Patrick Rothfuss - The Kingkiller Chronicle [SPOLIERS]

I like the story. It's pretty good. He said he slowed down after the second because he was ignoring his wife and kid and also his father ended up with cancer.

One thing that put me off a little bit though was the fact that the Adem don't know that men are required to have kids. Seeing how free they are with sex I don't get how they can't make that connection. Also I don't get why Kvothe goes around chewing a herb that prevents him from having kids.
 
Daald said:
I like the story. It's pretty good. He said he slowed down after the second because he was ignoring his wife and kid and also his father ended up with cancer.

One thing that put me off a little bit though was the fact that the Adem don't know that men are required to have kids. Seeing how free they are with sex I don't get how they can't make that connection. Also I don't get why Kvothe goes around chewing a herb that prevents him from having kids.
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I wondered about this too, but actually if they're more free with sex they're more likely not to make the connection. I did wonder about their views on pregnancy being totally unconnected to sex but then it occurred to me that there's a couple of explanations:

1) A substance they ingest for other purposes might have the side effect of being a contraceptive.

2) Women who are at a very high-end of physical performance often stop menstruating.

Both of these would make pregnancy much more rare. Combined with constant sexual activity it is easy to see how they might not make the connection.
 
gumboot said:
I wondered about this too, but actually if they're more free with sex they're more likely not to make the connection. I did wonder about their views on pregnancy being totally unconnected to sex but then it occurred to me that there's a couple of explanations:

1) A substance they ingest for other purposes might have the side effect of being a contraceptive.

2) Women who are at a very high-end of physical performance often stop menstruating.

Both of these would make pregnancy much more rare. Combined with constant sexual activity it is easy to see how they might not make the connection.
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It would make sense if they were poofed into existence as they are (which of course they were). Other than that you would have to explain why they were unable to make that connection living in a world where knowing that is kind of necessary. They are descendands of people that successfully copulated and have done since antiquity before their culture came to be. It would be hard to explain why their ancestors never understood the mechanism of birth in a world with plenty of examples before they took up the warrior lifestyle and failed to teach it to their children. Heck if they have livestock they have to know the mechanism otherwise they don't eat.

It's a small gripe I guess. We are swallowing much bigger things so I don't know why it stood out to me. Maybe because it is so mundane and it felt that the author took the cheap way out. These kinds of small things ruin it for me.
 
Daald said:
Heck if they have livestock they have to know the mechanism otherwise they don't eat.
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Well I'd have thought so but years back I read a book about sex education in Ireland which included cases of couples coming to see the doctor about fertility problems

One guy was ejaculating across his wife's stomach thinking the "seed" would take root, the other woman's belly button was rather raw.
:jaw-dropp

I think he was balancing their pragmatic and honest attitudes to much of life with a dash of craziness.

As regards timing he said of the second that he restructured it many times, changing it a bit at the end that meant rework of earlier pieces etc.
 
Daald said:
It would make sense if they were poofed into existence as they are (which of course they were). Other than that you would have to explain why they were unable to make that connection living in a world where knowing that is kind of necessary. They are descendands of people that successfully copulated and have done since antiquity before their culture came to be. It would be hard to explain why their ancestors never understood the mechanism of birth in a world with plenty of examples before they took up the warrior lifestyle and failed to teach it to their children.

Heck if they have livestock they have to know the mechanism otherwise they don't eat.

It's a small gripe I guess. We are swallowing much bigger things so I don't know why it stood out to me. Maybe because it is so mundane and it felt that the author took the cheap way out. These kinds of small things ruin it for me.
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To us, it seems obvious that sex causes pregnancy, but that's because we've known that for thousands and thousands of years. It's not necessarily true, and he was probably basing it on the Trobriand Islanders.

Here's some more on them.

Back when Malinowski was doing his field work, he was amazed that islanders could freely have premarital sex and yet still found it desirable to get married.

...girls want sex just as much as guys, kids start having sex at a very young age — 6-8 for the girls and 10-12 for the guys — with no social stigma, there are few customs about dating to inhibit “hooking up”...

Of course, much of the story of a Trobriand’s intimate life is the same: initial attractions budding into lasting relationships, etc. And then, out of nowhere, Malinowski drops in something totally bizarre. The islanders don’t kiss, he explains. Instead, they scratch. The girls scratch the guys so hard that they draw blood and, if the guys can withstand the pain, then they move forward to having sex...while everybody is having sex whenever they want, premarital meal-sharing is a big no-no. You’re not supposed to go out for dinner together until after you get married.

But the most fascinating and strange part about the islanders are their beliefs on the subject of pregnancy, also described in Malinowski’s classic article “Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands”. When people die, you see, their spirit takes a canoe to the island of Tuma...When the spirit gets old and wrinkled it shrugs off its skin and turns back into an embryo, which a spirit then takes back to the island and inserts into a woman. This, you see, is how women get pregnant.

That’s right. The islanders do not believe that sex causes pregnancy. They don’t believe in physiological fatherhood.

...

They argued the case quite logically. After all, they noted, one fellow went on an expedition for a year or two and when he came back, he had a new son. He obviously wasn’t having sex with her while he was away, so where did the kid come from? ... And, they note, there are some really hideous people on the island who nobody would dare have sex with, yet they manage to become pregnant.

...

They also argue the other way: people on the island are having sex all the time from a very early age and yet they very rarely get pregnant.

...

