This feat was achieved numerous times in eight different geographic areas with many different plant varieties, and "Once the advantages of growing these 'new technology' seeds was apparent, wild harvesting (and thus the possibility of domestication) of other equally promising species effectively ended", so to think that this happened independently and with numerous wild species throughout man's history is really stretching credulity. The odds of a beneficial mutation are already astonishingly small; this definitely sounds like another Darwinian "just-so story".
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there is no way for early man to know that existence itself depended on his long-term experimental breeding program. Many groups of people in eight different geographic areas would ALL have had to know this fact. Then, once the plants were domesticated all of the world's people would have had to forget this fact and stop passing it down through oral traditions.
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take a look at the wild rye in Russia; they have been trying for 150 years to make a notable change in the plant and it still has not yet appeared; this is already an entire human generation. I can tell that you have no evidence that a multi-thousand year breeding operation will do any better a job than a 150-year operation.
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Even if early humans were smarter than us (see their Ancient Stone Tech), it is not likely that they would labor at something like this for generations with little reward and succeed in such rapid time; it is implied that the alleles were selected with expert precision despite the inability of early man to examine anything more than the plant's phenotype: "early farmers seem to have selected domestication-gene alleles that are insensitive to genetic background and to the environment. This process would have been slow, unrewarding and difficult to understand, because the effects of gene variants on the plant weren't stable. "

OK, so there are a lot of miracles involved, but that is basically what Darwinian theory demands from its believers: Just believe in the pre-existing freak beneficial mutations (they are just waiting to be activated by a clever breeder), the intelligence of early man (who is globally engaged in long-term experimental biology), add time and luck as "fudge factors" due to the lack of hard evidence and voila! Any trained Darwinist can now EASILY see how humans would have done this without ever remembering that they were smart enough to do so!

"But once sensitive alleles had been replaced with robust ones, breeders would have been able to exert strong selection pressure on plant traits, shaping them much more easily than before, and the pace of domestication would have picked up."

This implies that there was actually a chance that such complex manipulations of nature could be carried out by primitive yeomen in eight geographical areas over 5,000 years. This strains credulity because, in each case, in each area, someone actually had to look at a wild progenitor and imagine what it could become, or should become, or would become. Then they somehow had to ensure that their vision would be carried forward through countless generations that had to remain committed to planting, harvesting, culling and crossbreeding wild plants that [typically] put no food on their tables during their lifetimes, but which might feed their descendants in some remotely distant future.

they somehow had to ensure that their vision would be carried forward through countless generations that had to remain committed to planting, harvesting, culling and crossbreeding wild plants that put no food on their tables...
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Nearly all domesticated plants are believed to have appeared between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, yet in the past 5,000 years, no plants have been domesticated that are nearly as valuable as the dozens that were "created" by the earliest farmers all around the world.
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As they grew, their seeds and grains became large enough to be easily seen and picked up and manipulated by human fingers. Simultaneously...

To domesticate a wild grass like rye or any wild grain or cereal (which was done time and again by our Neolithic forebears), two imposing hurdles must be cleared. These are the problems of "rachises" and "glumes"...

That adjustment was of extremely daunting complexity, perhaps more complex than the transformational process itself...

However it was done, it wasn't by crossbreeding...

The human animal evolved to eat every animal or plant that wasn't actually toxic (and, after simple treatments, some that to greater or lesser degree were). Seeds are a rich store of energy, some have good protein levels, vitamins (especially vitamin E), minerals, and protective phytochemicals. Living as wild animals for the last million years or so, we ate every seed that was worth collecting,  grass seed, legume (bean-like, pea -like, peanut and others), and any other seeds that were sustaining and productive, or big enough to be worth bothering with.
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No reasonable energy source was ignored, and wild seeds were no exception. Indeed, grindstones with adherent plant starch from before 160,000 years ago - when the first recognisably modern humans appear in the fossil record - may have been used to grind grass seeds [ref]. We, of course, ate every non-toxic seed (including tree seeds) present in the environment we had moved into. There are many plants with edible seeds in the various climatic zones of Africa, but relatively few have big enough seeds, or are productive enough, to be worth expending the energy which are nicer to eat, easier to store, and require no preparation.

