# Whorl Geography; Vance; Homemade Religions *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 19 Mar 1997* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### David_Lebling *19 Mar 1997, 17:43* Typhon almost certainly rules more than one world. The population of the Whorl may well come from several colony worlds, not just Urth. We also don't know for sure that the Sleepers come from Urth. Their level of technological sophistication indicates to me that they may be part of Typhon's invasion/occupation force, rather than indigenes. The Whorl's pattern of many cities with different customs and separated by difficult geography reminds me of Jack Vance. He likes to have planets with many different cultures (one classic example is _Big Planet_). While Vance may usually take a cynical attitude towards the religions he depicts, they are also usually just as trumped-up as that of Viron. Viron's religion was designed by Scylla as a parody of the state religion of her whorl. It (forgive me, Ranjit) doesn't seem much like the religion of the Commonwealth or Ascia, the two countries we know most about from _New Sun_. It appears to be a pagan, syncretic sort of religion, and if you substitute "real" gods for the ones we find in _Long Sun_, it reminds me more of ancient Greek or Roman pantheism more than anything else. Clearly the religion of Triviguante was designed by Sphigx for her own peculiar reasons, perhaps as another parody (a female-centered Islam, as someone called it, seems about right). Perhaps each city of the Whorl has its own home-made sect. No doubt there are Scientologists lurking about somewhere... -vizcacha (david_lebling at avid.com) Questions or problems to whorl-owner at lists.best.com ---