It is speculated that the yams that form the basis of the island diet have a contraceptive agent in them ... which conveniently explains quite a bit, including the low birthrate despite the high level of sexual activity.

...

...the society is necessarily matrilineal, since fathers have no technical lineage. Yet sociological fathers (the mother’s husband), Malinowski notes, show more love and care for their children than most he’s seen in Europe.

Furthermore, they believe the same rules apply to the rest of the animal kingdom. This is what clinches it for Malinowski — despite all the effort they go to to raise pigs, they insist that pigs also reproduce asexually. They never attempt to breed pigs; indeed, they castrate all the male pigs they have. (To them this is further proof — we castrated all the pigs and yet they keep having children! Malinowski notes that the domestic pigs often sneak off to canoodle with those in the wild.)
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So there you go, a real-world example of a sexually promiscuous culture that didn't make the connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction.
 
Wudang said:
Qi is as generic a term as energy is in english.
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Yep

I use the word "qi" in conversation every day with native chinese speakers who use it as a physical concept

The problem is that it can also have "spiritual" connotations, but the physical and spiritual concepts are not really seen as particularly distinct, at least not among the layman, but then that's probably true of "energy" in english too
 
gumboot said:
So there you go, a real-world example of a sexually promiscuous culture that didn't make the connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction.
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Ahh. Very nice find. I notice that they are on an island where outside cultures can't influence them though and I think the Adem don't fall into that category as they isolated themselves a few hundred years in the past.

Seeing this example makes it more easier to accept though. Thanks!
 
Daald said:
Ahh. Very nice find. I notice that they are on an island where outside cultures can't influence them though and I think the Adem don't fall into that category as they isolated themselves a few hundred years in the past.

Seeing this example makes it more easier to accept though. Thanks!
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But see the classic book "Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches" where many acts that can seem crazy from the outside may have very practical roots - e.g. wealth distribution within a group, keeping resource exploitation sustainable etc.
 
Daald said:
Ahh. Very nice find. I notice that they are on an island where outside cultures can't influence them though and I think the Adem don't fall into that category as they isolated themselves a few hundred years in the past.

Seeing this example makes it more easier to accept though. Thanks!
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Actually, the Trobriand Islanders weren't isolated at all. They're just off the coast of New Guinea, and partook in the regional trade, utilising ocean-going canoes.

Further, even though they now have access to modern medicine and technology they still retain their beliefs about reproduction.

Finally, I don't think Rothfuss' has actually provided enough information about the Adem to make any clear judgments about their historical timeline. No clear timeframe is given for the 99 Tales, and we don't know what the geographic or social context is. The Adem could easily have emerged internally from within a geographically isolated population that had always believed men had no part in reproduction.
 
I haven't read these books in quite some time, but this discussion has piqued my interest in them again. I'm a bit sad that it'll probably be years before the series ends (or the third book is released, at any rate). Here's hoping we don't have another Wheel of Time in the making. :P
 
<bump> Half way through The Slow Regard of Silent Things - a novella about Auri from the Kingkiller books. Rothfuss himself warns that just because you like the Kvothe books doesn't mean you'll like this. It's very quiet and reflective and he's not afraid to show off his vocabulary. A charming book and an exploration of Auri's world. A big surprise.
 
Someone handed me the first book while we were on night shift babysitting commo gear in the command post during Annual Training a few years ago. I was right furious when I devoured the thing and THEN found out the second book was still in the future. Reread it last month and refuse to read the second until the third is out so I can binge-read the set.

Darn good writing.
 
Finished Auri's tale now and I would highly recommend it if you're happy reading a short character study. There is no action, no exploration of back story but some hints of both. Quite quite charming.
 
That third book has been in revision for going on ten years now. If it had come out within a year or two of the second, I would have eaten it right up. But over the years, the second book gets worse and worse in my memory. Now all I remember is a meandering and largely irrelevant narrative, with a big fat Sexy Tom Bombadil Moment right in the middle. So I'm no longer invested. If the third book ever gets published, I'll give it a miss.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
Maybe he found an old lamp & rubbed it, and when the Genie appeared said "I want to be able to write fantasy like George R.R. Martin"....
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I feel like I was there for Peak Rothfuss. I was at w00tstock the year Paul & Storm debuted "Write Like the Wind", calling out Martin for slacking on GOT (this was also the Peak GOT period - the books were selling, the TV series had just started, enthusiasm was high). At that same show, Rothfuss did a reading of the Marzipan Princess. That was enough to convince me and Ms TP to buy pretty much everything he'd ever published.

A couple years later, we went to Nerdcon Stories, a convention headlined by Rothfuss and Internet-famous vlogger John Green. Paul & Storm were also there...

... Anyway, my point is that from my perspective, Rothfuss and Martin blew up around the same time, in their respective ways. And Rothfuss was definitely running with a crowd that was well aware that Martin was screwing up a good thing. Avoiding the exact same train wreck we were all watching happen to Martin in slow motion must have been at the top of his mind. Or should have been at the top of his mind, anyway.

---

Honestly I think what happened is that writing novels is much harder than it looks, and Rothfuss lost control of his narrative somewhere in book 2. Neither he nor his editor could figure out how to get it back under control, and meanwhile he was diluting his focus and energy on a bunch of side projects. I think at some point he realized he just didn't have it in him to successfully wrangle all the potential and mystery boxes into a coherent and apt conclusion. So he's quietly given up.
 
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