Dirty Dragon Thoughts

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

“Still punk as fuck,” I whisper to myself, as I slide new Orthotic insoles into my Converse. As long as I’m down there, I get them on my feet and tie them. I use this double loop thing my kid taught me when he was in middle school. I’m sure there’s an easier way to keep my shoes tied, but this way has never failed me. And it keeps me connected to my kid, every day. I exhaled, and stood up with a…

purity politics

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

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Like the blue light with Varun. Because if theres a real world example of a haunting blue light you never want to see in person ever, it's this:

Also, Nona does not want and probably can't really eat, which is both a running gag but also one of the first sympthoms after somebody gets radiation poisoning. And at the end of the book, her condition deteriorates.

And there are debatably implications they were working with radiation in the first place for the cryo project! From the sound of everything combined, probably testing that the frozen people shipped off to Tau Ceti would be good to survive the radiation of space, and they'd gotten it up to an estimated 92% chance of success without significant lasting damage for the average person, but to get to those numbers, they'd wound up with a whole mess of very irradiated corpses. Which was why they were going to have so much trouble disposing of them, and when John talks about just burying them he sarcastically mutters "you would've loved that", and why the general population was so freaked out by how Scary it sounded, and why John got blacklisted from a lot of shit (despite having been the one to insist on clearance from Asia-Pacific Environmental!). He describes the latter specifically as "I was irradiated." And we do know how Muir loves layered meanings, especially through John!

On Tor's website, TLT is listed as Scifi/Fantasy. However, when forced to choose, Tor picks Scifi above all. This is HUGE, because even with all the necromancy and fantasy elements of The Locked Tomb, the publisher looked at the series and said "No, this is scifi." Ergo: the "magical" elements must have a basis in science.

Now, spiritual/religious elements (souls etc) can exist alongside science without much issue. But if you're manipulating physical objects in a real-world environment, you have to explain it in a way that could conceivably track with scientific theory as it functions in the real world. You can extrapolate from there.

So. In GtN, we enter a world of fantasy tropes and Regency-era hand wringing about social morés.... but we also see Palamedes tear his hair out about dating Canaan; how nothing seems to fit a reasonable timeline. In real life, scientists use radiometric dating in geology & archeology to determine the age of objects. (also, do necromantic (or irradiated) interactions with objects impart additional radiation? I don't know!!)

TLDR; You can tear the soul out of a planet, but the actual tearing process needs to make enough sense to pass muster in the Scifi world. Nuclear fusion is a great candidate, as mentioned by @oh-jod-dammit and @championofdnd and is supported by the text ("the soul was like a tiny atom bomb"). God, it's right there.

This, of course, raises some questions.

If necromancy is related to radiation, what power does Alecto/Earth impart to John that allows him control of (assumingly) irradiated corpses? and WHY? What about him was so fucking special? Sure, he was trying to get humans off Earth for its own sake, presumably by testing radiation shielding for long-range space flight. (aka the problem with pregnancy is you have to worry about irradiation for fetuses or reproductive organs. probably.)

But how is John a better ally than an eco-warrior or biologist or any number of scientists that were presumably trying to save the Earth? Alecto (allegedly) said she chose him. How did he bring himself to her attention? If we keep following this logic, how did radiation connect them?

I'm tired. Let's review some facts from both sides.

.Electromagnetic Radiation is produced by stars and other celestial bodies.

.Planets, people, and stars emit different types of radiation.

.Planets and people are proven to have souls, which can be removed from the body by force.

.Do stars have souls?? The sun?? The Moon in the Fucking Sky??? (where is the Moon, btw??)

.Does radiation serve as a connection to a different dimension? Are radio waves a bridge to The River? Did John tear a hole in spacetime and make some kind of wormhole?

"you were the noise that was everywhere" thats RADIO WAVES. tamsyn muir I will GET YOU

This is why Wake is wearing a Haz suit in the River Bubble, btw. She only started experiencing negative effects when the suit was punctured. (right?). It's why The Eggs All Died. It's why flipped planets slowly mutate. RADIATION. I love y'all.

The stupid First House robes? They're a fucking PRISM. Electromagnetic Radiation is visible light!! GODDAMN!!!

On Wake:

Ya gotta ask - Why was Wake wearing the Haz suit before she died? On the Ninth, her body is found wearing a life support suit as an outer layer, but that's different. This suggests she was possibly wearing the Haz suit underneath - to protect against what?

