Well, Cet'inigra explicitly says that what the Nonmen believed in was a lie - I took that to reference the idea that they can find Oblivion and hide from damnation. This is why he understood that Nil'giccas and the rest of his people won't really believe, or rather accept such a revelation, because it would render all the strife and hopes in their lives to this point meaningless. One has to see the Inverse Fire to believe.

But then that Erratic's soul did slip the Ciphrang (again, that might be just a lucky circumstance, as has been posited).

With regards to the JE being able to see the No-God - why I think this is hugely important is because to some extent it puts the God of Gods outside the continuum as well (otherwise inability to perceive the NG follows), which lends credence to the Solitary God interpretation. On the other hand, Bakker seems to have said that the Fanim have it totally wrong....

(this feels like we are discussing the nature of quantum mechanics back in the 1920s )

Hi there,

I haven't really participated in the discussion here, as I rarely have the time to actively follow-up on posts but I've been reading a lot on the forum since I finished TUC. There are two thing that - to my surprise - I haven't seen being discussed and I wonder about your take on them.

(1) There hasn't to my knowledge been a very serious discussion about what the Mutilated mean when they say the No-God can read the code of Earwa by using deaths. Up to this point, the acquired wisdom has been that the No-God is a means to cut off the number of living souls and thus seal Earwa (and maybe other worlds as well) to the Outside. The entire code-reading narrative goes into an altogether different direction, signifying, at least to me, that the Ark was designed to gleam meaning from the specialness of Earwa where the Outside is closest to the physical reality and thus achieve world-sealing in some other, scientific, way.

I find it irritating that while Bakker claimed TUC would reveal or at least hint at who is right and who is wrong w/r/t understanding of Earwan metaphysics, he in fact only introduced further uncertainty. For example, Cet'inigra muses that the Oblivion approach of the Nonmen is fallacious although the text makes special effort to show that at least one Erratic does in fact escape Hell (granted, this might have been a special case, as has been discussed here). The book therefore keeps lacking clear authority on what exactly is the proper way to achieve salvation and what mechanisms allow it, and therefore fails to deliver at least on that front of Bakker's promises.

(2) More excitingly though, don't you find it highly revelatory that unlike Cnaiur/Ajokli, Mimara was in fact able to see the No-God with the Judging Eye? Literally leading to the important conclusion that the eschaton/invisibility argument doesn't extend to the God of Gods itself but just to the Hundred. I think this has immense metaphysical implications, which I am not altogether ready to summarize. It's also noteworthy that her perception of the sarcophagus didn't involve any descriptions of either damnation or salvation that have hitherto been present when she sees other entities with the Eye.

Hi guys, technically a newcomer to the forum, though I have been reading it for a (long) while Thanks for all the great discussions!

I recently ordered via amazon the Orbit paper copy on the TWLW - i had read it as an e-book when it came out but I wanted to complete my paper collection and give that meagre support to Bakker anyway. To my dismay, the book is not the same format as the rest on my shelf and the first thing I thought about was return/replace it but when I started checking, I can't at all find online information about a small paperback from Orbit.

All the TPN books and TJE that I have (uk orbit editions) measure just about the same height but all the TWLW editions that I can find are about an inch/2cm higher. Does anybody know any better? This would be a very weird thing to do on the part of Orbit if they only changed the format randomly...