[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

I don't have a question prepared on short notice, so the first thing that comes to mind is to ask about Ark.  It was my presumption that the No-God apparatus (the sarcophagus) functioned differently before Ark-fall.  My supposition would be then that while Ark was fully functional, the souls of the Progenitors would have been contained therein, meaning that on other worlds, it would have been unnecessary to find a suitable surrogate.  Of course, the presumption then would be that what makes a soul a suitable alternative is not specifically Anisûrimbor blood, but rather similarity to the Progenitors.  Could this be an accurate summation?

Plug and play, basically. Having lost the original store of circuits, the Consult had no choice but to keep rummaging through the heap the World provided. The Anasurimbor, for whatever reason, have proven apt historically.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

Is Mimara giving birth in Golgotterath meant to be a little meta-joke - that Golgotterath, the most wicked place in all of Creation, is now Earwa's actual Jerusalem?

Or Bethlehem. I'm not sure the inversion counts as 'joke' though - at least not of the ha-ha variety!

[H]

Plug and play, basically. Having lost the original store of circuits, the Consult had no choice but to keep rummaging through the heap the World provided. The Anasurimbor, for whatever reason, have proven apt historically.

A circuit indeed, a very interesting likening, thanks!

[Hiro]

A lot of the questions have been put forward and even answered already. Something I was wondering about, what was the ultimate point of the Serwa vs the Dragon scene? The Ordeal's fight to enter the Ark seemed futile, considering the context of the Golden Room, and I don't quite see what the Serwa scene does for the narrative. Serwa's feats had been legendary already, I did not feel or understand the necessity of this setpiece.

I'm not sure I get the question, even if it were the case that the battle lacked downstream consequences. To the extent that war is generally pointless, all war stories are mountains of futility with peaks of 'closure' here and there. I can't tell a realistic story without including dead ends. The Glossary is literally packed with them!

Thanks for your reaction. The point that you make about including dead ends is clear, and something that I do agree with.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

I've been reading the books and 3 pound brain for quite some time, and thank you Richard for answering what you can.

My question is more about message: Is it my understanding that the progenitors is something you see as something humanity is going towards, and ultimately, in your books so far is the implied message that too much knowledge and power, as demonstrated by both the progenitors (via tekne) and the non-men (via gnosis) - ultimately leads to damnation? Both of them stepping too close to the absolute, to bringing light to where ignorance should always rule. The only thing that will always win is absence - ignorance, the unknown. That is why the no-god was always inevitable, as it is the unknown. This is the same of the God of Gods, in a way. (I won't ask here because obviously you're saving that).

I guess what I'm asking is whether this is one of the messages you intend here, and that the moral we should see in it is the importance of leaving a bubble of ignorance, to respect the unknown's place and importance as defining us within what we do see. Since we cannot see ourselves we are both the ignorant and the ignorance. The importance of admitting ignorance, respecting it and take into consideration that not all pursuits should be taken, not all tracks should be explored.

No. The ignorance stuff is more retail than that, part of my attempt to write an inverse scripture, one preaching suspicion as opposed to belief. My 'message' is that we, as a species, now find ourselves standing beneath Golgotterath, the crash site of meaning and morality. Check out: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/what-is-the-semantic-apocalypse/

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

Can you tell us what was up with the Old Father ordering the skin spy to preserve Mimara?  Even once we know the 'false prophecy' refers to the misunderstanding about the Anasurimbor returning at the end of the world I'm still not sure why they thought Mimara could prove beneficial to their cause.

So if you look at prophecy in superpositional terms, then any given prophecy will only be true of one set of forking paths. If you believe that a meta-prophecy lies buried among those prophecies, then you will be circumspect about the ways you wage war against destiny. There's no end to the potential counterfactuals when it comes to the Judging Eye, given the apparent randomness of its opening and closing. If the Consult has any inkling of Mimara's importance, they will be circumspect.

[Woden]

What about the skin-spy with (apparently) a soul?
It was a lonely lucky by trial and error accident? Or a conscious and searched improving of the Tekne?

