"Chaos and old Night."
This is the time of the evening when I:
stop reading Poul Anderson;
read something else;
find something appropriate for blogging anyway.
In "Guardians Of Time And The Pact," here, we saw that:
the Time Patrol stabilizes a reality forever liable to chaos;
the war between Law and Chaos is waged in every universe.
Now Law finds an unexpected ally. Lucifer Morningstar interrupts a conference of demons -
Lucifer Morningstar: Gentlemen. I hate to interrupt - -
Chairdemon: Lucifer Morningstar! You are most welcome, Lord! And the - - the chair belongs to you without dispute!
Lucifer Morningstar: Thanks, but I'm not staying. I just wanted to make a point. Reality hangs on a knife-edge, just at the moment. And it is in my interests that reality endures. Doubtless, you only meant to take advantage of the current disorder. But in the process you deepen it into chaos. Chaos, as I see it, is the true enemy.
-Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (New York, 2005), p. 66, panels 1-3.
Thus, the ranks against chaos are swelled. Tomorrow I expect to rejoin Steve Matuchek's anti-Chaos struggle in his part of the multiverse.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I suspect the Adversary in Anderson's OPERATION CHAOS would disagree with Carey's Lucifer. Recall the Hell universe in OPERATION, dead, chaotic, drained of all true energy and life. The Adversary wanted to destroy all the works of God and of those who served Him. Hell was to be an eternal and infinite NULLITY.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I remembered just now a word or concept I strove unsuccessfully to recall when I was writing my first comment here. What the Adversary desired was the final despair, entropy and heat death of either the entire multicosmos or at least as many alternate worlds as possible. That seems a grimly apt translation into science fictional or even scientific terms of what the Catholic Church believes the Adversary to desire and for what Hell is like. A state of existence of totally despairing entropy and heat death.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Anderson's Adversary, Blish's Satan and Carey's Lucifer are completely different guys.
Paul.
Sean,
Carey's Lucifer wants an ordered cosmos not in which he rules others but in which he is not ruled. When he is in control of a universe, he welcomes immigrants but forbids them to worship him or anyone else.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I consider Anderson's conception of the Adversary far more theologically sound than what Carey speculated about.
Ad astra! Sean
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