Gideon the Ninth

[jack]

I reread Gideon the Ninth and half way through Harrow the Ninth. I posted a lot of recap and musings on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10104135617416710&id=36912084

Should be public to everyone, but you can always comment here if you don't use Facebook

Comments

[cjwatson]

On the part about the Resurrection: major spoilers and rampant speculation follow.

Somewhere I ran across the idea that John and the OG Lyctor crew were a band of ecoterrorists pre-Resurrection, and that rings true, but it needs a bit more explanation to fill in all the gaps.

I think that what little we're told about the first death of Earth is mostly accurate as far as it goes: some kind of ecological mess. John says "Rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction", apparently carefully not being very specific about who caused what. My guess is that the rising sea levels were caused by the sort of climate change processes we're familiar with, but they hadn't actually killed everyone yet, and they couldn't have been responsible for the death of the rest of the solar system. While campaigning against ecocide John somehow hit on necromancy, maybe a smaller bomb or similar that caused a relatively small-scale thanergy bloom, and started working his way up with a campaign of terror. Wake asks "How many babies died in the bomb" and John doesn't deny the existence of a bomb, so I think the "massive nuclear fission chain reaction" bit was John's fault: once he knew that necromancy was a possibility and that Earth was in a very bad ecological way anyway, he deliberately set up some kind of necromantic WMD in order to achieve a sort of global reset. That killed everyone but him (or maybe it killed everyone in the solar system and he pulled the same trick as towards the end of _Harrow_), leaving him able to reap the massive thanergy dividend in order to be able to commit Resurrection. After the Resurrection they found that they now had a bunch of thanergy planets on their hands which could support more than just John doing necromancy, and the Nine Houses system got underway.

This is more or less consistent with what we hear from both John and Wake, allowing for at least John being a distinctly unreliable witness. Giant corporations or billionaires or whoever doomed humanity, leading to Augustine's comment that "Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity". Also, John did the actual killing of the solar system: he was the direct proximate cause of ten billion deaths, and so Blood of Eden have spent a myriad looking for revenge and trying to undo the system he set up.

Blood of Eden is some kind of paramilitary wing of the human extra-solar colonies. It's not clear whether they escaped John's destruction and the subsequent Resurrection, or whether they emigrated after Resurrection and renounced necromancy; I lean towards the former since their culture seems to have some direct influences from old Earth not via John, but it's hard to tell. The epilogue to _Harrow_ seems to be set on one of those colonies, which by now probably have considerably more human population than the Nine Houses do.

Even if this is all correct, there's surely more to it. Some people seem to think that the current structure of the River is unnatural, perhaps caused by the deaths of the ten billion. There is definitely something weird going on with the way that the stoma treats John like an RB, but I don't think we have enough information yet to figure it out.

[jack]

Yeah, something like this seems very likely, but I'm not sure which bits do and don't.

[jack]

OK, another long rambling comment about several important themes.

I read the Judith Deuteros story (https://imgur.com/a/bTGprJJ preview or added on to the end of the ebook) where's she and the others are prisoners of blood of eden. That does give specifics on quite a few things that otherwise I only had tenuous speculation on.

Blood of Eden captured the three of them from the first house. Maybe specifically to acquire a necromancer? Hinted Camilla had some connection to Harrow, but they don't seem to have planned this. Camilla wasn't working with BoE earlier, she joined them in some way whilst prisoner.

That doesn't answer, why Harrow knew to tell future Harrow to silence Judith. Did Harrow set up the blood of Eden capture? How did she know who would end up working with Blood of Eden and who wouldn't, just from knowing the people? Ianthe agreed to some of this because she had caveats about "silencing (without hurting) Corona" -- is she working with Blood of Eden, despite aiding John against Augustine?

A lyctor (I think Mercy) gave them coordinates for the Mythraeum. Did that mean she secretly set up an obelisk? We think "to an obelisk" is the only way you can travel with a stele? Did Mercy have a DIFFERENT plot? I wouldn't be surprised!!

We also fill in some details about combat between non-necromancers (basically rifles and medical tech similar to when the book was written) and necromancers, which was implied but not stated before. Basically, as we expected, necromancers win against conventional troops, but some of that is people not knowing what their strengths and weaknesses are.

We DON'T know what outside of the empire planets are like otherwise. Do they have regular governments? Are they in touch with each other? Do they have governments that don't matter much but BoE are the only group with any connections between?