Accessing the Nutrients in seeds

While grubs, meat, tubers, fish and plant foliage can be eaten raw, all these things are physically easier to eat cooked, or cause intestinal disturbance if they are not cooked. Seeds are no different.
While you 'could' eat whole rice grass seeds (for example) without parching them first, only about 25% of the proteins are able to be digested. Cook the whole seed, and about 65% of the protein is available. Grinding raw rice seeds would probably make more than 25% available, but equally, grinding and cooking would likely improve protein availablity beyond 65%. The cultural evolution of both grinding and cooking seeds brought evolutionary advantage in the form of greater access to protein  - at least, for those tribal groups who had the technology.

Grass seeds, in particular, had to be heat 'parched' anyway, to get rid of the adherent woody 'chaff' covering the seed (later, with domestication, this chaff became easy to remove by beating). So a degree of 'cooking' was more necessary than a choice.

A few seeds have somewhat less protein digestability after cooking, but they are the exception. You would have to cook grass seeds at 200-280°C (392-536°F) to reduce rather than improve, their protein digestibility. Meat protein digestibility, in comparison, decreases when cooking is above only 100°C (212°F).

Seeds contain 'antinutrients' - substances such as saponins, tannins, 'protein splitting enzymes' inhibitors, and phytates. These compounds reduce the body's ability to access the nutrients in seeds. The type, and amount of anti-nutrient varies both with the species of plant, and with the local variety of the species (common beans, Phaseolus vulgaris, for example, have a wide range of  phytic acid and tannin concentrations - with white seeded beans having least tannins-depending on the variety). Some have several different anti-nutrients, some have few, some have relatively a 'lot' of any one anti-nutrient, some have very little.

Most, but not all, antinutrients are destroyed or reduced by cooking. Soaking and leaching are necessary to reduce some antinutrients, particulalry in some varieties of bean and other legumes. Soaking and sprouting seeds also reduces phytates. Soybeans, for example, contain a contain a 'tryptophane inhibiter' that interferes with the absorbtion of the amino acid 'tryptophane'. The inhibitor can be neutralized both by cooking and by sprouting (the sprouted root must be 3 to 4 inches long for this to be largely complete).

A very low percentage of the starches in some seeds 'resist' being digested ( up to 7%  for wheat, and oats and 20% for baked beans) These undigested starches are fermented by the microflora of the colon, producing variable quantities of gas.

Guided by the practices of recent African gatherer-hunters, it seems likely our African ancestors mainly dealt with anti-nutritional factors by roasting the seeds. Sometimes they were soaked as well, either before or after roasting (and grinding). These are classic techniques that we use even today when preparing legumes; although westerners rarely roast any other than peanut seeds, and occasionally soya seeds.
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In parts of Australia, the aboriginal people regularly harvested wild grass seeds (chiefly a wild 'millet', Panicum spp.), and it is likely that given time, they would have domesticated them. Indigenous tribespeople of the grasslands of Southern South America gathered grass seeds for food, and even brought one species of brome grass into cultivation. In Mexico, one of the local 'panic grasses' (Panicum spp., a kind of 'millet') was collected, and ultimately, domesticated. Palaeanthropologists have found 19,000 year old stone mortars for grinding grain show that wild grains were not just parched, but processed, from at least since that time.[ref]
Saharan wild grass harvest There is a lovely cave art picture of women gathering wild grasses in the once productive Sahara region of Africa at the Paleologos site (www.paleologos.com).

Our ancestors probably parched the whole grains on ember-heated stones (this would have burnt off the adherent husks around the seed), and made a dough from the cooked flour (Tibetan people today eat a dough from roasted barley flour mixed with tea and yak butter and formed into a ball - tsampa). Such doughs laid on hot stones or embers would have made the first unleavened 'bread' . Or the roasted flour could perhaps have been mixed with water to make a thin 'porridge'.

...There isn't enough evidence to consider them plausible enough to formulate serious theories around, when compared to the huge amount of hard biological and historical evidence. Even discussing them in a "thought experiment" way is kind of pointless IMO...
...

I might consider reading some more into this if any good evidence arises.

