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I loved these books when I was fourteen and still capable of being astonished by tenuous parallels in comparative mythology. The only specific bit I remember with any fondness or clarity is in the second book, where the titular Ink (a swarm of nanomachines) "rewrites" the Vellum in an attempt to satisfy everyone's desires. Due to conflicting and incompatible ideologies, most of reality gets turned into featureless grey wasteland, except for a few strongholds where like-minded people have banded together. That was kind of neat. The overarching theme was, I think, repetition and reenactment. The Unkin are all archetypes who reoccur in several iterations throughout time and across various parallel realities (Thomas Messenger, for example, is supposedly Puck from Celtic folklore, Sumerian deity Tamuz, and real-life victim of hate crime Matthew Shepard. The Wikipedia article has the rest), and are doomed to endlessly relive events and themes. I'm really testing my memory and my interpretation of the text, but I think the Ink nanomachines cause some kind of quasi-heat-death situation in the form of a multiversal Ice Age by rewriting the Vellum, which is implied to eventually thaw and thus begin a new cycle of time with the same myths and archetypes, etc. So maybe the message is that we're at the mercy of myths - that we can record and revisit and remix them, but never really escape...? I dunno. Wachter fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jun 28, 2015 |
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Jun 28, 2015 17:48
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:01 |
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