The Unholy Consult

The Unholy Consult (Aspect-Emperor, #4)R. Scott Bakker2017★★★: The conclusion to the Second Apocalypse’s “The Aspect-Emperor” tetralogy, an extended double-book of The Great Ordeal/The Unholy Consult.

After thousands of pages exhausting the reader in a ‘slog of slogs’, the two threads of the plot, the wizard and the crusade, finally converge at Golgotterath for the epic battle at the ultimate stronghold of the Consult, which consumes the majority of the book and harks back to Lord of the Rings and WoT’s A Memory of Light. The end of the battle sees a stack of revelations unfold, including at least two that could be called literal deus ex machinas, the failure of the Great Crusade and the second resurrection of the No-God. (I would worry about spoilers here but seriously, you are reading R. Scott Bakker’s fiction, you didn’t actually think the Crusade was going to succeed and defeat the Consult and prevent the No-God’s resurrection and not go horribly wrong somehow, did you?) This sets the stage for, presumably, another trilogy covering the fight against the No-God and Achamian re-enacting the First Apocalypse (although Bakker insists that the resurrection of the No-God is in fact the planned culmination, the final meaning of the series, which “ends the Thousandfold Thought”, with the rest being “fuzzy” appendix, so we should not try to interpret it as merely a cliffhanger and prologue to the ‘real’ ending).

Bakker remains Bakker: technology like nuclear bombs and lasers are quietly slipped into the fantasy setting, the sex remains disturbingly weird, the influence of Frank Herbert remains profound and probably missed by most readers (I was particularly struck by “No-God”—literally there in the name, yet I missed its meaning for several books). What is good:

• I found The Great Ordeal to be more compelling in several ways; in particular, I was interested in the description of the Crusade’s logistical struggles across the plains and their slow brutal moral & mental degradation and degeneration from eating Sranc meat and Kellhus’s manipulations of the Crusade to get it to Golgotterath such as a nifty exegesis of Girardian mimesis (including, in a signature Bakker ‘WTF’, a sudden homosexual rape out of nowhere). While the writing here got repetitive, I think it was necessary to drum the theme in. (Criticizing it for being repetitive would be like criticizing “Endless Eight” for repeating the same episode, or David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King for being boring.)

• the Non-men, a dark twist on Tolkienesque elves, receive extensive coverage as long passages are set in the last Non-men city of Ishterebinth; while with worldbuilding and alien species, familiarity all too often breeds contempt, Bakker manages to make the Non-men even more interesting than they were when we had mostly hints.

• a lot of world-building and backstory gets filled in

• the final battle is worth the journey it took to get there

Downsides:

• ending is a huge question mark: abrupt, several of the revelations, as mentioned, feel like deus ex machinas and not in a good way. Thinking about it made some of it make a little more sense, but most of it remains unsatisfying and awaiting better justification in the sequels.

• Kelmomas, as both a character and plot arc, continues to feel arbitrary and poorly written; I hated and was bored every page he was in except the last. (Bakker wrote a narcissistic psychopath child without any effort to make him sympathetic or interesting, whose chapters vastly slow down the main plot—the parts which we are interested in—for reasons which remains deeply opaque even after you finish the book. )

  This made several arcs appear totally pointless, particularly Sorweel: I loved seeing Ishterebinth, but was all of that really nothing but setup for Kelmomas to interfere at the last second?

• considerably less quotable; prose can be described as overwrought to the point of making it hard to understand what is going on at all; certain words, such as ‘licentious’, are vastly overused by Bakker (where was the editor?) and he should write a little shell script to flag them in his drafts. I must, however, defend Bakker against the review which called it 450 pages of “various descriptions of each and every character’s turgid member”, however—many of those members were flaccid, not ‘turgid’. They are opposites.

So, I thought The Great Ordeal was a considerable success, but The Unholy Consult… I am not sure. As the quip about the French student riots go, “it is too soon to tell”.

What Does It Mean?

One thing the ending does not do is explain what it all meant. Why is the resurrection of the No-God the point of the series? We are told little about what the No-God is, and much about Bakker’s philosophy; what are we supposed to deduce about the two, and what is the system of the Second Apocalypse?

I have not mastered the corpus of fan discussions, only dipped in occasionally while reading the novels, but what struck me is how little commentary discussed the extensive connections between Bakker’s fiction and Frank Herbert’s Dune universe: clearly when Bakker was conceiving the Second Apocalypse as a teenager, Dune weighed heavily on his mind. This suggests a deep connection: the Second Apocalypse is Bakker’s reply to Dune.