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

In Prince of Nothing, there is a scene where Conphas describes war as intellect, and then later on, another scene where Cnaiur describes war as conviction.  Given this, should we see one of the key themes of the entire Second Apocalypse as a contrast and/or conflict between rationality and faith, and/or their implications?

Many of the words used to describe the in-story concepts have more than one meaning in English. With that in mind, how important to the overall story arc is the spiritual/religious meaning of gnosis?

Should we read anything into the use of the word jihad for the Fanim holy wars?

Are the head-fucking scenes a direct message from the author to the reader?

How much is the Earwa No-God influenced by Karl Barth's concept of the No-God?

A large part of the project deals with problematizing both rationality and faith in light of their mandatory nature, the fact that we have no bloody choice but to live life through them--as well as how both are bound to ultimately let us down, despite their proximal power.

Both gnosis and jihad plug into the conceptual imaginary of the series in largely retail ways.

As a rewriting writer, you hover over the text too long not to become wicked in some small way.

I've never read a lick of Barths.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

How should we take the Mutilated's statement that the No-God is the Absolute?   Is it just rhetoric on their part or is the No-God a mechanical device that somehow uses God?  I have thought that the No-God being a device that interacts or uses God in a mechanical manner would be an easy way to explain both how it controls the weapon races (beings without "Free Will") and the Bode (everything with "Free Will" can feel the emanation of Divine Will but aren't suborned to it).

In TTT, Kellhus says the Mangaecca squat, chanting about Aurang's real body to relay him to the Synthese.  But, the Consult's Brain Trust seems to be restricted to just Mek, Shauriatus, Aurang and Aurax (and then the Mutilated).  Were there any other Minds among the Consult for the past 2 millenia or has it just been those four?  If so, given their .. dilapidated status how did Consult programs like breeding the Inversi actually function?  How did they manage it with so little sane manpower? 

How much of the Tekne do the Mutilated understand?  They've attached batteries to a lasergun and fixed a nuke, but is it limited to electrical engineering (which they could understand just by taking things apart and using their big brains) or have they learned any of the fundamentals of physics, chemistry, or biology?

Edit: Is the Chair of Hooks meant to be a device we should recognize and go "Ha! The Inchoroi used a [insert] as a chair!"?  Because I can't figure out what its original purpose was based on its description. 

Edit 2: Kakaliol kills an Erratic and can't find its soul.  Did this poor Erratic actually manage to find Oblivion?

There's no real world sense to be made of this: the Absolute, the unconditioned condition, is chimerical, a kind of cognitive perpetual motion machine. So fictionally speaking, the question is what kind of plausibility tales can you cook up. The Mutilated go pure objectivity, sapience absent sentience, while Kellhus goes pure subjectivity, sentience absent sapience. Press in either direction, and you trip into conceptual crash space, which is why all philosophical investigation of the theme remains mired in endless disputation.

Your second question leads me to believe that pretty much everyone has missed a certain boat, in which case, I can only say, RAFO!

The Mutilated have at best an operational knowledge of the Tekne devices they have happened upon - a Dunyain operational knowledge.

As for the Chair of Hooks, no, I had nothing devious in mind - I'm not even sure what you have in mind Jurble! As for the scene with the Erratic, yes, this is the implication.

[jurble]

So our boy Mekeritig was wrong... or not completely right when he decided the Between-Way was a lie.  That's a relief, I was worried I had to root for the Consult.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

Do you have any predictions of when can we expect book 1 of THE NO-GOD series ?
2- still 2 books or a trilogy now?
3- what can you say about Kellhus' role in TSTSNBN?  still a major player?
4- How much metaphysical questions can we expect to be answered in TNG ( feels good saying that)  ?
6-  What is the deal of the Anasûrimbor prophesy?  Didn't Akka's changed dreams hint at Nau-Cayuti being Seswatha's son, how was he the NG 1.0 then?  or did the Mutilated misunderstood it?

