Haven't watched it yet but I really enjoyed this story.
I really enjoyed the video. I think that prestonjacobs makes some really good points. I do wish that I would have known ahead of time that there were two versions of the story. The audio version reflects the original version from 1976, whereas the written version was edited for inclusion in the Tuf Voyaging series in the 1980s. There really are some interesting differences. Unfortunately, I only read and didn't listen.
As a reader not a listener, which do you recommend - the discrete stories or the Tuf Voyager chapters? I have both.
I don't know. You could probably toss that one in just about anywhere. It's really short. I read it after the others, but only because it took me a while to find.
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."
I really enjoyed the video. I think that prestonjacobs makes some really good points. I do wish that I would have known ahead of time that there were two versions of the story. The audio version reflects the original version from 1976, whereas the written version was edited for inclusion in the Tuf Voyaging series in the 1980s. There really are some interesting differences. Unfortunately, I only read and didn't listen.
As a reader not a listener, which do you recommend - the discrete stories or the Tuf Voyager chapters? I have both.
It's hard to say. I never got all the way through the audio version. To me it would be interesting to look for changes between the two.
Why must I always be the isle of crazy alone in an ocean of sensibility? The should to everybody else’s shouldn’t? The I-will to their better-nots?
Just read it - very nice story. Early days yet, but based on this short story alone, one implication suggests itself to me:
Language describing mists and trees is very anthropomorphic whilst not directly linked to wraiths. It indicates GRRM’s preferred imagery and metaphorical style of language, not so much direct clues a la LmL.
What I've always felt about the language in ASOIAF is that given the nature of his world, it's inevitable that references to blood, swords etc are going to crop up with great regularity. In addition to direct references it is also virtually inevitable that there will be frequent allusions - anything red is reminiscent of blood, and any pointy object is reminiscent of a sword (where in our post-Freudian world we see penises). So whilst I fully agree that GRRM has dropped many many hints and links, most of the ones fans pick up on are probably red herrings.
White is the color of purity, ho, and the plague star purifies this land. Yet its touch corrupts and decays. There is a fine irony in that, is there not?
This in the prologue to Tuf Voyaging seems to parallel my hypothesis on the Gaia theory in ASOIAF, namely that the Others are effectively the planet regulating the imbalance caused by the hubris of Men.
Miasma.
LOL
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."
Language describing mists and trees is very anthropomorphic whilst not directly linked to wraiths. It indicates GRRM’s preferred imagery and metaphorical style of language, not so much direct clues a la LmL.
I completely agree. But at the same time, we clearly have some very tangible anthropomorphs in ASOIAF.
What I've always felt about the language in ASOIAF is that given the nature of his world, it's inevitable that references to blood, swords etc are going to crop up with great regularity. In addition to direct references it is also virtually inevitable that there will be frequent allusions - anything red is reminiscent of blood, and any pointy object is reminiscent of a sword (where in our post-Freudian world we see penises). So whilst I fully agree that GRRM has dropped many many hints and links, most of the ones fans pick up on are probably red herrings.
Agreed again. Many, many red herrings. But in order for a red herring to really be a red herring, it has to be obvious. At least, in my opinion, or it doesn't really serve as a distraction and is otherwise simply world-building and writing-style.
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."
Post by maestercambodia on Jun 11, 2016 4:31:05 GMT
What I've been doing is reading the stories, making notes as I go along, and then watching the PJ video to see what I missed. So far I've read the first 5, 23-24 plus Morning Comes Mistfall. Here are my observations thus far:
MCM - what stood out was the richness and distinctiveness of GRRM's preferred imagery and metaphor - e.g. the mists and trees being described very anthropomorphically WITHOUT inferring any direct links to characters hidden or otherwise. I've picked this tendency up in the other works, which strengthens my point in the post above. Beware red herrings!
Men of GS - I posted comments in the thread made for this story but I'll add an ASOIAF thought here: I’m veering towards Rhaegar precipitating war due to prophecy and Dany repeating that, soon to be urged on by R’hllor Azor Ahai prophecies. i.e. prophesies are harmful and have no truth – therefore, the gods are similarly non-existent. Jojen’s prophecies similarly unreliable. What does exist is magic but on balance is a negative force, upsetting the Gaian balance.
