ramtops

How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it. [chapter 1]

The Moor's Account tells the story of 'Estebanico', a Moroccan slave who was among the four survivors of the 600-strong Narváez expedition, an expedition to the so-called New World in 1527. 'Estebanico' is the name forced, by the Spanish, upon a trader from Azemmour, Mustafa ibn Muhommad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, after he sells himself into slavery to save his family from poverty and starvation. And the 'New World' is neither unknown nor uninhabited.

"... I thought you'd be on the side of law and order."
"No, young man," said Bishop Beartongue, despite being several centuries his junior. "I am on the side of justice. If we're lucky, the two run in parallel. If they don't, we bend the law to attain justice, not the other way around." [loc. 4092]

Edmund leaves the Temple of the Many-Armed God with a mule named Sweetheart, a selection of rare books and an ancient artifact that he's been tasked with transporting to an academic in Archen's Glory. He has no intention of returning to the temple, with its misogynist priests and antiquated ways. But before he has time to make plans, bandits happen( Read more... )

In our world, matter that was living decomposes -- but not always. If decomposition was interrupted, a fossil forms instead... Here, a fossil is like a seed. [loc. 2988]

It's 2018, and Laurel is working as a dishwasher in Antarctica, mourning the death of her son, separated from her husband Eli -- and drawn to the Arc, an anomalous phenomenon a few miles from McMurdo Base, that manifests as an arch of light. Laurel was formerly a mycologist, and she has a scientific outlook: but when she dreams about the Arc, she can't help feeling that her dream has given her an insight. And then Eli, a renowned physicist, shows up at McMurdo. He believes that the Arc might help him prove his theory of the universe, a theory that proposes an 'antiuniverse' where 'entropy reverses on a massive scale' and time itself moves in the opposite direction.