do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

James Wynn · 21 May 2011, 05:36 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Sat, 21 May 2011 00:36:39 -0500
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
In-Reply-To: <630092.30979.qm at web114707.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
References: <SNT123-W220B7E3214FF82B9BAC2DDCF710 at phx.gbl>	<AE83B76DDD3A4DCCB4C28DABF86BA1B5@jill>	<4DD6C327.5090406 at gmail.com>	<535089.18349.qm at web114704.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DD6EBE4.5000407 at gmail.com>
	<630092.30979.qm at web114707.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4DD74F67.8000504 at gmail.com>

>> The other options  are that megatherians refers to a line of human rulers that
>> have ruled under  Abaia's authority or a line of human rulers that have
>> fashioned themselves as  being like Abaia or all the undersea powers.
> Is there an objection to those options?

Yeah, but I get that its aesthetic. It's just that it still leaves open 
the question "Why 17?" "Who did they rule?" We at least know something 
of monstrous undersea rulers. A reference to a some unknown rulers who 
are vaguely related to one of the giant beasts or all of them strikes me 
as random. Some people prefer that. I don't. Like the carefully laid 
structures in this novel that have been identified or are glimpsed.

>> And I think we have  enough information to put the pieces together:
>>
>> There are 17 recognized  "Great Beasts" who are ruling or have ruled Urth.
> Part of Urth?  And what makes you say they're ruling?

Their various territories. They rule as the Storm King rules in 'An Evil 
Guest'. And Abaia has an army.

>> Why would people NOT write a  history of the alien powers that have controlled
>> and influenced life on Urth for  millenia?
> Because they have no material?  It seems quite possible that people know very
> little of those undersea powers' lives.

I think that's unlikely. The Ascians don't *have* to follow Abaia. They 
choose to (or originally chose to) for rational reasons.

>> And if you write a history of the activities of a sentient life, then  that is
>> a biography ("The Life of").
> Usually a biography called "The Life of" is written when the person's whole life
> is known, from beginning to end.  An example is Suetonius' /Lives of the Twelve
> Caesars/, the title that may have inspired /Lives of the Seventeen
> Megatherians/.  (By the way, that comparison favors your suggestion that the
> megatherians could have been a "line" of rulers over my suggestion that they
> were a "group" of contemporary rulers and yours that they were contemporaneous
> monsters--but I don't think it's conclusive.)

"Biography" means literally "written life". Many people produce multiple 
such volumes before they die.
Of course, some of the great beasts might be dead already. I certainly 
think one is at least.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net