Post by maestercambodia on Jun 11, 2016 4:42:27 GMT
Bitterblooms - more of GRRM's favoured motifs: long winter, windwolves, blood-loving 'undead' creatures in the form of vampires, blue flowers. Also recycled names (Alynne, Jon, 'Jaime' - Ned previously) - nothing should be read into these - a blue flower in one story is not the same as a blue flower in a later story; a similar name in ASOIAF does not imply similar character. We even have anthropomorphised constellations with blue eyes - sorry LmL, it means nothing!
What does seem significant is the role of old yarns. Morgan's tale of yore could equate to prophecies and myths from Essos - not to be trusted. Old Jon and Tesenya's stories seem to have substance like Westerosi Old Nan's - and Maggy the Frog??
PJ wants to see an anti-patriarchy theme here and in other early GRRM works from when he considered himself a feminist. That's fine but I'd stress that in ASOIAF any feminist message is the women are every bit as badass as men - we've got Cercei, Dany, Catelyn, Arya who are super-violent. For me it's not so much 'males' who are aggressive and militaristic, as 'Men'. The 'hidden victims' are the Children/weirnet, and they are by no means passive at this point.
Post by maestercambodia on Jun 11, 2016 4:52:01 GMT
In The House of the Worm - are the grouns an inspiration for COTF? I have a suspicion that there are considerable populations of Children that have been inhabiting an extensive underground network beneath Westeros for millennia.
One key theme is how the surface people are utterly complacent in the face of climate change. Make no mistake, the dead are coming
We have a second example of a theme that I'm quite surprised hasn't explicitly appeared in ASOIAF, that of reaching a certain age and being sacrificed/committing suicide so that the elderly don't put a strain on resources. You'd think the Iron Born or Dothraki might practice this. In a few stories like A Song for Lya the person unites with the hive mind. This does correlate with my theory that Children don't die but at a certain age meld into the weirnet at the roots of weirwoods.
Post by maestercambodia on Jun 11, 2016 5:01:12 GMT
So here are my current ASOIAF 'big picture' thoughts based on what I've read so far:
I'm basing my ideas quite heavily on the plot of Men of GS where the hiveminded fungus lures the men into slaughtering each other.
To what extent can it be said that Bloodraven (a la Littlefinger) manipulated Targaryens, causing them to turn on each other in civil war? Has it always been his intention to sow discord among Men to fatally weaken them?
After the Blackfyre rebellion and his departure for the Wall, the penultimate stage of his scheme was to precipitate the War of 5 Kings (>GoT), and the ultimate stage was to bring dragons to precipitate a Westerosi Armageddon.
Key problem for BR/the weirnet is the NK/Others have gone rogue and out of control of Children – Bran is needed to rein them in. Using Bran is part of this plan – the Wall needs to come down so their WMDs can combat Fire WMDs once dragons have fulfilled their role in roasting Men south of the Wall. The intended result is that humans are decimated (well, 90% as opposed to 10% dead). At which point a whole population of Children will emerge from their vast tunnel complex to reclaim their land. Bran is now in a sense the enemy of Men although he doesn’t realise it, same as Dany. So we are building up to a climactic big battle a la LOTR, only to find out Men should have joined together to fight the two extremes of Ice and Fire, but they didn’t. The eventual survivors/winners will be the Children and the survivors of the First Men headed by the Starks. Andals and Valyrians – bye bye.
So... after watching the Nightfliers film from the 1980s (yeah, I watched/listened to the film before reading/listening to the book--so sue me), I feel that I understand Sweetrobin so much more, his potential in the story that everyone is overlooking--and Sansa's role to play with regards to her cousin. And most certainly do I understand Bran much better.
So... after watching the Nightfliers film from the 1980s (yeah, I watched/listened to the film before reading/listening to the book--so sue me), I feel that I understand Sweetrobin so much more, his potential in the story that everyone is overlooking--and Sansa's role to play with regards to her cousin. And most certainly do I understand Bran much better.
I need to watch it. I haven't put together a thread for Nightflyers in the indiv-story GRRM corpus-read/GRRMarillion project but I need to because I know it's next up on PJ's list.
"I can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers."
And soon Annelyn begins to notice that while the worms are changed from something harmless & natural normal worms into something monstrous--he soon begins to notice that the Grouns used to be more like the Yaga-la-Hai. What we're left to infer is that Project Theta (an important organization in the 1000 Worlds, that's responsible for genetic mutation experiments) basically transformed some humans into Grouns for a purpose of digging in the darker tunnels.