At the end of the last Ice Age, people in many spots around the globe shifted from hunting animals and gathering fruits and tubers to cultivating livestock and plants.

It seems so straightforward and yet the more scientists learn, the more complex the story becomes. Recently, geneticists and archeologists working on domestication compared notes and up popped a question of timing. Did domesticating a plant typically take a few hundred or many thousands of years?
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finding these alleles in the first place must have been difficult, Olsen said. Only a subset of the genes in the wild population would have reliably produced a favored trait regardless of the crop variety into which they were bred and regardless of where that crop was grown. So the early stages of domestication might have been beset by setbacks and incomprehensible failures that might help explain the lag in the archeological record.

"What we are learning suggests there's a whole lot of diversity out there in wild relatives of crop plants or even in landraces, varieties of plants and animals that are highly adapted to local conditions," Olsen said, "that wasn't tapped during the domestication process."
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Farmers seem to have selected for plant variants that were insensitive to epistatic and environmental interactions.
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In the limited number of examples at their disposal, the scientists found it to be generally true that that domesticated alleles were less sensitive to genetic background than wild alleles. The domestication genes, in other words, tended to be ones that would produce the same result even if they were introduced into a different crop variety.

Unlike companion-animal breeders, early farmers seem to have selected domestication-gene alleles that are insensitive to genetic background and to the environment. This process would have been slow, unrewarding and difficult to understand, because the effects of gene variants on the plant weren't stable. But once sensitive alleles had been replaced with robust ones, breeders would have been able to exert strong selection pressure on plant traits, shaping them much more easily than before, and the pace of domestication would have picked up.

The first thing to know is that there is nothing simple about abstractions.

(Study of holy scripture) brings one to vigilance, vigilance bring one to alacrity, alacrity brings one to cleanliness, cleanliness brings one to abstinence, abstinence brings one to purity, purity brings one to piety, piety brings one to humility, humility brings one to fear of sin, fear of sin brings one to holiness, holiness brings one to Divine inspiration, Divine inspiration brings one to the resurrection of the dead.

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3. The article make more assumptions, that what it calls "directed crossbreeding" is an incredibly technical process, that couldn't have been achieved by "primitive barbarians". In fact, this crossbreeding would have almost certainly started in the form of artificial selection/selective breeding, and is actually a very simple and easy concept to observe. I have no doubt that primitive humans that were capable of planting crops could have started selective breeding within a few generations. If a beneficial mutation occurred in a plant (higher yield/larger fruit etc) then this knowledge could have been applied straight away to exploit the mutation, creating huge amounts of crops even within a single human generation.

Another relevant theory (which I think you touch on in your post) is the population explosion and more sophisticated behaviour in humans that occurred about 50,000 years ago. Is it not much more plausible that this increase in population, intelligence and social sophistication allowed humans to start experimenting with plants, noting which ones grew well in certain conditions etc? There is strong evidence for their hunting techniques improving at this time, and if we look at some ancient tribes, they have incredibly specific knowledge about the plants and animals that inhabit their environment.

So to sum up, although your theory is certainly an interesting one, I don't believe there is anywhere near enough evidence for it. You are showing strong signs of confirmation bias, trying to fit selective evidence and theories into what I suspect is some sort of religious/supernatural worldview.

in 1837 the Botanical Garden in St Petersburg, Russia, began concerted attempts to cultivate wild rye into a new form of domestication. They are still trying, because their rye has lost none of its wild traits, especially the fragility of its stalk and its small grain. Therein lies the most embarrassing conundrum botanists face.

Question, does an object standing still, for all practical purposes, have greater degrees of freedom than an object in motion?

CoinCube don't lose your math objectivity. You'll never be able to prove God exists. It will always be a tautology. But don't worry because our existence is also a tautology Even the speed-of-light is what ever we think it is, totally arbitrary figment of our measurement precision. I will blog on this if I have time.

Whomever or Whatever made all this universe is still the question. And with that question, no answers are really found in this "alternative" thread. Only more questions.

...

So now my question is this: how can we communicate with the angelic beings? What language do they use in the world of the spirit? And what about the teachings that come from those who claim to give voice to these speakers? Is there any one who is a valid speaker for the angels?

