Kingkiller Chronicles Speculation: The King and Caesura

I am continuing my speculation on the fantastic series, the Kingkiller Chronicles.  I've discussed Denna, the identity of Master Ash, the use of Copper, and what the plan of the Chandrian might be.

In this post, I want to look at the title "Kingkiller", and the name "Poet-killer" given to the sword Caesura.

Obviously, Kvothe is called Kingkiller because he kills at least one king.

It's Got Gears on the Cover!

Antikythera mechanism

That's how you know a book is steampunk; if it's got gears on it.

A close friend of mine and I have a running debate on steampunk.  He thinks it's an inherently flawed genre, whereas I think it's a genre with the potential to be good, if done right.

I've been trying to prove him wrong, to little avail.

The heart of steampunk, from what I can tell, is the fantastical machines.  Clockwork androids, aether flux shields, steam rifles and bicycle-powered flying machines.  It's about a future that might have been, where mechanisms were just slightly less complicated and inventors only slightly more brilliant and insane.  With a hammer, some wrenches, and a lathe, the dedicated professor can pound out some incredible piece revolution of precision engineering.  It attempts to capture that era of uncertainty and excitement that surrounded the huge technical advancements of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Any thing could have been made, anything could have been discovered; the world was young and large and waiting to be explored.

That is a good setting for a genre.  It has so much potential.

Sadly, I've found very little that really captures it.

A Dragon's Psalm

I took this from The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis.  It is one of my favorite books by him, as it is just so packed with symbolism you almost need a philosophical encyclopedia with you when you read it.  It is the first book written by Lewis after his conversion, and tells the allegorical struggle of a young man from the town of Puritania as he goes on a quest after a vision of an Island.

At some point, there is a miserly dragon living in a frozen waste, living alone over a hoard of gold, and it sings this song to itself.

Illustration by Michael Hague

Once the worm-laid egg broke in the wood.
I came forth shining into the trembling wood,
The sun was on my scales, dew upon the grasses,
The cool, sweet grasses and the budding leaves.
I wooed my speckled mate.  We played at druery
And sucked warm milk dripping from the goats' teats.

Now I keep watch on the gold in my rock cave
In a country of stones: old, deplorable dragon,
Watching my hoard.  In winter night the gold
Freezes through toughest scales my cold belly.
The jagged crowns and twisted cruel rings
Knobbly and icy are old dragon's bed.

Often I wish I hadn't eaten my wife,
Though worm grows not to dragon till he eat worm.
She could have helped me, watch and watch about,
Guarding the hoard.  Gold would have been safer.
I could uncoil my weariness at times and take
A little sleep, sometimes when she was watching.

Last night under the moonset a fox barked,
Woke me.  Then I knew I had been sleeping.
Often an owl flying over the country of stones
Startles me, and I think I must have slept.
Only a moment.  That very moment a man
Might have come out of the cities, stealing, to get my gold.

They make plots in the towns to steal my gold.
They whisper of me in a low voice, laying plans,
Merciless men.  Have they not ale upon the benches,
Warm wife in bed, singing, and sleep the whole night?
But I leave not the cave but once in winter
To drink of the rock pool: in summer twice.

They feel not pity for the old, lugubrious dragon.
Oh, Lord, that made the dragon, grant me Thy peace!
But ask not that I should give up the gold,
Nor move, nor die; others would get the gold.
Kill, rather, Lord, the men and the other dragons
That I may sleep, go when I will to drink.

I think it is beautiful for its ugliness.  It describes a miserable and wretched creature whose obsession is the source of all its misery.  The dragon yearns for surcease from the cold, hungry loneliness that it has caused itself, yet asks for it on its own terms, in the terms that let it keep the source of all its misery and remain essentially the same pitiful worm it always has been.  It does not want any change, rather that the entire world be bent around it and all the men and dragons slain so that it may have the peace it could have if it would just forget about its silly golden hoard.

I think it is such a complete picture of the fallen state of humans, how our own pride and desires generate all of our misery, and how we reject the insurmountable joy of God, being unwilling to let go of our golden hoards.

That's all I have for today.

Kingkiller Chronicles Speculation: the Chandrian and Their Plan

I'm going to continue speculating about the Kingkiller Chronicles.  I have already covered Master Ash and what I think copper is used for.

SPOILERS AHEAD!  Please don't read unless you have read both of the books, and thoroughly at that.

Very early in the first book, before we even know who the silent innkeeper is, we hear about the Chandrian.  From the story, we quickly pick up that they are some sort of evil sorcerers with eery powers.  We learn some weird stuff, like fires going blue and metal rusting, but most importantly is the children's rhyme:

"Magic Isn't Supposed to Make Sense!"

