Post by maestercambodia on Jun 10, 2016 8:27:01 GMT
Firstly, my apologies for creating a thread in the wrong sub-forum, but I couldn't see one that it fitted neatly into. Please move it to a more suitable location if there is one.
I think that ASOIAF is such a vast world that no one other than GRRM, who's been conversant in it for half a century (as I now see from starting to read his early works), can be a specialist in the whole thing, so we need to find our niches, and my primary interest is in beginnings (well my BA degree all those years ago was in Biblical Studies, with minors in Ancient History and Prehistory - the interest never truly went away).
I've posted bits and pieces of ideas I have in various threads but here I'd like to tie them together. My overall quasi-original idea is to see a Gaia Theory underpinning the ASOIAF universe, and with my thoughts developing weekly, this week I've been enjoying the notions of two posters over on westeros who have written about hypotheses involving Westerosi volcanic activity and the climatic impact of geological shifts. I'll start with copying and pasting posts I've made earlier (in full or extract form) and go on to embed my newer ideas. Warning - this will be a long one! I'll break it down into multiple posts to make it easier to digest. I'm hoping those of you with enough patience will consider my ideas and point out the flaws therein.
My original contribution to this picture is where I believe that GRRM has working in James Lovelock's Gaia theory, with a twist of the known laws of nature being pervaded by equally rational but unknown (to us) laws of magic. For anyone unfamiliar, I'll just extremely briefly summarise Gaia: it's the idea that the Earth's ecosystem has a natural balance, and that when that balance is upset, the Earth will right itself. Crucially, there is usually a delay - hundreds or thousands of years between cause and effect. Hence, if humankind miraculously switched to a sustainable lifestyle tomorrow, climate change would still continue to worsen because of our abuses that haven't yet worked through. That's why the Long Night arrived thousands of years AFTER the Pact. And that is why the Second Long Night is coming long after the Andal genocidal invasions. The trigger both times has been the damage to the weirnet. As early posters have noted, treetime (weirgaia) works very differently to mantime.
There's a bit more. Lovelock was strictly scientific, and his theories were utterly ridiculed by the mainstream scientific community for decades, if not any more. But his ideas were welcomed by new agers, many of whom went beyond scientific credibility in adding notions of sentience or consciousness to 'Mother Earth'. I think that's what we've got in ASOIAF. This 'mysticism' manifests itself as 'magic'; voice here articulates it through scientific metaphors such as 'miasma', LmL uses language of 'mythical astronomy' - all such metaphorical language is legitimate in trying to describe the 'Song' since GRRM has so far given us only the most tantalizing glimpses of the laws of ice and fire magic, insufficient to draft a grand theory as yet.
I think that ASOIAF is such a vast world that no one other than GRRM, who's been conversant in it for half a century (as I now see from starting to read his early works), can be a specialist in the whole thing, so we need to find our niches, and my primary interest is in beginnings (well my BA degree all those years ago was in Biblical Studies, with minors in Ancient History and Prehistory - the interest never truly went away).
I've posted bits and pieces of ideas I have in various threads but here I'd like to tie them together. My overall quasi-original idea is to see a Gaia Theory underpinning the ASOIAF universe, and with my thoughts developing weekly, this week I've been enjoying the notions of two posters over on westeros who have written about hypotheses involving Westerosi volcanic activity and the climatic impact of geological shifts. I'll start with copying and pasting posts I've made earlier (in full or extract form) and go on to embed my newer ideas. Warning - this will be a long one! I'll break it down into multiple posts to make it easier to digest. I'm hoping those of you with enough patience will consider my ideas and point out the flaws therein.
My original contribution to this picture is where I believe that GRRM has working in James Lovelock's Gaia theory, with a twist of the known laws of nature being pervaded by equally rational but unknown (to us) laws of magic. For anyone unfamiliar, I'll just extremely briefly summarise Gaia: it's the idea that the Earth's ecosystem has a natural balance, and that when that balance is upset, the Earth will right itself. Crucially, there is usually a delay - hundreds or thousands of years between cause and effect. Hence, if humankind miraculously switched to a sustainable lifestyle tomorrow, climate change would still continue to worsen because of our abuses that haven't yet worked through. That's why the Long Night arrived thousands of years AFTER the Pact. And that is why the Second Long Night is coming long after the Andal genocidal invasions. The trigger both times has been the damage to the weirnet. As early posters have noted, treetime (weirgaia) works very differently to mantime.
There's a bit more. Lovelock was strictly scientific, and his theories were utterly ridiculed by the mainstream scientific community for decades, if not any more. But his ideas were welcomed by new agers, many of whom went beyond scientific credibility in adding notions of sentience or consciousness to 'Mother Earth'. I think that's what we've got in ASOIAF. This 'mysticism' manifests itself as 'magic'; voice here articulates it through scientific metaphors such as 'miasma', LmL uses language of 'mythical astronomy' - all such metaphorical language is legitimate in trying to describe the 'Song' since GRRM has so far given us only the most tantalizing glimpses of the laws of ice and fire magic, insufficient to draft a grand theory as yet.