Before Adam sinned, he was on a much higher level than contemporary man. In that state, man was on a very lofty level, fit for a high degree of eternal excellence. If he had not sinned, man would simply have been able to elevate and perfect himself, step by step.

He would then give birth to future generations while still in that state of excellence. Their number would be accurately determined by God's wisdom, depending on how those enjoying his good should best be perfected. All these future generation would have shared this good with Adam.

God had also determined and decreed that all these generations would have been born of Adam should exist on various determined levels. Some generations would be primary, while others would be secondary, like roots and branches. Later generations would stem from the earlier ones [and share their characteristics], like branches stemming from a tree. The number of trees and branches, however, was determined from the very beginning with the utmost precision.

When Adam sinned, he fell from his original high level, and brought upon himself a great degree of darkness and insensitivity. Mankind in general also fell from its original height, and remained on a degraded level where it was not at all worthy of the eternal high degree of excellence originally destined for it.

Nature is amoral. Nature knows nothing of good and evil. In nature there is one rule—survival of the fittest. There is no right, only might. If a creature is weak, kill it. Only human beings could have moral rules such as, "If it is weak, protect it." Only human beings can feel themselves ethically obligated to strangers.
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Nature allows you to act naturally, i.e., do only what you want you to do, without moral restraints; God does not. Nature lets you act naturally - and it is as natural to kill, rape, and enslave as it is to love.
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One of the vital elements in the ethical monotheist revolution was its repudiation of nature as god. The evolution of civilization and morality have depended in large part on desanctifying nature.
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Civilizations that equated gods with nature—a characteristic of all primitive societies—or that worshipped nature did not evolve.
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Words cannot convey the magnitude of the change wrought by the Bible's introduction into the world of a God who rules the universe morally.

According to the genetic and paleontological record, we only started to leave Africa between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. What set this in motion is uncertain, but we think it has something to do with major climatic shifts that were happening around that time—a sudden cooling in the Earth’s climate driven by the onset of one of the worst parts of the last Ice Age. This cold snap would have made life difficult for our African ancestors, and the genetic evidence points to a sharp reduction in population size around this time. In fact, the human population likely dropped to fewer than 10,000. We were holding on by a thread.

The authors found genetic evidence for a surge in human population size about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This period, just after humans first set foot outside Africa, is of great interest to archaeologists because it coincides with a dramatic increase in the sophistication of human behavior. People began crafting tools from bone, burying their dead and fashioning clothing to keep themselves warm in cool climates. They developed complex hunting techniques, and created great works of art in the form of cave paintings and jewelery.

The archaeological record also shows that during this time, humans began hunting more dangerous prey and more easily exploiting small game like rabbits and birds. They traveled farther than they had before, perhaps due to the growth of long-distance trade routes – the first of their kind. Jared Diamond, author of The Third Chimpanzee, calls this period “The Great Leap Forward,” when humans burst forth culturally – finally separating themselves from their evolutionary cousins.
The exact cause for these changes in human behavior may never be known. Some believe a simple genetic mutation or that the evolution of language could have sparked such a dramatic change. But what we do know now, thanks to this new genetic research, is that like the (much later) invention of agriculture this explosion of innovation was accompanied by population growth.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

(Yet another personal insult and attack like all of his other posts)

Under a veil of protecting people from abuse by authoritarian regimes and “online trolls,” Jigsaw founder and president Jared Cohen is releasing a set of tools known as ‘Conversation AI.’

“I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight… [we will] do everything we can to level the playing field,” said Cohen. Jigsaw argues that online trolls bully people into self-censoring their views, and that online speech must be moderated to ensure that nobody is silenced.

Conversation AI will use machine-learning techniques to pick up on “harassment” and “abuse” faster than any human moderator possibly can. According to Google, the filter has a 92% success rate at detecting so-called “abusive” messages in concurrence with a panel of humans, producing a false-positive only 10% of the time.

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters

We live underneath an artificial steel dome and only the severely brainwashed person who believes we're on the surface of a spinning ball hurtling through a vacuum thinks there's no creator.

