For some reason I was thinking about time lines and them being disrupted. Say you disrupt one time line and The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series becomes an obscure, unknown work. It just didn't get printed, for one. So imagine in one time line someones a huge fan of Tolkien, gushing about it, in the other time line he doesn't know about it at all and as a adult you hand him one of the books that to him is some obscure unknown, he reads it and...doesn't think much of it. Certainly none of his friends gush about it.

I was thinking, could one say one trait of good writing is that irregardless of timeline, it will have the effect it has? I know, alternate time lines, what the heck? But regardless, the question...?

Maybe you'd say that the lord of the rings series would still have it's effect. It might be a harsh/missplaced example, but I wanted to touch on turbo fandom being non plussed in another time line. And so shear away a layer (or layers) there to the effect the book has.

Something occurred to me while skimming a reread.

(I wasn't sure of the best spot to place this thread, so please move if appropriate).

The Nonman emissary Nin'sariccas asks Kellhus to confirm if he has, in fact, traveled to the Outside and returned.  Kellhus asks him if he's worried that Kellhus has been replaced by a demon.  I suspect that this is not the case, but Nin'sariccas says that "such substitutions" have happened before. 

That makes me wonder if any of the major historical figures in Earwan history eventually were "replaced" by demons.  Does anyone have any ideas?

I was flipping through WLW and read past the a conversation between Mimara and the skin-spy that was following the skin eaters.

Why did the thing spend so much time trying to remake itself in Her image? What was the motivation behind their conversations, warning them about the Qirri among other things? Was it really just following orders and following the band, protecting the prophesy or something?

Also, since I'm not exactly sure where there was a discussion about this, I wanted to pick out an allusion:
"Only a soul can hold a paradox," she explains. "Since the true meaning of paradox escapes you, you can only grasp non-paradoxical approximations. In this case, 'strange.' Only a soul can comprehend contradictory truths."
Mimara, WLW p276 USA large edition. my bold.

In 1984 the word doublethink is defined as "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them".

I thought this was an interesting similarity. That Earwa defines the soul as something with this ability to see a paradox, but 1984 uses this same idea as the premise behind its own propaganda. The Soul in Earwa being the ultimate truth, held as the ultimate lie in 1984.

Kellhus has two adopted children: Moenghus and Mimara

1) Fantasy, typically, has a trope of privileging "Blood" above all else.  Hertitage--with a capital H--matters.  If someone is 'adopted' it's a royal who is just lying in wait.  It's never the adopted family that matters, his blood always supersedes that relationship.

2) The Real World, typically, makes a big deal about how there is no difference between adopted children and 'blood' children.  There is much proclaiming that it makes no difference.

What if, in Earwa, Kellhus adopting the children makes them the same? What if adoption works metaphysically in Earwa the way that we say it works in the real world, there is nothing to distinguish them they are anasurimbor in soul now.  It's not just a nominal formality; they are his children.

OK, so I was thinking about the Greek words RSB chose for sorcery and its artefacts in tSA. They're mostly pretty obvious ('Gnosis' = 'Knowledge'; 'Anagogis' = 'Allegory'; 'Aporos' = 'Impasse'; 'Psukhe' = 'Soul'; you all know these already, right?), but for some reason I'd never really thought about what 'Chorae' meant. I think I sort of assumed it was something to do with 'chorus', as it drowns out the 'singing' of a sorcerer. But 'chora' is an actual Greek word, meaning 'country' (or 'realm' or 'region').

In The False Sun, RSB uses the word 'Ground' interchangably to refer to either worlds/planets or to what we might term 'spacetime' or 'the fabric of Reality' (the No-God's hunger bends it). A 'chora' is a relatively small (compared to the World), bounded piece of literal ground, with its own laws set by its creator/ruler. Replace 'ground' with 'Ground', and perhaps a Chorae is a small sub-reality with its own physical laws (e.g. "magic doesn't work here")? It is a 'Tear of God' (to the pseudo-pantheistic Inrithi at least) because a whole new Reality, even a very small and simple one, is by definition divine, with its own immanent Divine Presence. A Tear holds a tiny, distorted reflection of the Whole.

The No-God's carapace is an iron sarcophagus set with 11 Chorae (a curiously precise number). Now, what would eleven subrealities/'realms', each contained within a small sphere, arranged in the shape of a sarcophagus, actually look like?

Oh, right:

No, sadly not yet confirmed on IMDB (someday!)

Here are currently popular actors and actresses that I can see filling the roles (click on the actor names to see a picture):

Kellhus - Chris Hemsworth, but basically you just need to cast an Aryan pretty-boy with some range.
Maithanet - Ditto.
Esmenet - this one was hard... you need a skilled actress who can do 'used up prostitute', 'erudite concubine' and 'empress of the empire'. I'm going with Salma Hayek.
Serwe - Hayden Panettiere
Cnaiur - Dalip Singh
Drusas Achmian - Erick Avari, although you'd need someone to play him as a boy and as a teenager in Atyersus.
Ikurei Comphas -Jonathan Rhys Meyers, again an Aryan pretty boy, but someone who can pull of "narcisistic psychopath" with no problem.
Krijates Xinemus - Ashraf Barhom (he was good in Agora and Coriolanus)
Eleazaras - Donald Southerland (come on, admit it, it would be badass!)
Iyokus - McCauley Culkin (he looks like he's been hitting the chanv pretty hard recently)

I am pretty sure that I am going to be fired for how much time I spend reading this forum...

So I noticed that the High Round (the Mangecea's old stronghold, where Titirga was entombed) is in Shimeh.

Whatever that means.