I agree! With a slight modification: I propose that the giant eaterworms, with their 5 concentric rows of teeth (the outermost being metal!) were created to dig tunnels. The grouns were made to maintain underground equipment, such as the 5 giant metal structures in one hall Annelyn walks through on his way back out, where a thousand grouns are climbing all around the room, maintaining the structures (probably generators that heat the House of the Worm). When the white worms got out of control, the yaga-la-hai bailed, leaving the grouns behind to keep things running. Which they have now been doing for millenia. So not only are grouns innocent victims in all this - if they go extinct, so do the yaga-la-hai.
Yeah the Tuf ones were really cool. Guardians is the one with the mudpots the colonists were eating...never realizing they were sentient.
So are the mudpots really the COTF... or are they the weirwoods themselves? The trees live forever, thinking their slow tree thoughts; time doesn't exist for them. They are all connected (= weirnet), so when a few die it's not a big deal- but when too many are taken, they generate a response.
CRACKPOT ALERT [Perhaps this response was to mobilize the innocent COTF to fight against Man. This did yield results in the end, culminating in the Pact, which guaranteed that no more weirwoods would be destroyed.
A thousand years later, humans were nearly wiped out by icy Altered Men, in a terrible war that was, however, unrelated to their earlier conflict with the trees and COTF. I might even take it a step further and speculate that the Others - once human, like the grouns, and possibly engineered to do something important in the far North- came to the AID of Men in the Long Night. Or maybe they came to warn them. (Maybe the red comet causes the weather shields to fail temporarily, and since the Others are maintaining these shields they wanted to alert humans? I know, too scientific, but they could be magic shields or some version thereof- something keeping true, LN-type winter at bay). But, as we see in Greywater Station and House of the Worm, Men who are already stressed out by a dark and hostile world tend not to welcome Others, especially white others that don't look like them. Tragically, Men attacked the helpful Others, who felt betrayed and confused and eventually fought back. GRRM loves to play with this theme of the seeming protagonist unknowingly killing allies, mistaking them for enemies. We also see it in Dying of the Light, when Jaan Vikary shoots his former partner (teyn) Garse. Jaan thought Garse had changed sides and was hunting him, but the reader knows that Garse was loyal to Jaan til the end, and was coming to his aid.] The End.
Side note: I am aware that GRRM has said planetos is not one of the 1000 worlds. Nevertheless, the parallels are striking, from the fused stone (obsidian) chamber in HOTW to the kid in Starlady looking exactly like a Valyrian, from the anthropologist in Plague Star telling us that the common thread among primitive interregnum cultures are legends of a past golden age to the Seven appearing in Laren Dorr. The pale child Bakkalon is found in the House of Black and White, Rita Dawnstar (never mind the name) rides a T-rex that was modified not to attack certain people (um, dragons, anyone?), the lower tunnels and halls in HOTW look an awful lot like a buried spaceship with their metal walls and round doors with handles that look like wheels and must be turned, which opens the door and allows air to rush into the vacuum... I could go on. I doubt GRRM will ever reveal this fact, but there really is a lot of evidence pointing to planetos having once had a much more advanced civilization, one that somehow ended up with lifeforms, gods and legends (not to mention technology) from several of the 1000 worlds.
Oh and one other fun fact: while GRRM has described the Others as "a different form of life" and "inhuman", he has also given us a definition of what it means to be human, which directly contradicts his other statement, given the repeated mention of terrible half-human children. This is from Dying of the Light:
When Dirk happened to mention his year on Prometheus, Janacek quickly seized on it. "Tell me, t'Larien," he said, "do you consider the Altered Men human?"
"Of course," Dirk said. "They are. Settled by the Earth Imperials way back during the war. The modern Prometheans are only the descendants of the old Ecological Warfare Corps."
"In truth," Janacek said, "yet I would disagree with your conclusion. They have manipulated their own genes to such a degree that they have lost the right to call themselves men at all, in my opinion. Dragonfly men, undersea men, men who breathe poison, men who see in the dark like Hruun, men with four arms[unrelated but I do believe he is describing grouns here!!], hermaphrodites, soldiers without stomachs, breeding sows without sentience-these creatures are not men. Or not-men, more precisely."
