[What Came Before]

Really?  I feel like it's plot devices (the LOTR homage in TJE) and setting elements (Dune stuff; like skin spies/flesh dancers, eugenics to make a prophet, etc)

Just seems too much of a stretch plot-wise to incorporate it for its own sake, if you see what I mean.

[What Came Before]

Depends how much Bakker just let the derivatives build up and mash together, I guess? It's a neat idea.

[mrganondorf]

Wondering if Esme's womb is special, marshaling all the bits:

1. Sex with many men (avatar of sex-goddess?)
2. Sex with skin-spy
3. Sex with synthese/possessed dude thing
4. Possessed by Aurang
5. Sex with only gnostic wizard (first gnostic wizard since Seswatha? lost his whole school in the apocalypse?)
6. Sex with mad dunyain
7. Years of exposure to slightly magical whore's shell
8. Gave birth to half-dunyains, each with a peculiarity, most useful to Kellhus (all in some clandestine way?)
9. Gave birth to monstrosities (makes me think of external manipulation, invisible god magic or psukhe)...(were all those things really drowned?  they could be a match some of the first draft monstrosities and abandoned experiments I hope we meet in the ark)
10. Conveniently the most desirable womb for Kellhus (his estimation of her IQ, nice that she's right there and single at the right time)
11. Conveniently the ONLY womb that can handle Dunyain sperm...or just Kellhus'.  A problem maybe his dad didn't have and the dunyain don't--where do they find their breeders and why can't Kellhus do the same...OR HAS HE???

P.S. Love the idea of glamor as a third category of magic!  Would that make the initial 4 gnostic schools: Sohonc, Mangaecca, school of glamors, school of magic items?

uoıʇɐןnɔǝds ɥɔnɯ os

[locke]

you forgot

12. Gave birth to Mimara: holy savior.

[themerchant]

Maith has a mother as well and it's not esme. Although i often wonder at his mother, considering his reference to Inrilitas about having his mothers bones and them being soft. Was Maithanet a test-tube baby or was his mother big-boned?

[Wilshire]

Maith has a mother as well and it's not esme. Although i often wonder at his mother, considering his reference to Inrilitas about having his mothers bones and them being soft. Was Maithanet a test-tube baby or was his mother big-boned?

Lol she was a whale of a woman

[mrganondorf]

Thanks locke!  I think that might be the biggest one

[Wilshire]

It is mentioned that only a Dunyain Woman can give birth to a true Dunyain son, which kind of says that while the Dunyain have no breeding issues in Ishual, any Dunyain would have trouble breeding with any other woman. I think we are being led to believe that the Dunyain were isolated for so long that they are one the brink of speciation.
Any evolutionary biologists in the house? How many generations does it take to speciate two separated groups of the same animal? I know that some long running experiment managed to speciate some species of insect (fruit flies or something?)... But I think it took like 20+ years, and the reproductive cycle of flies is rather fast.
I wonder , given the limited data we have, if anyone has tried to come up with some kind of extremely rough correlation that gives you speciation time in years (or decades/centuries/etc.) given a given reproductive cycle/rate... Probably varies way too drastically between animals to do something like that.
Probably a stretch IRL, but throw in some magic and a little bit of Alien blood and I think its a plausible timeframe

Food for thought: one common trait of the offspring of inter-species couples is infertility, if, that is, the offspring can be brought to term and born alive.
Maitha has no kids (right), nor do any of Kellhus' kids.

I'm not 100% sure what that might mean for Esmi or Mitha's mother, but these facts seem to point to the Dunyain being a different species, which then (if you take a large leap) leads me to believe that the Dunyain had this in mind all the time. Nerdanel: Dunyain always planned on eventually copulating with the Nonmen to create viable hybrid children (to what end, I don't know.).

[Cüréthañ]

I'm starting to think that the union of human and nonman is not actually achieved by sexual activity at all.  It's actually a product of huffing dead nonman ash.

[Wilshire]

Many things are made possible by huffing enough drugs

[Madness]

...

It's difficult to answer this because as scientists there needs to be established an arbitrary baseline. Technically the species before the speciation event wasn't evolved to the new, separate species...

So goes the argument, anyhow.

EDIT: Also, scientists went back to do modern studies (70's - though some of the studies are ongoing) on Galapagos, where it all began so to speak in this line of thinking, and those finches showed generational adaption in response to environmental changes in one generation that greatly affected which beak-type survived and then back!. Super frightening to think we were are doing to our own environment that relies on all the ecosystems that are drastically out of wack (the environmental changes prompting evolutionary drift were literally flooding for during the one generation and drought the next).

[Wilshire]

One generation of genetic drift does not a new species make.

You can't really know if some kind of speciation event horizon has been crossed until they can no longer produce successful offspring when brought back together Successful here meaning offspring that can reproduce, and their offspring can reproduce as well. Some separate species can mate and have offspring that can reproduce, but this ability is not passed onto any subsequent generation.

[Madness]

One generation of genetic drift does not a new species make.

Just highlighting some of the mechanisms involved .

[mrganondorf]

I'm starting to think that the union of human and nonman is not actually achieved by sexual activity at all.  It's actually a product of huffing dead nonman ash.

I like this idea.  Mimara has twins!  One is dead like what happened with old Celmomas?  Sranc hide makes a great material for a double stroller.

[The Sharmat]

I just want to point out that the concept of "species" is just an arbitrary category that's there for ease of use and doesn't reflect scientific morality, even with the old biological definition of "the largest community of organisms that can mutually reproduce viable offspring." You still get weird shit like "ring species" where population A can breed with population B, and population B can breed with population C...but population C cannot breed with population A. How many species are there? Where do they start and stop?

That said, a thousand years is pretty quick for hominid reproductive cycles (and modern Dunyain take longer to gestate than other Homo sapiens) to produce a complete genetic isolate. But, with a very small population in the first place (profound genetic bottleneck) and a very rigorous selective breeding program (Dunyain do not tolerate defectives and I suspect mated with each other the way another human would breed horses) could possibly result in the pretty extreme compatibility problems Kellhus has with Esmi, if you got really lucky with mutations and the genotypes of the initial breeding population.

So yeah, as a biologist (though admittedly, not an evolutionary biologist), I'd say it's plausible enough for fiction, and a neat twist. It doesn't challenge my suspension of disbelief.

I like this idea.  Mimara has twins!  One is dead like what happened with old Celmomas?  Sranc hide makes a great material for a double stroller.

I'm pretty sure Kelmomas is already the recapitulation of Celmomas.