Books Read

[dsrtao]

36. Knife Children, Lois McMaster Bujold.  A novella in the Sharing Knife universe, which is a pretty strange fantasy land that suffered a magical apocalypse at least a thousand years ago and I have no idea how they managed to figure out a way to kill Malices* by trial and error before all humans went extinct.  But the characters are mostly interesting people and their troubles are understandable.

*A Malice is a magic-eater with a multi-stage life. When young it is effectively a Grog, a sessile eater that controls animal life around it. Then it gets to reshape animals, including humans, into "mudman" servants. Then it gets up and starts to expand its range.

How do you kill a thing like that? You need a knife made from the bone of someone who has performed a particular (voluntary) ritual, and then the bone knife is used to kill another such someone (which allows their bones to be turned into knives) and then you can kill a Malice with it. Otherwise, they appear to be immortal. How does that get started?

Comments

[alexxkay]

I haven't read these, but I can throw out a hypothesis. Desperate people tried crazy things, and stumbled upon something that worked -- but actually, 50% or so of the complex procedure is unnecessary.

[Cf _How To Invent Everything_, which includes many examples of real-world tech that can be done in a very simple way, but was done for centuries in a more complicated one because people had a system that worked, and mostly stopped experimenting.]

[squirrelitude]

That seems about right. Also, once you *have* your procedure that involves killing two people, how much more experimentation are you willing to do? :-) Expensive procedures that work are expensive, but they work.

I should read How To Invent Everything, because I've been fascinated for a while with how tech becomes both more and less complicated over time.