The thing I appreciate most about the locked tomb series is that its doing something that most current media has given up on: trusting the audience to pay attention. There is nothing simple about this book, but Muir is very intentional with the parts she explicitly explains. Enough is left for the readers to connect and conclude for themselves. I appreciated being slightly confused the entire time reading Nona. It felt good to actually need to think critically about what I was consuming.
The contrast between Nona the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth makes me so emotional. The only reason the horror of Nona's existence is hidden behind a weil of whimsy and wonder is because she is loved. They take care of her not only to further their plans but also to make sure she is okay and happy. She is different but they don't treat that as a problem, the plot is not driven by how vulnerable and (compared to other characters) "useless" Nona is, she drives the plot with curiosity and her experiences.
In Harrow the Ninth Harrow was more capable than Nona but the circumstances were worse. She was suffering and nobody helped. There was no understanding from god or the older lyctors, nobody beside Ianthe tried to comfort a sleep deprived schizophrenic girl who was so riddled with grief she could not graps that she resorted to trying to murder somebody with soup.
I sometimes wonder what would've happened if Harrow joined Coronabeth and Camilla on that secluded planet, or if Nona fell into the Hands of John. I think Camilla would've tried to help Harrow and she would've understood and comforted her the best she could. And I know that John Gaius would've put Nona in a cell.
I think often about the heavy irony of John laughing at Wake's name and mocking BOE's naming systems. BOE are trying to preserve lost Earth culture, but clueless of context, their fragmented merging of high and low culture comes across as silly to John (and us. But it's a noble attempt to preserve everything, even the stuff that wouldn't necessarily seem 'worth' saving. But what does John rename his friends? Pyrrha and Cassiopeia and Ulysses and Augustine. He also names almost everything after Earth culture, but it's literary/religious/historical 'high' culture. BOE is scrabbling to save everything possible, but John has the privilege of context and memory, and so he picks and chooses what's 'worthy' of being used or shared. Low culture is reserved for his little jokes with himself— though honestly, a lot of his references to earth culture full stop seem to be inside jokes at the expense of others. I doubt Cassiopeia knew she was named after the infamously vain ancient queen, for example. John also quotes things at people without explaining what he means, like when he quotes Shakespeare and Hans Christian Andersen at Harrow; he's not really sharing it, he's mostly using it to isolate the other person in the conversation, or make himself seem unknowable and superior. It's honestly very telling that when given the choice John will name most things biblically or classically. It does partially feel like he's desperately scraping to preserve something of his childhood and the home he destroyed (especially with the renaming of Gideon to the Māori translation Kiriona, but... well, he literally renamed her and made her into a walking corpse teenage soldier so :/), but when you look at how he deploys earth culture on the whole, it usually becomes weird and imperialistic and weaponised. He's not really preserving lost art, he's selectively using it for his own agenda, and he's often using the two biggest things that were ever co-opted by conservatives and imperialists, the classical world and biblical convention.
reading new books is so hard because like. i know not every sentence can be "memory hit harrowhark nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall."
but a lot of them aren't even trying.
Every once in a while I think about what it would've been like for Harrow to witness Nona and oh my god. Big smiles and inquisitive eyes, long hair braided gently by loved ones, silly tshirts and scruffy pants covered in dog hair. The small hands that once held a noose and had to reanimate her own parents' corpses now get gently squeezed upon request. Everything she was never allowed to be and never wanted to be while simultaneously being the only version of that body to experience unconditional love and gentleness and kindness. She did everything right, everything the Ninth House wanted and yet those 6 months were the closest she's ever been to happiness and she (presumably) didn't even get to experience them.
I think it would fuck her up just a lil bit.
Not to be the unhinged theorist in the Locked Tomb fandom but the Resurrection Beasts and Alecto have some peculiar themes that just tie too perfectly into radiation.
Like the blue light with Varun. Because if theres a real world example of a haunting blue light you never want to see in person ever, it's this:
Also, Nona does not want and probably can't really eat, which is both a running gag but also one of the first sympthoms after somebody gets radiation poisoning. And at the end of the book, her condition deteriorates.
And even from a narrative point of view: John Gaius used to be a scientist. He wanted to save everyone. He also kinda took the soul of the earth. He embodies powers that, if kept in check, can help many but they can also spell untold destruction. It just works. The resurrection beasts and their rampage basically being the equivalent of a melting reactor would mean it is still John's fault and it fucking is so I will just keep believing it.
Mercy describes Varun as "blue like Loveday's eyes", and Gideon compares Cytherea's (aka Loveday's) eyes to "electromagnetic radiation" specifically.
And there are debatably implications they were working with radiation in the first place for the cryo project! From the sound of everything combined, probably testing that the frozen people shipped off to Tau Ceti would be good to survive the radiation of space, and they'd gotten it up to an estimated 92% chance of success without significant lasting damage for the average person, but to get to those numbers, they'd wound up with a whole mess of very irradiated corpses. Which was why they were going to have so much trouble disposing of them, and when John talks about just burying them he sarcastically mutters "you would've loved that", and why the general population was so freaked out by how Scary it sounded, and why John got blacklisted from a lot of shit (despite having been the one to insist on clearance from Asia-Pacific Environmental!). He describes the latter specifically as "I was irradiated." And we do know how Muir loves layered meanings, especially through John!