I wrote a post a while ago that, really, was supposed to be about the plausible impossibility of interacting with any sort of "parallel universe", if one were to exist and going there were possible.  So if you found a passage in to Narnia in some old professor's mansion, likely you'd find Narnia very much the way Digory and Polly found it - empty, lightless, and with nothing in it (not even the singing Lion).

However, while going there, I stopped to comment on fantasy fiction, which is how the thought struck me.  Parallel worlds are pretty common, after all.  Sort of in the vein if The Gods Themselves by Asimov (or more like it The Ring of Truth by Lake) I tried to think of a parallel universe that had an entirely different set of physical laws.  Where things behaved totally differently.  I guess it would have been a sort of partial ingress into Level IV multiverse theory?  I don't assert such a universe would actually exist, just that modeling one would be neat.  The goal was that the emergent behavior of these laws would make magic work.  Or something so totally different that we would see it as magic... whereas the inhabitants therein would look at a light bulb from our world and cross themselves to ward off evil spirits.

So contained therein was this idea of "hard magic", analogous to "hard science" fiction.

Kingkiller Chronicles Speculation: Copper

SPOILERS AHEAD!  Please don't read if you haven't read both Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear.

I am going to continue posting my own speculation about the Kingkiller Chronicles.  In a spasm of fanboy insanity, I had written up some twenty or so pages detailing everything I think I had deduced from the text.  Recently, in his own blog, Patrick Rothfuss brought up a totally awesome copper knife a fan had made him, noting that it would be good in a fight against a Namer.  Rothfuss said this showed the fans had been paying attention.  I was glad to see that apparently I had been paying attention too, and that others (in the comments) had noted things similar to me on the use and possible function of copper in the books.

Why Harry Potter is a Terrible Series

In modern fantasy fiction, there are essentially two prototypes of approach; that of Lord of the Rings and that of Narnia.  Not that every work will copy one of these or be like one or the other or any other generalization that pedants will feel the need to scold me for, but that there's two basic, classic approaches to fantasy worlds.

The Narnian approach is simple, and usually followed by children's books.  There's some hidden land of fantasy magic, it gets discovered, and you go on a fun tour through your imagination.  It's almost an extended dream sequence.  There's trolls and goblins and witches and elves and fairies and satyrs and... and it goes on.  The magical creatures are there because they are magical creatures and this is a magical world.  Nothing is really supposed to make sense, so much as present a fun escape from boring reality.  The narrative space of the story is just a big bag for holding mythical creatures.  It's fun.  You're supposed to feel wonder at all the incredible surroundings, and not really think about why Medusa moved to New England and why no one has called the cops for missing persons.

It's pleasant, and there's nothing wrong with it.

Kingkiller Chronicles Speculation: Denna and Her Patron

This is the first in what may be a series of posts speculating on characters and events in the Kingkiller Chronicles.

SPOILER DENSE!  Contains tons of things from the first two books in the series.  Please don't read unless you've read both books carefully yourself.

As has been noted, the Kingkiller Chronicles leave open the unique opportunity of an unfinished epic fantasy series with a solid and fixed resolution.  We know that whatever happens in the third book will bring us to the Waystone Inn.  We know that Kvothe will trick a demon and kill an angel, and then kill a king, and somehow start the entire war with the Penitent King.  We know that something is going to happen to unleash fairy creatures in to the world.  The whole series has already been written (and is just being revised), so there are definite hints and foreshadows and the material can be trusted to lead somewhere. It's like a murder mystery in that regard.

Seeing the unique opportunity, I decided to wildly speculate, as have so many other fans.

In this post, I will focus on Denna.  It is long.

To Stand on Charn

Since C.S. Lewis showed us a world on the other side of a wardrobe (and perhaps before), fantasy and science-fiction stories have abounded with this idea of traveling to parallel universes and experiencing strange new worlds.  It's almost iconic: awkward teenager struggling in school and with bullies, gets sucked in to an alternate magical world, meets fascinating elves and confronts evil, and finds confidence to face real-world issues on his or her return.

Typical example

So here's my question: how do they interact with matter in the alternate universe?

Virtual Aristotelian Physics

I spent several hours the other day looking up some sort of reference to a computer simulation of Aristotelian physics.

The thought came to me in connection to fantasy worlds.  Good fantasy authors will create their own fictional worlds with different histories, cultures, languages, and religions, similar to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.  Lately authors have started going kind of crazy, and have been experimenting with alternative physics, like flat earths and sentient quanta.

I was thinking, why not Aristotelian physics?  Is it that impossible?  A professor of an old friend of mine, remarking to a room of Thomistic philosophy students, asked why they were so enamored with Aristotle when you couldn't make your car run on Aristotelian physics.  Maybe not their cars, but any car?  Can a car run in a world of Aristotelian physics?

Aristotle with impetus