Also, good catch with Jod being chosen/unchosen! I think it's more like -

Jod is very close to the electromagnetic spectrum through his work with irradiated corpses

So close that he, a living person, is able to “make waves” in the EM field - aka influence physical reactions, like moving/manipulating bodies.

This work puts him closer to whatever plane the souls reside in (The River) and thereby Alecto.

That's what brings John (unknowingly) to her attention; he *was* chosen by her (“I picked you to change, and this is how you repay me?”) BUT she had no idea he would force a connection through the opening made by the death of “the nun” (which, btw: pre-resurrection, Christabel is never given a first letter like M– or A– ; only “The nun” or “M– ‘s nun”). 

If John had stopped at physical manipulation - kept curing cancer, found a way to heal the earth using EM waves, etc, he never would have broken through. But by cracking the “atom bomb” of a soul that was the “missing link,” John forced a door to open between the physical plane and The River/astral plane. He may have pushed a ton of EM waves/radiation through the hole while cycling the power back through himself (?)

"I was looking at the code, I knew why I hadn't been able to see anything.” Radio waves would cause a lot of interference, yeah?

Random additional thoughts:

Wherefore the missing people? Well, per John, he “snapped up” a large percentage of humanity before the nuclear warheads hit, although he phrases it as a kindness. I don't know if that means he claims some kind of ownership over those souls. This is a wobbly guess from me.

The reason the Houses don't have much in the way of technology is because the radiation renders it null. Otherwise they'd definitely have SOMETHING after 10,000 years. You can't just kill everyone who ever had the idea for an internet.

Again, WHERE IS THE MOON. We see no references to it at all.

Y'all are bringing up some great points, keep 'em coming! My original Megatheorum included most of this, but I had no scientific explanation that fit the clues. So far Electromagnetic Radiation is the *best* fit I've found that explains Tor's Scifi designation while matching the text provided.

Something I was thinking about recently is that the other time we really discuss Cherenkov radiation is "the blue flash" during criticality experiments/accidents. So at Los Alamos National Lab there were two experiments that went critical (started the fission chain reaction) back in the 1940's (interestingly, these both occurred after the end of WW2). There was one scientist - Harry Daghlian - who decided to do an experiment at the end of the workday without anyone around and without notifying anyone and dropped the tungsten block he was holding (the block was meant to reflect neutrons back onto the core so they could make measurements about what happens as you get close to criticality). It set of the chain reaction and he was heavily irradiated. He died 2-3 weeks after the incident. He reports having seen a flash of blue light when the block dropped. A few months later, Louis Slotin was showing his successor how to do an experiment really quick at the end of the day (do we see a pattern here?) and asked the other scientists to pause their work for a few minutes so he could do this demonstration real quick ("we'll be done in 20 min"). The experiment had two hemispheres of neutron-reflecting material to - again - make measurements about criticality. Importantly, the top hemisphere had a hole so you could hold the dome more easily. And so Slotin was using a screwdriver to keep the hemispheres apart (they had an SOP to use like wooden wedges that you could slide forward and backwards to lower the top slowly or quickly push back up but this was a quick demonstration so hey let's just use this handy screwdriver) and the screwdriver slipped. Slotin quickly pulled the top hemisphere off to stop the chain reaction and saw that same blue light. He died 9 days later.

So as someone working in the field, and obsessed with TLT, when I saw this post, a lot of things clicked (so THSNK YOU OMG). I also want to note a couple things that might not be relevant but I think are interesting and cool. Both these criticality accidents occured with the same plutonium core ( nicknamed "the demon core" bc it was involved with both criticality incidents) which makes me think about the fact that it seems like Varun has killed the most lyctors over the years. And just keeps coming back. A few years after the second incident, LANL tried replicating the Slotin incident using robotic arms and like pulleys ( bro it was like 1946 I don't know what they were using but they were trying to do these experiments remotely so avoid irradiating people up close again) and they didn't see the blue light! But that's supposed to be a recurring thing in criticality incidents! (Also, the core didn't seem to go critical when they did this remotely! What?!!! Eventually, they figured out that the guy had his thumb in the hole to hold the top and his thumb blocked an escape route for the neutrons and reflected enough back to make the thing go critical - crazy right>!?!) They realized that the blue light was Cherenkov radiation which has to go through a *dielectric* medium - air is not, but water is. SO the blue light is the result of the electrons hitting the liquid in the eyes!!!!! DOES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR?!!! Damn Tamsyn, didn't realize I would need my friggin phd to understand your books. But this is so fucking genius.