Ylem

"'By all creation,' whispered Tolteca..."
-The Night Face, I, p. 549.

He also says:

"'...good ylem, Commandant...'"
-op. cit., I, p. 547.

Read hard sf and learn:

"'The most probable event is immediate extinction, and a re-birth of both universes from the primordial ylem.'
"'Ylem?' Amalfi said. 'What's that? I've never heard the word before.'
"'The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged,' Dr. Schloss said. 'I'm not surprised that you hadn't heard it before. It's the ABC of cosmogony, the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow premise. Ylem in cosmogony is an assumption like "zero" in mathematics - something so old and fundamental that it would never occur to you that somebody had to invent it.'"
-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 467-596 AT CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 579.

The earliest cosmogonists did not know enough to assume a primordial flux of neutrons and Roman mathematics lacked "zero." Such assumptions are not old and fundamental but newer and more sophisticated.

Ylem, Creation And Chaos: Scientific Oaths

The Night Face.

The Nuevamerican, Miguel Tolteca:

"'...good ylem, Commandant...'" (I, p. 547)

"'By all creation...'" (p. 549)

"To Chaos with being a gentleman..." (VII, p. 604)

Science replaces religion as a source of oaths. "...all creation..." has come to mean just the universe, not the created order as such.

There may be other examples but that is my lot for this evening. Earth Real is providing us with enough excitement and drama for several sf novels. 

Cosmic SF

"Lodestar."

"The primordial element, with which creation presumably began, is hydrogen-1, a single proton accompanied by a single electron." (p. 350)

This paragraph proceeds to explain that:

"To this day, [hydrogen-1] comprises the overwhelming bulk of matter in the universe." (ibid.);

vast masses of hydrogen-1 condensed into increasingly hot globes, i.e., stars, where atoms combined into heavier elements;

novae and red giants spread these heavier elements through space;

later stars generated when these elements condensed produced planets with life and consciousness.

This understanding has become our modern cosmogony. Perhaps the creation myth closest to a scientific understanding was the Norse story of a void in which interaction between the extreme but opposed forces of heat and cold generated life, including the first giants and gods. Impersonal material forces preceded consciousness, then the gods fashioned the world that we know from the body of a giant: the sky from his skull; mountains from his bones; oceans from his blood etc.

I want to compare this passage with a reference to "ylem" in James Blish's Cities In Flight. However, we find not only that we have already quoted the Blish passage but also that Anderson too refers to "ylem." See here.

Two ultimate cosmic sf writers.

Cosmogony In SF

"'We believe all matter began as a chaos of hydrogen, the smallest atom. Some of it was fused in the primordial fireball to form helium...'"

-Mirkheim, I, p. 42.

 

Does this mean that first there was a chaos of hydrogen, then there was a primordial fireball fusing some of the hydrogen into helium? Whichever way it happened, what preceded or produced either the chaos or the fireball?

 

"'The galaxies were formed by the condensation of monstrous hydrogen clouds. But there wasn't an absolute vacuum between them. Especially not in the beginning, when the universe hadn't yet expanded very far.'"

-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), II, p. 18.

 

This account mentions hydrogen but not the fireball or helium although it does mention expansion which, we understand, began from the fireball.

"'...the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and living creatures.'"

-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), Prologue, p. 9.

Presumably those first atoms that evolved were hydrogen. Thus, this account presents four earlier stages:

vacuum

quantum fluctuation

expansion

first particles

 

"'The ylem was the primordial flux of neutrons out of which all else emerged...'"

-James Blish, The Triumph Of Time IN Blish, Cities in Flight (London, 1981), CHAPTER SEVEN, 579.

 

So those neutrons were the first particles.

Bale Time III

Tolteca points out that every Gwydiona who can walk treks to the Holy City at Bale time, including those with incipient diseases, weak hearts or old arteries. He implies that this would explain why some die and therefore do not come back. But, if that is all it is, then why do the Gwydiona not just say so?

The Gwydiona language is derived from archaic Anglic which was closely connected to ancestral English!

Research reveals that "Bale" can mean:

a bundle;
a fire;
a funeral pyre;
an evil or sorrow -

- and also that "Baal" was the name of a god.

"Bale" could mean "God" or "evil." We will see (in fact, see here) that the Gwydiona gravely misuse the word, "God," which should refer to trans-, not sub-, rationality.

Chapters XI and XII of The Night Face occupy pp. 641-660 of Flandry's Legacy and conclude the narrative. We will finally be shown what happens inside a Holy City.

The characters swear by "chaos" and even by "ylem." (p. 637) Will scientific terms replace divine names as swear words?