-copied from here.
"'Some would have the universe unfold as it will, and run to its ending as matter itself decrees; others would take matter up into the stuff of Mind.'"
-SM Stirling, The Sword Of The Lady (New York, 2009), Chapter Twenty-One, p. 650.
This sounds like the same conflict both in Aycharaych's false metaphysics and in the Emberverser's "true" metaphysics. However:
"'...the Cutters and the Power behind them claim all humankind and the world as well, and say none of us may breathe or believe save as they permit.'"
-Stirling, op. cit., pp. 650-651.
Why should those who accept entropy be totalitarians?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I remember THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN and the false religion Aycharaych cynically invented as a means of fomenting a jihad designed to leave the Empire "convulsed and shattered." But I think you could have added that one of the contradictions Aycharaych built into his fake religion was the question of whether God is the Creator or the Created. I think he did this because he did not want the Empire to be taken over and remaining united under a more "consistent" religion. So these contradictions were built in to encourage heresies and schisms to break out, leaving a chaotic congeries of states hating each other more than an outside aggressor--like Merseia.
Oddly, AND fortunately, something precisely like that did happen with Islam, the model used by Aycharaych. Less than a generation after Mohammed's death, Islam was split into opposing Sunni and Shia camps. And others soon arose, such as the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt. Islam is more than dangerous enough right now when it is not united!
As for Stirling and his truly nasty theosophical Church Universal and Triumphant, the Power behind it was not friendly to mankind, and thus not inclined to have this false church be theologically consistent.
Sean
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