finished seven surrenders

ethnianmandarin:

oligopsonoia:

nostalgebraist:

teared up a bit at the end there ;_;

spoilers below

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This is all v interesting

My reasons for thinking Bridger is the real deal have less to do with the brute technical difficulty of faking magic than with the difficulty of providing motive for every trace Bridger has left on the narrative.  Whoever wanted to fake Bridger would have needed the means to fake magic, but the motive to convince a very specific set of people (Mycroft, the Hive leaders who witnessed the resurrection, Papadelias, the Saneer-Weeksbooths, Saladin [I think?]) while allowing the public to still maintain doubts.  They could have made the public doubt things more firmly if they had just killed off Bridger, but instead, for some reason, they left around this child-size military genius claiming to be Achilles.  Meanwhile, either Mycroft is in on the whole thing (via whom?), or someone went to a huge amount of trouble arranging things to dupe Mycroft into believing in a magic child.  (The will-to-believe that Mycroft displays around JEDD isn’t sufficient here, because he reports numerous physical miracles.)

Seven Surrenders definitely showed that this kind of elaborate puppet-strings plotting is possible and perhaps common in this fictional world, but I’m having a hard time imagining how this will be made plausible and non-stupid to the reader.  All I can come up with is stuff like “an invisible Utopian was present at scores of previously narrated events, using things indistinguishable from magic to fake actual magic for reasons which have received essentially no foreshadowing thus far,” and that’s just bad writing.

One way to look at it: it is very “convenient” how things have been arranged to allow reasonable doubt to remain about Bridger, but this could be careful authorial arrangement rather than careful in-universe arrangement.  If you put a nearly omnipotent character in your story, word and belief is going to spread very quickly unless you set up a bunch of special circumstances to block it.  (As just one example, it helps that Bridger is a psychologically normal, confused kid, rather than a self-assured godling like JEDD – we take this for granted, but Ada Palmer could have made it otherwise, and if it had been otherwise, Bridger-belief would have been that much harder to contain.)

Although, on the other hand, Thisbe’s ability to induce “hallucinations” does seem mighty convenient for explaining away most of Bridger’s appearances, and I’m not sure what purpose it serves in the story if not that.  (This also explains Mycroft’s weird certainty that Thisbe is a “witch” whose powers go beyond the smell-artist stuff; this could be his way of conceptualizing her use of mysterious Utopian/Brillist tech.)  This hypothesis actually removes a lot of problems I mentioned two paragraphs ago, although the motives are still murky.

ETA: I don’t have the book with me, but IIRC Sniper claims in his chapter that there’s some sort of objective record out there showing that “the Bridger stuff is real.”  Would be interesting to check exactly what kind of record it’s talking about

ETA2: omg, @oligopsonoia, about the Antichrist thing – seven and ten are key numbers in the Book of Revelation.  In Rev. 12 there’s a dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns, and then in Rev. 13 and 17 there’s a beast with seven heads, ten horns, and ten crowns, and the dragon gives the beast “his power, and his seat, and great authority.”  And then Rev. 17 there’s this famous interpretation of the beast in terms of kings (part of which goes “And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space”).  Of course this has all confused the hell out of everyone for millennia, I wrote a paper on it back in college

Anyway, seven-ten lists, seven vs. ten billion at the end of TLtL, etc.

(Everyone’s got their microchips [trackers] installed, natch)

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