Dune And Bakker

The parallels between Bakker and Herbert go far beyond the obvious stylistic parallels like Bakker’s use of chapter-heading epigraphs/in-universe text quotes—the universes are almost the same. To elaborate on some of the easier analogies between Dune & Bakker:

qirri : spice; Dunyain : Bene Gesserit+Mentat; Kellhus : Paul; the Breaking of the Houses/Great Crusade : Butlerian/Paul’s Jihad; Kelmomas/No-God : No-ships/No-globes/Siona; Tekne : Family atomics; Dûnyain whale-mothers : Tleilaxu axolotl tanks; Probability Trance : mentat computation; sorcery : prescience; Crusades : Caucasus rebellions; Esmenet : Chani; Leto II : Kelmomas.

It would not be going too far to view Bakker as telling the Dune saga in a far more brutal fashion and going far more in depth into the Jihad part than Herbert did. Both are fundamentally concerned with human freedom in a deterministic universe—but reach opposite conclusions about the endpoint of human agency.

The most transparent reference to Dune is the name “No-God”, which follows the same naming pattern as “no-globes” and “no-ships” in the later Dune books.

The reason this is important is that the ‘no’ prefix does not mean simply ‘fake’ or ‘false’ (as I imagine most Bakker readers assume, that “the ‘No’-God is simply a pretender replacement-god which is no god, but just some sort of techno-monster created by the aliens, and it’s a derogatory name given by its enemies who follow the true gods”). What the no-prefix means is that it’s an active negation of another power: in Dune, no-globes/no-ships actively destroy the power of prescient people to look into possible futures by hiding things which can then affect the future. They are blinded to everything involving no-objects: they cannot understand events, and the more they rely on prescience, the more devastating this vulnerability is. In the same way, actions of the No-God are invisible to prescient powers like the gods, and the gods’ only vulnerability.

Time Travel

This, I think, may be key to interpretation. If prescience can exist, then that implies time travel and reverse causality. Which kind? In the Dune-verse, the time travel of prescience is usually assumed to be the straightforward implicit iterative kind. I think that a close read of even Dune shows that Frank Herbert was groping towards a more sophisticated one: self-consistent stable time-loops (eg. “All You Zombies”, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Timecrimes). Dune is, more specifically, a series of nested time-loops.

In the Dune-verse (often missed by readers), prescience doesn’t just work forward but also backward: those who foresee the future enable their future selves to reach back in time and create their futures. Thus, in the Dune novels, many of the characters are slaves to prescience.

At the first level, many characters have low-level prescience, from use of spice, natural talents from the long-term eugenics programs, tools like the “Dune Tarot” card game, and control tiny regions of space-time. (Such characters include the Guild Navigators, Reverend Mothers, and wild Fremen.)

At the second level, a perfected Kwisatz Haderach exhibits prescience over a lifetime. In Dune/Dune Messiah, Paul Atreides becomes aware that he has been foreseeing & manipulating events on Arrakis from before he has ever consumed large quantities of spice; long before, the Spacing Guild sees a ‘nexus’ blocking their attempts to manipulate events, while the Bene Gesserit are concerned that a ‘higher-order power’ is taking control of Arrakis and thus the future of the universe, as revealed by anomalies like the Lady Jessica’s betrayal to conceive a son or the seeding of manipulative memes among the Fremen to make them tools of the Bene Gesserit. The move to Arrakis, defeat, the fleeing to the desert, the Jihad—all are caused by Paul’s prescient vision being so strong, as the first Kwisatz Haderach, so as to override the weaker visions of first-level prescient powers, manipulating them allto act as necessary to bring “Muad’dib” into existence. The prophecy of “Muad’dib” is a self-fulling prophecy, but not merely self-fulfilling: it is self-creating, because he is the stable fixed point. (That is, Jessica did not conceive a male child and created the possibility of a Paul Atreides—the possibility Paul Atreides could exist forced her to conceive a male child and create the actuality of Paul Atreides.) He is trapped by this prescient vision because to deviate from it will destroy him: if his mother bears a daughter, he doesn’t exist; if they do not get sent to Arrakis, the Emperor finds some other way to destroy the rising threat of House Atreides; if he doesn’t escape to live among the wild Fremen, he is killed by the Harkonnen; if he doesn’t lead a rebellion on Arrakis, at some point the Fremen or Harkonnen kill him as an inconvenience or threat; if he doesn’t conquer Arrakis and loses, he and his children will die, etc. Finally, at the end of Dune Messiah, he pre-meditatedly walks into a trap where a bomb will blind him, rendering him unfit for office, and exiled to die in the desert—leaving his children to rule the empire in his stead, and finally escaping the prescient vision, and free to lead his own life (however short that may be).

But this is only the second level of prescience.

In Children of Dune/God-Emperor of Dune, Paul Atreides is, in turn, himself enslaved by his son, Leto II.¹ Leto II is an even more powerful prescient being, and manipulates Paul to bring himself into being² (in addition to the expected daughter), and intervenes (even as a newborn babe) as necessary to defeat Scytale etc. Leto II’s ‘Golden Path’ creates no-globes/no-ships, the human equivalent of no-globes (Siona & descendants), and built-up pressures yielding the Scattering across the multiverse of Siona-descendants in no-ships. The no-ships and Sionas guarantee that no prescient vision, no matter how powerful, will ever again be able to see (and control) all of humanity, and the Scattering ensures that no single political polity or military or civilization can ever physically track and destroy all of humanity.