I'm averaging about a book every two years, it seems. The No-God at the moment looks like two or three books, but maybe more. I see it more as a set of interrelated atrocity tales, a new set of Sagas, than a single, linear narrative. Otherwise, Kellhus is dead, and I think the best way to kill the metaphysical realism of the series is to provide a canonical version. Even I were to provide such a version, it would be fraught with ambiguity by virtue of being metaphysical. Lastly, confusion regarding paternity was but one of many hobgoblins of the ancient world.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

Interpretative indeterminacy, or what I call 'Crash Space' in my philosophical work, is what this series is ALL about, so if you were expecting a traditional discharging of narrative mysteries, you were bound to be disappointed: the idea is to cue our meaning-making instincts in the absence of any definitive interpretation.

What questions can we ask which wouldn't invalidate to various degrees this goal, Scott?

Edit: Also while I'm sure getting back into raw writing rather than redrafting must be exhilarating, might you continue at TPB in future?

I'm sure those on the short end, dismayed by the indeterminacy, would be inclined to smell a postmodern rat, a way for an author to immunize him or herself from making any sort of 'errors.' But what can I do aside from shrug, reaffirm that I did work tremendously hard on this final book, and reassert that frustrating our meaning-making reflexes was paramount among my goals? Those things I am asked that belong to the signal I hoped would transmit will get a direct answer, as in the case of the hologram for instance. If that minimal signal doesn't come through for certain readers, then I failed those readers. But I thought, and still think, the exercise was well-worth risking such failures. If it proves that these individual failures aggregate into the commercial failure of the series of the whole, then so much the worse for me. But I will still insist that those who do feel betrayed by the ending actually 'get' the book in a way more profound than they know.

It's crash space. A place where every judgment of error doubles as an affirmation of success. You know more intimately than most, I'm sure, how this stuff has genuinely animated my thought.

Speaking of TPB, I find out today how much of the data from my old harddrive they were able to salvage, as well as how much it's going to cost.

[Cû'jara-Cinmoi]

Is there any hopes for a further edited Glossary in future printings? While I loved reading it, all the character entries from TTT are lifted with no death dates added and there are loads of things I looked forward to looking up in the Glossary but alas, were nowhere to be found. Some I had hoped for, an entry on the Tall, the Cinderswords.

And is Glimir and Alamir the same sword? It's described as the High-King's sword, spelt as Kelmomas, and matches Glimir's description from TGO.

There's an entry on the finger locking handshake of Boonsmen...but not one on Boonsmen.

I'm sure The No-God will include an updated glossary, but until then, what you see is what you get, I fear. But one thing you will not get is a perfectly edited, entirely consistent encyclopedic version, simply because, for one, some of the inconsistencies are intentional, and secondly, because error/omission free encyclopedia are the product of the Enlightenment. Pre-Enlightenment compendiums are gloriously messy things, and now that we're staring down the barrel of AI editing, the messiness of these books will telegraph their humanity all the more.

That said, Glimir/Alamir is likely a continuity error.

[Walter]

Can you tell us what Maithanet was trying to say to Esmenet when he died?

[Likaro]

Scott, thank you so much for your works. Truly it is amongst the best epic fantasy has to offer. Congrats on finishing this arc (or ark if you will ).

TUC hit me like a punch to the guts. I figured the No-God was getting resurrected one way or another, but I still wasn't prepared for that brutal ending. I actually felt depressed the whole day after finishing it! So Bravo on that.


1. If the No-God 2.0 doesn't have Chorae attached to the carapace, why didn't Akka just blast the thing into oblivion at that moment where it's revealed to him?

2. Are Ajokli and the Gods still completely unaware of things with the Consult/No-God? Doesn't Ajokli have enough information now to infer that there are things that he cannot see ? I mean he was briefly right there interacting with the DunSult so he has to have some clue about whats going on. Or the God's just not reason that way?

3. It seems kind of foolish that the Consult would bring Dunyain back as prisoners. Was it simple arrogance that made them feel safe in doing so, or are you actually kind of saying that the Consult brain trust isn't that great and has degraded?

4. The Inchoroi are immortal in their physical bodies and were able to do the same for the Nonmen. Why were they not able to do that for Shaeonanra, a human? Why did he have to resort to that complicated and cumbersome method of soul trapping for staying alive?

5. Is/was Kelmomas one of the few?

Thank you!