Aw, be patient. These flat earth people are still people. They need to have a place to express themselves just like everybody else. When we get tired enough of them, we will place them on REAL ignore, and not simply lie about it like they do. I just hope they don't get so upset about it, when it happens, that they go off and commit suicide because nobody is even looking at them.

I mean, even flat earth people have to feel a little important about themselves in life.

r0ach you are violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is explained in my blog.

You could be correct on a short-term horizon (and on human scale) but in the large scheme of things, it is impossible for you to be correct.

On the specifics, I believe there is more than abundant energy in the universe and mankind is clever enough to extract it.

And the decentralization of information and thus knowledge production is already revolutionizing our world. This will accelerate.

I am optimistic. Yeah we'll see the Western socialism collapse, which is good change. Along the way, we will see some negative things happen, such as potentially war, etc..

The Western world has had a long period of relative peace and affluence. Cycles dictate that must change. I don't view the future as continuous decline, rather as a cycle of up and down. Yet technology never stops improving our quality of life overall.

Justice decreed that neither man nor the world will ever be able to rise to perfection while still in their current fallen state. Because they remain in this spoiled, non-ideal condition, and evil in the meantime has increased, both must go through a stage of destruction before either can arrive at perfection.

Man must therefore die, and everything else that was corrupted with him also must perish. The soul cannot purify the body until the body dies and deteriorates and a new structure is composed, that the soul can enter and purify. The entire world must likewise be destroyed and cease to exist in its present form, and it must then be renewed in a new state worthy of perfection.

It was therefore decreed that man should die and then be brought back to life. This is the concept of the Resurrection of the Dead. The entire world must similarly be destroyed... for one thousand years it will be desolate. At the end of this thousand years, God will again renew His world.

The true time and place of reward will therefore be after the resurrection in this renewed world. Man will then enjoy his reward with both body and soul. The body will be purified by the soul, and will therefore also be in a proper state to enjoy that good.

Since it has been decreed that man must die, body and soul must remain separated until the time comes for them to be reunited. During this period of separation, an appropriate place must exist for each of the two separate parts. The body thus returns to its element, decomposing and losing its form... When the soul is recombined with the body after the resurrection, however, it will no longer be bound or restricted and will enter the body with all its brilliance and strength. The body will then experience a great enlightenment, and will not have to develop gradually as a child now does.

We are well aware of physical things, and their natural properties and laws are well known. Spiritual concepts, on the other hand, are outside our realm of experience, and therefore cannot be adequately described...

One of these fundamentals is that everything in the physical world has a counterpart among the transcendental Forces. Every entity and process in the physical world is linked to these Forces... These Forces are therefore the roots of all physical things, and everything in the physical world is a branch and result of these Forces. The physical and the spiritual are thus bound together like links in a chain...

The existence and state of being of the physical universe thus emanate from these highest Forces and are dependent upon them. Whatever exists in the physical world is a result of something that takes place among these Forces. This is true of both what existed in the beginning and what transpires with the passage of time.

These Forces were the first things created, and they were arranged in various systems and placed in different domains. Everything that came about later was a result of this, following rules willed by God, linking these Forces to the physical world. Everything that happens in the past or present thus has its origin in processes taking place between these Forces.

The existence, state, pattern, and every other quality that exists among these Forces are a result of what is relevant to them by virtue of their essential nature. The existence, state, arrangement, and other phenomena involving physical things in turn depend on what is transmitted and reflected to them by these Forces, following the essential nature of these physical entities.

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When we put all those equations together, magically the correct equation for the gravitational force is achieved, although that equation was originally derived from Newton's laws which have no concept of entropy or microstates of the bodies in consideration. Verlinde's discovery was a major revelation for Physics.

What I want to add is the insight that gravity emerges from the probability that the microstates of relative bodies of mass can't avoid dispersing some energy from the one with the higher energy (mass) to the one with less. As the bodies move closer to each other, the equations dictate the force increases, and this is because the number of equiprobably microstates is decreasing as the surface area of the imaginary sphere decreases, so relative acceleration between the two bodies must increase so as to maintain the rate of energy dispersion. Or in other words, as the bodies move closer to each other, the change in the relative entropies decreases, so the acceleration (and force) increase to compensate since the relative energy (mass) has not changed.