"No," Dirk said. "I've heard the term not-man. It's
common parlance on a lot of worlds, but it means human stock that's been mutated so it can no longer interbreed with the basic. The Prometheans have been careful to avoid that. The leaders-they're fairly normal themselves, you know, only minor alterations for longevity and such [unrelated but we do have tales of BTB, BSE, and Garth the Green, or the Grey king, living for a thousand years]-well, the leaders regularly swoop down on Rhiannon and Thisrock, raiding, you know. For ordinary Earth-normal humans-"
"Yet even Earth is less than Earth-normal these past few centuries," Janacek interrupted. Then he shrugged. "I should not break in, should I? Old Earth is too far away, in any event. We only hear century-old rumors. Continue." "I made my point," Dirk said. "The Altered Men are still human. Even the low castes, the most grotesque, the failed experiments discarded by the surgeons-all of them can interbreed. That's why they sterilize them, they're afraid of offspring."
The definition here is pretty clear, and it happens to agree with modern-day science: regardless of physical appearance, two lifeforms are the same species if they can mate and reproduce. This was a clue in House of the Worm, where the Meatbringer was half yaga-la-hai and half groun, and it's a clue again in Ice&Fire. If the Others can sire terrible half-human children on wildling women, they can't be an entirely different form of life. They can't be inhuman.
ETA: Wow, sometimes I can be a little slow. The best part of this exchange went right past me! I will paste it here again, so as not to distract from my point above:
"No," Dirk said. "I've heard the term not-man. It's
common parlance on a lot of worlds, but it means human stock that's been mutated so it can no longer interbreed with the basic. The Prometheans have been careful to avoid that. The leaders-they're fairly normal themselves, you know, only minor alterations for longevity and such- well, the leaders regularly swoop down on Rhiannon and Thisrock, raiding, you know. For ordinary Earth-normal humans-"
"Yet even Earth is less than Earth-normal these past few centuries," Janacek interrupted. Then he shrugged. "I should not break in, should I? Old Earth is too far away, in any event. We only hear century-old rumors. Continue."
"I made my point," Dirk said. "The Altered Men are still human. Even the low castes, the most grotesque, the failed experiments discarded by the surgeons-all of them can interbreed. That's why they sterilize them, they're afraid of offspring."
The Altered Men are sterilized, so that new ones can only be "made" from normal humans, not born. Never born. However, from the grouns we know that this doesn't have to be a permanent situation; somehow they overcame this inhibition and are breeding on their own. It's possible that the ancient yaga-la-hai allowed them to breed, so that they wouldn't have to keep making them, or that they acquired additional mutations over time.
What does this mean for our Others? I'm not sure, but it seems likely that the first Others were never born, they were made (engineered or made through sorcery, it doesn't really make a difference). We also know that during the LN, half-human children were sired. This could mean a few things, such as male Others only being able to reproduce with female humans. Far fetched? Perhaps, but the same is the case with the Ibbenese, only in reverse, IIRC (human men with Ibbenese women). Sure, the NK loved his NQ, but we don't hear about offspring, and it's the only male-human/female-Other relationship we hear about. Alternatively, it may simply be harder for female Others to rape men than for male Others to rape women. That's why we only see the one couple, where the man had no fear and presumably a high cold tolerance.
Then there are those babies. Craster's sons. IF the Others are taking them (as the Altered Men take normal humans), then why are they content with only boys? Is it b/c boys can be altered to be just like them, and there is no need for women (at least not many) b/c reproduction among Others is "not a thing"? Or maybe they don't care about gender at all, but realize that for Craster to breed as efficiently as possible, they should let him keep the females?
Sigh. These 1000 worlds stories are making me question everything I thought I had figured out in ASOIAF...
Last Edit: Jan 3, 2017 18:29:56 GMT by Maester Sam
“In Qohor he is the Black Goat, in Yi Ti the Lion of Night, in Westeros the Stranger. All men must bow to him in the end, no matter if they worship the Seven or the Lord of Light, the Moon Mother or the Drowned God or the Great Shepherd. All mankind belongs to him... else somewhere in the world would be a folk who lived forever. Do you know of any folk who live forever?”
Maester Sam should I start to read it? voice just introduced me to the Feast For Readers board. He says it's popular...
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones