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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 27, 2022 15:03:59 GMT
The Caldera seems quite different from the Matrix: the "womb" clue is perhaps so we don't miss it. It was tainted from the nightmarish "birth" of its own creation, that's why it hates its creators. And if it's heavily defended, how did the four lieutenants get to the abomination's graveyard without its connivance? Who even are these lieutenants? The lieutenants are drawing more and more of my attention as this reading group continues. Some other random thoughts: Despite its supposed prominence, we seldom see Faction members in full armour in fiction do we? Those kinds of stories lack the opportunities for full ceremonial dress, and with the move from the Faction as a military army to a more subtle threat the Bone Monster look becomes more a vestige of their Military Aspirations era when building the Remote. The Caldera makes my back itch. I could have sworn it was in space in Interference. And are TARDISes unable to breed without it? Or does that only apply to new generations of timeship? e.g. construction of Type ##s, etc from which their is no previous type .of that number. I really, REALLY wish a more distinctive name had been chosen for the Imperator. My eyes just keep glazing over and I forget that he's Morbius. It's too generic. :~( The Unkindnesses gather around the severed head of Brian Blessed. Makes sense. *nods* You know he played Rassilon in Miles Interference 2-parter? I dig the 4th dimensional maze of the Stacks. Something you need to walk through not just along the right path, but in the right order with the right dead-ends. I strongly suspect that Father Stendec, the keeper of the Faction Paradox bestiary, is a reference to Maurice Sendac, the author of Where the While Things Are. And he has created 5 different versions of Nessie which AREN'T the ones seen on television. (Didn't Iris Wildtyme encounter a Loch Ness Monster? Does that fit her version?) |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 27, 2022 15:25:53 GMT
I would've loved to have seen the beginnings of it, perhaps even seeing the Grandfather rub elbows with other significant Great Houses figures I was surprised to realize that the Great Houses kept Grandpappy-P imprisoned for more than 200 years. I feel like that fact isn't broght up as much as it would be. It always seems surprising/psychologically striking that so much creative effort goes into developing the Eleven Day Empire as this spooky base for the Faction, and then there's the events of the audios. Lawrence Miles took the phrase 'kill your darlings' to heart. Setting information is all well and good, but a good story requires a disruption of the status-quo. And one of the things writ-large about the Eleven Day Empire was... it could never last. Even in this book it was burning a finite ammount of time crunched into a small footprint to maintain the loop. I think that the Eleven Day Empire was probably overdeveloped as part of the proscess of consolidating the various Who-expat properties together. In order to create an alternative to the Time Lords without TARDISes Miles decided to chart how Faction Paradox figured in relation to... everything the Great Houses touched, and assign major figures and corresponding bureaucratic locations within the 11DE. He filled EVERY gap left by what they couldn't use from the Who IP by specifying the FP equivilant. So there was a LOT of detail, to the point that it almost reads like a RPG setting. But wasn't the Book of the War also a setting primer hashing out the 'rules' for this so other writers could contribute? This level of detail feels necessary in that case. Over-developed, but the alternative was having a half-dozen different writers fill in the gaps in conflicting ways. One of the most admirable things about Faction Paradox, to me, was the sheet chutzpah it took to say "Oh yeah? We're taking out characters and starting our own Whoniverse! With hookers and blackjack and blood rituals. Yet weirdly less creepy sexual content than the VNAs." |
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Post by ryanfogarty on Sept 29, 2022 4:08:42 GMT
garyshots alluded to this briefly, but "womb" is the literal meaning of the world "matrix". When I first read The Book, after having seen NuWho, I simply interpreted the caldera as a rebranded Untempered Schism, but in reality it's actually earlier and much weirder. With the Matrix, some of the details clearly match: the caldera is a womb, and in "Toy Story" Lilith and her sister call the Matrix "Mother"; and both are what make the Great Houses "Lords of Time", although there's no mention of the caldera storing the minds of dead academicians. Very radical reinvention of the concept. Moles grow out, cancer dips down. I think the Caldera is a place where someone took a melonballer to the universe. The result looks like a crater from our perspective on the inside but it allowed things to flow in through the wound. I do NOT tend to think the Caldera is the Eye of Harmony simply because a bottled Black Hole is indifficiently unique in science fiction to be copyrighted and I don't think Miles would need to replace it, thus I conclude that it must serve another purpouse. It may be a basis for the Matrix, the Time Lords' virtual afterlife in FP's strange cosmology where the Time Lords are joined to time on a life-proscess level (something I'm not personally a fan of) and their bio-data is their life (something I am a fan of.) All of which means that the Matrix isn't really a simulated afterlife because a simulation based on biodata is the real thing. I also tend to think that the pre-NuWho Matrix wasn't 'running' an afterlife simulation and that the simulation existed as a way for the living person diving into the matrix to interact with the bio-data, which would only be dynamic and 'alive' when it was being interacted with. A sort of tree-falls-in-the-forest scenario. NuWho seems to contradict this was 'Death in Heaven', but does it really? The Nethersphere was all about preparing dead humans to sign away their emotions willingly and if it really was made using Matrix tech (which seems to be the assumption,) what if that same sort of two-tiered psycocomp system was there to help dead Time Lords transition? Giving them time to adjust to death, make peace and put their affairs in order and then willingly pass into a state of... non-dynamism? At any rate, the timeships reproducing around the Caldrera/Matrix, as a sort of well of biodata tied to all that is the Time Lords and all that is of time which they made their species foundational to, makes some thematic sense. As for what the Caldera actually is? The Caldera seems like.... Hh.Well that's interesting. Especially given my theory about the real origins of the Yssgaroth....This is pretty compelling, I must admit. Maybe I just need to get more comfortable with the FP Homeworld not looking exactly like the televised Gallifrey. Gallifrey doesn't look exactly like televised Gallifrey. It reinvented itself with every appearance on television, adding new and contradictory lore that was irreconcilable with what came before which we have developed consensus rationalizations for. It would be perfectly in keeping, if the original series had continued, for Series 29 to reveal that the Eye of Harmony was inside a giant turtle NAMED Harmony. And there's a myth about what happened to the SECOND eye, because of course there are two.... This is gibberish, but it's the same 'flavour' of gibberish that the show constantly threw out. "Do not look away Doctor! If Great Harmony wishes to open her eyes, you must meet her gaze!"
"I cannot! I -- I am afraid! Is that what you want to hear? It's too much, too -- "
"Gaze into the Abyss! Let the turtle look out, and fall!"
"Aarhhughh!"
*smash to credits* |
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PI9090
Cousin
I was loomed this way.
Posts: 91
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Post by PI9090 on Apr 1, 2023 12:16:56 GMT
If Grandfather Paradox is played by Ronnie Barker (because of Fletcher from Porridge), then at least one of the lieutenants obviously has to be played by Richard Beckinsale (who played Godber, Fletcher's impressionable younger cellmate). And what was the name of Beckinsale's other famous character, in Rising Damp? Alan Moore. Too silly?
Maybe if taken to too serious and greater extent but we can certainly use the physical likenesses of such actors for the four original Godfather lueitenants fanart purposes if nothing else. Porridge: Richard Beckinsale. Porridge and Open All Hours: David Jason. The Two Ronnies: Ronnie Corbett. The Navy Lark and Clarence: Richard Caddicot. <Auteur? Obviously we can't just outright create a group, "photo" for them but maybe something like the .M.G.S. franchise's Philospher's image, (see below) could be done. Anyone willing to help do so? It would mean scouring the shows listed above for useable images, (I think the younger David Jason from Opena All Hours would be better then Porridge's aged Blanco).  |
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