[jack]

The short story confirms the empire IS just constantly expanding, moving the population of all the non-house planets to newly conquered planets as the planets die. That's economically inefficient, no shit! Apparently depending on the resources of the newly conquered worlds to keep going. And it's less efficient the further from the centre the front gets. No wonder people hate them.

This really should have been obvious from them being an "empire".

The pyramid scheme nature implies that it might be hard to STOP expanding. After all, all the planets they have now are dying slowly.

But on top of that, there are several mentions of John being on a "crusade" and "no-one else needs to die for the sake of revenge", which implies that it's his pressure that keeps the empire expanding. Augustine and Mercy have discussed what they would do without John -- evacuate the house planets if they can, set up somewhere else, try to arrange a non-aggression peace with the rest of the galaxy.

They assume necromancy will slowly die in this case. Although that also raises the question, we assume John has some sort of infinite energy supply keeping dominicus going. But the power dynamics would make sense if HIS power came from the planets being flipping somehow, then he COULDN'T stop without letting necromancy die and losing his own power.

[jack]

What's up with Gideon's immortality? She survived the nerve gas, it's hinted she only survived Harrow draining her for the second house lyctor trial because she couldn't die, in the short story her corpse doesn't rot.

But we haven't seen any reason for that. Because of her genetics? The other stuff hadn't happened yet. Did she inherit immortality from John? Is he GENETICALLY immortal?

It also occurs to me, Lyctorhood involves swapping eyes or souls... does perfect lyctorhood mean swapping eyes without swapping souls or swapping eyes and souls without killing one body? Do we know? Is the emperor's current body the body his soul started with, or did the driving soul swap with whatever body Alecto started with?

The emperor and alecto are both described as "can't die" though we don't know if that's true.

[jack]

Still very confused about the hauntings of Harrow. Abigail Pent knows about Gideon's soul, but only mentions one additional haunting, Wake, who appears as the sleeper. She says Wake has a physical anchor in the world, and banishing her from Harrow won't necessarily banish her from the real world.

Does that mean that while Harrow's hindbrain is full of a fight to banish Wake from her body, Wake is SIMULTANEOUSLY walking around in Cytherea's body? Does Ianthe know this, is she letting Wake do that?

I'm unsure if in the real reality, Harrow went through a period of hallucinations when she was ten or not.

In the false history, we know all the "seeing writing as notes from the ghost" come from Wake, because they all reference Wake's plot. As apparently does the "orange-suited sleeper in the glass coffin" judging by how it ends up. And the "body" floating around being beautiful-to-Harrow is probably Gideon. So they both LOOK like Alecto somehow? But there's nothing that clearly IS Alecto, apart from the very last vision Gideon sees as she's dying in the river?

[jack]

The resurrection.

The emperor's conversation with Wake. He accuses her of plotting genocide by wanting to eliminate all necromancers, even babies. She says, "how many babies died in the bomb, John?" and he says, "all of them". This seems to imply that there was ONE bomb ("runaway fission explosion") that killed humanity. And then John benefited from it, presumably by gaining Godhood or at least necromancy. It could be that John caused it, or allowed it to happen, or just got th benefit by accident.

Also, people use "resurrection" to refer to the dying off, not only the coming back. That's not conclusive, but suggests it was a single event (since presumably if John were making something up, he'd pretend that bringing people back was his work and completely separate)

Augustine says, John's power doesn't add up. Even if the resurrection had produced the biggest thanergy burst ever, it would have faded, but John's power never faded. This suggests that he used the power to somehow become immortal-y necromnatic. Maybe the earth was dying slowly and he DELIBERATELY killed it quickly to made a giant revenant and partnered with her?

There's several more ways John's status quo sucks. It's not JUST old lies. Apparently he CAN'T be killed by resurrection beasts, but keeps letting his lyctors die in his place anyway. That seems likely to upset them. And keeps this endless war of conquest going.

I guess Mercy was training for 10k years in anatomy, not to kill a Lyctor, but to kill God, just in case. He really shouldn't have had those peanuts.

[jack]

Apparently the Stoma mouths exist all the time, but only open for resurrection beasts or emperors? Or to a lesser extent Lyctors?

I guess this is all connected somehow?

I'm assuming Abigail's speculation about being able to CROSS the river is correct, or if not at least meaningful and relevant. So everyone assumes that souls go into the river forever? But no-one knows for sure if they last forever, or if they all go there, or not?

Suggesting something is weird with this set-up makes sense, but I'm not sure exactly what to speculate.

[damerell]

I can't read it, but I'm glad you like the books (one or two of our mutual acquaintances are Wrong); they could not be more up my street unless I was a lesbian or a skeleton.