat ...

The Nonmen were largely not interested in ocean travel, apart from those of Illisseru:

(from TUC glossary, absolutely no spoilers for the plot but some new backstory information)

(click to show/hide)

More to the point, the Nonmen birth rate was very low and they expanded across Earwa very slowly, establishing only nine large Mansions (populations in the tens to low hundreds of thousands) over 10,000-20,000 odd years. Without population pressures and with apparently no other civilisation elsewhere on the planet, they was no economic or population pressure to expand or explore the rest of the planet at that time.

For the present era, it sounds like the terrain on the far side of the Kayarsus is not particularly pleasant and there is no real impetus to explore eastwards across the rest of the continent. If there was a powerful kingdom or empire out there, you'd assume it would have made itself known. As such, civilisation in Eanna is probably far less sophisticated than in Earwa. There's been no reliable intercontinental contact for 2,000+ years, since the Xiuhianni attacked Jekk over the South Kayarsus, which might have been the last gasp of a dying or less sophisticated race.

Zeum apparently has superior naval technology to the Three Seas and may have explored further into the ocean, but if they've found anything, they've not told anyone else. They may have explored the coast of Kutnarmu as well, but I think we can assume that northern Kutnarmu is Africa 2.0 and just uninhabitable desert apart from Cingulat.

More simply, Earwa is Europe somewhere between Ancient Greece and the Crusades, during which time exploring for exploration's sake really didn't happen, and it took 2,000 years from making the first reliable maps of the North Africa coast and finally founding the far southern tip.

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« Reply #10 on: May 28, 2017, 11:25:59 pm »
More simply, Earwa is Europe somewhere between Ancient Greece and the Crusades, during which time exploring for exploration's sake really didn't happen, and it took 2,000 years from making the first reliable maps of the North Africa coast and finally founding the far southern tip.

"Earwa is actually some four or five times the size of Europe. I put that allusory analogue of the Norwegian coast along the top as a sneaky way to guage the land masses involved."

Damn, that's probably one of the first posts referring to The Second Apocalypse.
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Werthead

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« Reply #11 on: May 29, 2017, 02:59:34 pm »
Yeah, that's what Som used as the basis for the scale on his maps, right? Earwa is pretty massive. Although I remain intrigued by the shape similarities between the Sea of Cerish and the Black Sea, as well as the proto-Scandinavia shape of the north-west coast.

Always worth a look is Scott's original map of Earwa (or "Rior") from back in the day.

Hopper8r

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« Reply #12 on: May 29, 2017, 03:10:08 pm »
Interesting (map of Rior).  I see 'scalding' rings....but no Golgotterath?

Madness

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« Reply #13 on: May 29, 2017, 03:13:09 pm »
I'd have to check, Wert.

I do know Som made a thread regarding the process contemporary of when he was making it. I feel like I recall that he used the one from www.rscottbakker.com, which Scott mentioned somewhere is a meticulous pixel by pixel creation. Lol.

That Rior is one cool map.

Lol, I don't think I ever noticed that that map is labelled "Second Age of the Tusk," not year of.
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Werthead

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« Reply #14 on: May 29, 2017, 07:42:33 pm »
Interesting (map of Rior).  I see 'scalding' rings....but no Golgotterath?

I think Golgotterath was always going to be in that ballpark, but maybe this map was designed not to have it on there as a means of mystery.

If this map was drawn up in the 1980s, I wonder if Scott was following traditional "grid map" conventions from back then (where each side of a square is 100 miles)?

Also, I don't think those are scalding rings. If they were nuke craters, they'd be from explosions so massive they'd probably have sterilised the planet from fallout. I suspect more ancient impact craters.