Editing Reference:RAWA/1997 Lyst posts (section)

== Re: More linking issues ==
Date: Friday, November 14, 1997

Fan A wrote
<blockquote>what happens if two linking books are written identically? (by the same writer, by different writers -- at the same time, at different times)</blockquote>

Fan B wrote
<blockquote>I suspect that two writers, not in contact, accidentally writing the same series of characters into their Descriptive Books, would get different ages, superficially similar, but with difference - Atrus is always commenting, in his journals, about how much he finds that he didn't write.</blockquote>

Even if the same writer wrote the exact same thing in two different Descriptive Books, the changes of the Descriptive Books linking to the same Age are so extremely remote that it's considered impossible to write two Descriptive Books to the same Age. In the "infinity" of the "Tree of Possibilites" there are countless worlds to match any description you can write. There is a chaotic element in how the Book selects which of those many worlds it will link to, which even the D'ni never were able to compensate for.

There are documented theories that this chaotic element is due to the fact that no two Descriptive Books are exactly alike, and that these differences influence the initial Link. Experiments were attempted to produce identical Books, but the experiments were never successful, so this theory remains unproven.

Fan B wrote
<blockquote>I think that the writer's mind changes the age - A different person could write the same words, and have them mean different things. Note however that a slavish imitation would not be the same process of 'creation', but imitation, and so the mind of the writer would not elaborate on the details put down by his/her pen. (I realize this is an enormous body of of speculation, but it explains a lot of stuff for me - the mental process of creation seems as important, or more important then the physical writing.)</blockquote>

The D'ni histories seem to make it clear that this was part of the skill of the Art, learning how to put exactly what you wanted into very specific words. The Books cannot "read your intent".

Fan A wrote
<blockquote>Also, in a prior post I asked how you can alter a age by adjusting its test.. and I understand that nothing (time/space wise) matters as long as the text matches the age, but what if something signifigantly changes the age suddenly? since the age no longer matched the test, would the link switch?</blockquote>

Fan B wrote
<blockquote>I have not read BoD, so I feel free to speculate. I think that if the age changed significantly enough, the text in the book would change (or perhaps merely fade?), the way the text in the book 'wrenches' changes in the world by the principle of similarity (a common magical principle). I think that this messing around with quantum physics is not addressing the problems straight on.</blockquote>

No, the text doesn't change, and no, the Link doesn't necessarily change just because the Age does. At least one example of this can be found in the Book of D'ni.

Fan B wrote
<blockquote>For example, people must certainly have noticed the absence of large daggers sticking into Riven, or the absence of a huge starry fissure. However, with great skill, changes, real changes, not collapsing of superpositions, or shifting of the link to a neighboring age - changes can be made in an age by writing in it's Descriptive Book.</blockquote>

The daggers and the fissures were written by Catherine, who's unconventional writing style bends a number of D'ni writing rules. Atrus himself, when examining one of Catherine's works, didn't think the Book would work at all because of the way it was written (see the Book of Atrus).

Fan B wrote
<blockquote>I think that this doesn not violate the idea of linking, not creation, because the changes are (relatively) minor, and require a lot of skill/luck to implement successfully. For example, the stoneship age was a partial failure on Atrus' part - it did not come out the way he wished, and Atrus is a skilled writer of Age.</blockquote>

Stoneship was one of Atrus' earliest Ages, written about a year after Gehn was trapped on Riven. He wasn't nearly as skilled a writer at this time, he was still experimenting - teaching himself how to write, learning what works, what doesn't. The failure of the Stoneship experiment taught Atrus why the D'ni rules did not permit the writing of manmade objects into an Age.

Shorah,
RAWA