So the upper bound for information content (Shannon entropy) of that system of two relative bodies is directly involved in physics of the acceleration of relative bodies due to the gravitational force. So intangible information content which is a dimensionless quantity, is projected into a dimensional structure in the physical world and thus interacts with energy and forces. This is profound because it seems to hint that information content is not orthogonal to our physical world.

Gravity is explained as an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton’s law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle leads us to conclude that it is actually this law of inertia whose origin is entropic.

I wanted to share with you my all time favorite book by an author you may have never heard of. As a fan of both Science Fiction and Fantasy I have read many many books everything from the classics of Tolkien and Asimov to modern and mostly inferior works. Having reached an age where the wonders of youthful imagination have slightly faded I did not expect to ever find a book that would displace the favorites of my youth. I was wrong. Other reviews have done this book far more justice then I can ever do so I will quote some of their words below.

https://www.amazon.com/Awake-Night-Land-John-Wright/dp/9527065224/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

   




AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is an epic collection of four of John C. Wright's brilliant forays into the dark fantasy world of William Hope Hodgson's 1912 novel, The Night Land. Part novel, part anthology, the book consists of four related novellas, "Awake in the Night", "The Cry of the Night-Hound", "Silence of the Night", and "The Last of All Suns", which collectively tell the haunting tale of the Last Redoubt of Man and the end of the human race. Widely considered to be the finest tribute to Hodgson ever written, the first novella, "Awake in the Night", was previously published in 2004 in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection. AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND marks the first time all four novellas have been gathered into a single volume. John C. Wright has been described by reviewers as one of the most important and audacious authors in science fiction today. In a recent poll of more than 1,000 science fiction readers, he was chosen as the sixth-greatest living science fiction writer.

Moments ago I finished Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright.

As I sit to give you my thoughts on it... the first thing that comes to mind is a question. How does one review... or critique... something like this? I am unfit.

One does not critique the great works of literature. One appreciates them. You define good and bad by them. Good and bad do not apply to them.

And so... it is with quivering hand that I must Awake in the Night Land in the most cherished of bookcases... where it will stand. Not with the merely great. Not with Zelazny or Heinlein. No. It rests with the masters that tower over the merely great. It shall stand with Tolstoy.... with Faulkner... Defoe... Melville.

A few men have great things to say. A few great men say things beautifully.

Cherish the tiny few who say a great thing in a beautiful way.

John C Wright is one such man. Awake in the Night Land is one of the finest books of any type in any genre I have ever read. It is Moby Dick. It is Paradise Lost. It is Crime and Punishment.

This is not hyperbole. Great books challenge you. They speak to the spark in your soul. One may improve himself... by merely reading them.

Go.

Go and read. Go and appreciate.

I have written a number of books. Never once have I said to you, my readers, "you must read this book". That is because I have never written a book like this one. There are a very small number of books of which I would say "you must read this book": The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Watership Down by Richard Adams.

There were also others that came close, books that I enjoyed very much indeed, but did not quite justify the assertion. Embassytown by China Mieville. Cryptonomicon and Anathem by Neal Stephenson. A Game of Thrones by George Martin. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Dune by Frank Herbert.

I will tell you now that if you appreciate excellent books, then you must read this one. I cannot imagine you will regret it.

I read this book a month ago. My intent was to review it immediately but I found that I couldn't. I purchased it based on the reviews of other readers and, for all that it impressed me, I couldn't concur with them. I agreed with the components; darkness, heroism, fatalism, valour, pride, corruption in a landscape of inimical intent toward all that is human. But there was something that bothered me, something that was missing in the descriptions.

The four tales develop the theme through the lives of four people who confront this horror, each in their own way, for their own motivations, and with different ends. The stories cover aeons of time, linked by the refusal of the protagonists to submit to the certainty of failure forseen by their situation and prophets.

Finally, it struck me. I had been fooled. Completely. In the heart of one of the darkest and most nihilistic narratives that I have ever read was a love story. A twisted ribbon of love between man and woman, brother and sister, father and son, generation by generation, through eternity.

Congratulations Mr.Wright, you made this hard old bastard weep.