Coldfire re-read: WTNF - prologue and chapter 1

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

We're back!

For those of you who have been along for the ride for BSR, welcome back! For those who are new, welcome! And everyone - enjoy yourselves, as usual.

Since the feedback on the posting style/method/frequency etc was "keep it the same", we will do. So expect to hear from trobadora on Mondays and me on Thursdays, bringing you the discussion posts for the latest chapters. As before, there is also schedule of all chapters which you can find here.

So, onwards to the prologue and the first chapter of When True Night Falls:


Plot Summary

Prologue
Once again we start the story with a sacrifice, this time with a much larger impact as the first settlers figure out how to deal with a planet where your dreams come true. Unlike most sci-fi shows want to make you believe, the sacrifice isn't stopped at the last minute this time and the settlers from Earth lose all their technology in an impressive fireball.

Chapter 1
Damien writes his report on What I did on my summer holidays and sends it to the Patriarch, who is less than thrilled by hearing what Damien has been up to and in what unsavoury company he has been. Un-thrilled enough to cast Damien out of the Church for his willingness to accept Tarrant's company. It all turns out to be a nightmare, created by Tarrant who is still snacking on Damien's fear - something Damien is so accustomed to by now that he barely makes a fuss any longer. They share a little Titanic moment at the bow of the ship, while Damien once more walks the slippery slope of justifying to himself just why he brought Tarrant along.



Quotes

• They couldn't go back. They couldn't get help. This far out in the galaxy they couldn't even get advice from home. The seedship's programmers were long since dead, as was the culture that had nurtured them. Communication with Earth would mean waiting more than forty thousand years for an answer - and that was if Earth was there to respond, and if it would bother. What had the mother planet become, in the millennia it had taken this seedship to find a home? The temporal gulf was almost too vast, too awesome to contemplate.


• "I think they'll give us a tool. A means of communication. That's the challenge, don't you see? We have to impress the power here with Terran symbology, so that we have some way to reach out to it. To control it, Leo! If we don't manage that, then we may as well pack it in here and now. Because all our technology won't stop it from killing, when it controls the very laws of nature."
  "So you answer it with more killing? Feed it blood-"
  "Sacrifice is the most ancient and powerful symbol we have," Ian told him. "Think of it! When primitive man sought to placate his dieties, it was that blood of his own kind that he burned on the altar. When the God of the Jews decided to test Abraham's faith, it was the sacrifice of his own flesh and blood that He demanded. Moses saved his people from the Angel of Death by smearing the blood of animals on their doorposts. And when God reached out His Hand to man with His message of divine forgiveness, He created a Son of His Own Substance to serve as a sacrificial offering. Sacrifice is a bridge between man and the Infinite - and it can work for us here, Leo. In time it can end the killings. I believe that."


• Bind evil to serve a worthy cause, the Prophet wrote, and you will have altered its nature forever. I pray it will be so with him.


• Even the Holy Mother, Matriarch of the westlands, would respect and honor such a dismissal. Which meant that he was no longer a priest. Which meant in turn that he was... nothing. Because he suddenly realized that he had no identity that was not Church-born; there was no fragment of his psyche that did not define itself according to the Prophet's dream, the Prophet's hierarchy.


• After a while he gave up, exhausted. And sank back into his fear, letting it possess him utterly. It was a gift to the one who traveled with him, whose hunger licked at the borders of his soul even now. The one who had inspired his dream, and therefore deserved to benefit from it.
  Damn you, Tarrant.


• But for you we would all be dead. Four dozen bodies rotting at the bottom of the sea, our mission in ruins. And our enemy would be unopposed, free to work his will upon the world. Isn't that worth the sacrifice of a life or two? And he despaired, Where is the balance in it? How do you judge such a thing?

Thoughts

• The prologue here is the most obviously sci-fi part of the entire trilogy. Would you have liked to see more of this during the rest of the books?


• There's a distinct settler mentality to the colonists. With 4000 on the ship and only 3000 waking up again after the coldsleep, that's a willingness to take a considerable risk in order to settle on a new planet.


• I've never quite put it together at first, but - the seed ship is still in orbit, isn't it? So would it still be up there in the time of Gerald, and then later even Damien's?


• Anyone good at maths - if they had a little more than 3000 colonists and 12 centuries, at what kind of a population size are we looking in Damien's time?


• Casca and Tarrant are very similar in their understanding, reasoning and approach. And just three centuries make a difference between being shot as a madman, and hailed as a prophet. I think that to the colonists, losing Casca may have been a loss just as serious as that of the technology. He is the one who put it all together and who figured out the ramifications of the situation. Who knows how long it took them after his execution to reach the same level of understanding again?


• I have to admit that the idea of Damien drawing pictures of Tarrant and sending them in to the Patriarch always amuses me greatly.


• When you think of the Damien we met in BSR and the Damien here, the changes in his attitude are tremendous. He used to be so black and white at the start, but now he's discovered all those shades of grey inbetween. I wonder - do you think Tarrant's company is corrupting him because of some fae aspect, or is it more a matter of it forcing Damien to reconsider his position on many things?

Have fun, and we'll continue on Monday with chapters 2 and 3!

Comments

[silver-ariane.livejournal.com]

I would've liked to see more sci-fi, though I'm not sure where it'd fit in unless the characters were only making reference to it -- but that's very possible, since obviously some of them are aware of and thinking about technology and Terran knowledge quite a bit.
As a reader I would've liked more of it mostly so the ending of CoS would've come as slightly less of a surprise among all the fantasy in that book.

I'd never thought of it before, but it makes a very interesting visual of the planet if the seed ship is still in orbit, so I'm going to believe it's up there.

Anyone good at maths - if they had a little more than 3000 colonists and 12 centuries, at what kind of a population size are we looking in Damien's time?

Very small, if their growth rate is anything like Earth's, but my attempts at the equations failed repeatedly and I got numbers all over the place, from around 30,000 to the obviously unrealistic billion+. But since the equations for population growth and interest earned on investments are one and the same, I did figure out that Gerald must've racked up some serious interest in 900 years. :)

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

I think the sci-fi could be worked into the background more. Little things, like Damien's alarm clock, the guns, Gerald's collection of random electronic junk... if it were to show up a little more, the sci-fi bits would be more present. As it is, it's sometimes easy to see it as a pure fantasy.

But since the equations for population growth and interest earned on investments are one and the same, I did figure out that Gerald must've racked up some serious interest in 900 years. :)

Assuming there were functioning banks in his time. :-D
But he probably had the sense to start investing as soon as banks were available. Somewhere, the money to start up his brewery had to come from!

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

Well, you can always find somebody to pay you for beer!