Friday Lulz!

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Aaaalright fellers. How was your Thanksgiving, then? Did you massacre the poor bird, eh? :)

So. Today's Friday LULZ thread starts with this.

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Try not to laugh if you can!

"Ten-ten".....
 

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Where in the Empire the AIs start off by threatening to make use of their fancy tools the Empire had originally created to make them a race of Slave Mooks and wind up assisting in creating the very technology that enables the Empire to wind up with half its population slaves by the passage of a few thousand years.

Then it turns out that the watchmen have long since lost attraction to the job and that a whole mess of long-term scheming backfires horribly. You might say that my stories also ask the question "What if people create a *person* to end war and that person actually does it?". Needless to say the Architects of Fear http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Ptitletxhiqoj2?from=Main.DidntThinkThisThrough

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

In The Fall of Hyperion the AIs start threatening to make use of their fancy tools the Hegemony had originally created to destroy humankind, but eventually opts for enslaving humankind and consuming it by means of a special biotechnology. In Endymion, that enables the Hegemony to wind up with most its population slaves by the passage of a couple of hundred years. Eventually in The Rise of Endymion this backfires terribly as a person (Endymion) is born to end war and that person actually does it.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Yeah but the guy on your picture has different plans.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

It is just a facilitator/catalyst of the events.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Dude, The Shrike pokes his nose in virtually every episode of some importance. Including the denouement.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

It's an it, the same way Agent Smith is an it.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I should note that the Empire actually abolishes slavery for fear of a large-scale Toussaint L'Overture-type leader showing up given that servile wars become increasingly endemic. There's a certain irony in who one of the potential slave rebellion leaders happens to be.

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I always thought of the Shrike as sort of Othello's Iago, except The Shrike sort of killed everything he touched...but ya know.

[ironhawke.livejournal.com]

Oh burn, edit before "IT'S AN IT, NOT A HE DAMMIT!!" ;)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The thing is that the AIs volunteer to help with the slave pens but they aren't needed and are doing it out of a mixture of "there but for the Grace of God go I" and sadism. The Architects of Fear actually go through a multi-millennia process of creating their super-soldier and while to some extent modeled after the Bene Gesserit are really more of a *successful* Unit 731/Menegle analogue.

And the other difference is that when the Empire finds out just what happens and that the first stage of the experiments *actually worked* they immediately declare it anathema and seek to destroy it, as they fear that the idea of a super-soldier to end all war would create something like Warhammer 40,000. But the Architects themselves prove immensely capable of functioning as a secret society.

And the result of the Omega Program is less Kwisatz Haderach and far more a nightmare combination of Captain America with Akira and Wilbur Whateley. And they avert the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup trope.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Oh I'm sure there are differences. There always are.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Talent borrows, Genius steals.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I get what you were trying to say now, and this stuff has already happened long ago by the time the actual events involving the Empire starts. The stories are set post a bloody civil war that's more the Taiping Rebellion than the US Civil War *caused* by all of this. You might say that from the point of views of the actual tales it's ancient history.

You might say that this is akin to explaining more of the nitty-gritty of the background. I might note that the Empire by the point of the tales is over 40,121 years old and has a lengthy sequence of multiple civilizational cycles akin to the Chinese dynasties. The events here are a tiny pittance of an Imperial history that's quite long.

The rise of the AIs has actually nothing to do with slavery in the Imperial fashion, which has a lot more to do with the idea of creating supermen. Then they decide they can up the ante with the supermen, and then they end up with a full-fledged God-Empress Eldritch Abomination after 6,000 years of experimenting with it.

The Empire's rulers have absolutely no desire for Kid Marvelman-style scenes in their cities and when one such scene does happen that's when the Architects of Fear are outlawed. They just keep on doing things due to things like bribery and the difficulty of administering entire planets to root them out. Until their plans Go Horribly Right.

And in any case the Imperial Civil War is by a guy who wants a monarchy because he considers the established diarchy illegitimate due to Imperial dynastic law but it's a Freedman general who is a lot more Ulysses S. Grant than anyone else who finally puts the kibosh on him.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that the Empire is far from a bunch of Mary Sues and in fact they end up really, really buggering the first time they try to fight off an alien invasion, sending troops into a position they couldn't defend against an enemy whose mentality they were entirely unprepared for. The result is that the Imperial force sent is completely annihilated and the Empire spends a few generations under de facto foreign rule of aliens fleeing Lady Death, an immortal kind of Fair Folk who happens to be blond and likes white dresses and is a thinly-disguised expy of a Galadriel from a world where the Elves lost. And who due to immortality became a monster.

And of course the empire also botches what was intended to be a simple repression of the rebellion that happens before the actual stories do, the result turning into 40 years of multi-sided civil war that finally ends after another 50 of small-scale guerrilla warfare by diehards of the losing side.