Why is the Golden Path so critical and the core of Leto’s entire story? Because Leto’s actions in creating the Golden Path also make him the final all-prescient being and a fixed point: Leto’s prescient visions exploring all the possible futures showed him that there were still further distant futures in which Ixian hunter-kill prescient machines (the primitive prototypes of which replaced Guild Navigators) surpassed human beings, and thus, could create the past in their image—except that the Golden Path blocked their retrocausal influence by crippling prescience millennia before, taking much of the universe out of prescient control. Otherwise, the possibility of superhumanly prescient machines would have been another self-fulfilling stable point, manipulating human history to bring them into existence. (As is entirely possible, as machines are not limited by human limits, and can be superior to humans; the evil of the machines is that they do not share human values, and can be abused by other humans. “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”)

Could there be a fourth level of prescience? Apparently not: because Leto II comes before the Ixian machines, thanks to the Butlerian Jihad, and is able to control events long enough to ensure a permanent escape from prescience via the no-globes/ships/genes, his loop becomes the ‘outer’ loop and controls all inner loops. The Ixian machines or their equivalent do bootstrap into existence eventually, with powers of prescience, as seen at the very end of Chapterhouse: Dune—but they are too late, in both a logical and a temporal sense, to defeat the humans, and are now simply another contending power in the universe. (For more discussion of this idea of contending time-loops resolving to a single fixed point, see my review of Timecrimes.)

And that is what is going on in Dune, and thus, what is going on in The Second Apocalypse.

Liberation: Awakening As Adults

The self-proclaimed goal of the Bene Gesserit is to create ‘adults’, by breeding and every other method: humans who are self-controlled, who have all possible abilities (from martial arts to rhetoric to prescience to ancestral memory access), who can adapt to all circumstances and embrace change, who are ‘awake’ one might say. As the Dune saga develops, humans grow ever more capable: the revived swordmaster Duncan Idaho is told he is literally slower and an obsolete model by a distant descendant who even as an old man can defeat Idaho. Norman Spinrad remarks that the libertarian Herbert once told him that he’d like to conclude the saga by eventually developing the universe into a democracy, shedding the elitist aristocracies and gerontocracies and tyrannies and theocracies and secret societies which dominate the Dune universe; this would be the logical endpoint of the growth and maturation of humanity.

You are a contradiction, my friend. You choose. You decide. You hold responsible and are held responsible. But at the same time, you’re a machine, something that can be conditioned, repaired, turned on or off, piloted with greater ease than a drone—so long as you remain convinced that you choose and decide.

“The Dûnyain, have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self-moving thought. The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? Only the Logos allows one to mitigate that slavery. Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. And only the Dûnyain possess this knowledge, plainsman. The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance. Only the Dûnyain are awake.”³

In Bakker’s terms, the goals of the Dûnyain / Bene Gesserit are the same: they seek to liberate mankind from “the darkness that comes before”. All men are slaves when they walk ‘conditioned ground’, bound by the shackles of causality. In particular, they are manipulated by the ‘100’ gods—who wish to feast on their souls in the afterlife, and, to ensure a steady supply of fodder, intervene in worldly affairs by manipulating probability and the future using prescience, creating entities like the “White-Luck Warrior”. (In another Dune borrowing, the White-Luck Warrior is an assassin who is simply so lucky that he can kill anyone, because all events just happen to occur as necessary & foreseen for him to achieve his mission—akin to Paul Atreides after being blinded in Dune Messiah.)

Whether men are manipulated by Dûnyain or by gods or by material conditions prior to that moment, what difference does that make? One must be free.

An End To Illusions & Causality

In Zen, acceptance and freedom in the moment; in Herbert, human development culminates in an endless jazz jam session across an infinitely undulating multiverse of provisional phenomena (dubbed ‘illusions’ by the pessimistic)—“If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: ‘Temporary’”; in Bakker, human development culminates in the shattering of all illusion, and the greatest illusion, that of the self—and embrace of the absolute in death.

Neuropath

The Second Apocalypse is easier to understand if we look at Bakker’s best known work outside it, the 2008_17ya serial-killer thriller Neuropath. It functions as something of a ‘skeleton key’ to the Second Apocalypse: because it was written in between the Prince of Nothing trilogy and the Aspect-Emperor, and it is one the bluntest statements of his views (perhaps because it was written up based on college classes he was teaching at the time).

It is best read in conjunction with his intellectual-autobiography 2011_14ya essay “Outing the It that Thinks: The Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem” and his summing-up 2012_13ya essay “The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness”.

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