And I mean. Necromancy in general is fossil fuels 2.0, so making the RBs nuclear feels right. And!! There's my recent theory that the whole solar system is A SYSTEM, effectively like the sun as a brain and the planets as organs for one big body, with all of them innately connected, but with or without that take, we know at minimum there's a lot of sun association with John and Alecto. So there's nuclear fusion too!
Someone in the comments said something about fusion and fision. I think there are parallels between that and the idea of thanergy/thalergy. The violent removal of a soul from its body always produces a revenant. The violent splitting of two parts of a whole generates vast amounts of energy. Only the nine houses planets produce death energy. The planets that were violently split into two parts.
Oh god, this connects SO many dots in my own terrifying Megatheorum. I won't even fit this in one reblog, because this is taking forever to write - but I think it's worth it.
On Tor's website, TLT is listed as Scifi/Fantasy. However, when forced to choose, Tor picks Scifi above all. This is HUGE, because even with all the necromancy and fantasy elements of The Locked Tomb, the publisher looked at the series and said "No, this is scifi." Ergo: the "magical" elements must have a basis in science.
Now, spiritual/religious elements (souls etc) can exist alongside science without much issue. But if you're manipulating physical objects in a real-world environment, you have to explain it in a way that could conceivably track with scientific theory as it functions in the real world. You can extrapolate from there.
So. In GtN, we enter a world of fantasy tropes and Regency-era hand wringing about social morés.... but we also see Palamedes tear his hair out about dating Canaan; how nothing seems to fit a reasonable timeline. In real life, scientists use radiometric dating in geology & archeology to determine the age of objects. (also, do necromantic (or irradiated) interactions with objects impart additional radiation? I don't know!!)
TLDR; You can tear the soul out of a planet, but the actual tearing process needs to make enough sense to pass muster in the Scifi world. Nuclear fusion is a great candidate, as mentioned by @oh-jod-dammit and @championofdnd and is supported by the text ("the soul was like a tiny atom bomb"). God, it's right there.
This, of course, raises some questions.
If necromancy is related to radiation, what power does Alecto/Earth impart to John that allows him control of (assumingly) irradiated corpses? and WHY? What about him was so fucking special? Sure, he was trying to get humans off Earth for its own sake, presumably by testing radiation shielding for long-range space flight. (aka the problem with pregnancy is you have to worry about irradiation for fetuses or reproductive organs. probably.)
But how is John a better ally than an eco-warrior or biologist or any number of scientists that were presumably trying to save the Earth? Alecto (allegedly) said she chose him. How did he bring himself to her attention? If we keep following this logic, how did radiation connect them?
I'm tired. Let's review some facts from both sides.
.Electromagnetic Radiation is produced by stars and other celestial bodies.
.Planets, people, and stars emit different types of radiation.
.Planets and people are proven to have souls, which can be removed from the body by force.
.Do stars have souls?? The sun?? The Moon in the Fucking Sky??? (where is the Moon, btw??)
.Does radiation serve as a connection to a different dimension? Are radio waves a bridge to The River? Did John tear a hole in spacetime and make some kind of wormhole?
"you were the noise that was everywhere" thats RADIO WAVES. tamsyn muir I will GET YOU
This is why Wake is wearing a Haz suit in the River Bubble, btw. She only started experiencing negative effects when the suit was punctured. (right?). It's why The Eggs All Died. It's why flipped planets slowly mutate. RADIATION. I love y'all.
The stupid First House robes? They're a fucking PRISM. Electromagnetic Radiation is visible light!! GODDAMN!!!
And here's where I leave this for a breather. My original document got corrupted somehow. probably the radiation :(
Okay @oh-jod-dammit brought up some REALLY interesting things in the comments that set my brain on fire
On Wake:
Ya gotta ask - Why was Wake wearing the Haz suit before she died? On the Ninth, her body is found wearing a life support suit as an outer layer, but that's different. This suggests she was possibly wearing the Haz suit underneath - to protect against what?
Also, good catch with Jod being chosen/unchosen! I think it's more like -
- Jod is very close to the electromagnetic spectrum through his work with irradiated corpses
- So close that he, a living person, is able to “make waves” in the EM field - aka influence physical reactions, like moving/manipulating bodies.
- This work puts him closer to whatever plane the souls reside in (The River) and thereby Alecto.
That's what brings John (unknowingly) to her attention; he *was* chosen by her (“I picked you to change, and this is how you repay me?”) BUT she had no idea he would force a connection through the opening made by the death of “the nun” (which, btw: pre-resurrection, Christabel is never given a first letter like M– or A– ; only “The nun” or “M– ‘s nun”).
If John had stopped at physical manipulation - kept curing cancer, found a way to heal the earth using EM waves, etc, he never would have broken through. But by cracking the “atom bomb” of a soul that was the “missing link,” John forced a door to open between the physical plane and The River/astral plane. He may have pushed a ton of EM waves/radiation through the hole while cycling the power back through himself (?)
"I was looking at the code, I knew why I hadn't been able to see anything.” Radio waves would cause a lot of interference, yeah?
Random additional thoughts:
- Wherefore the missing people? Well, per John, he “snapped up” a large percentage of humanity before the nuclear warheads hit, although he phrases it as a kindness. I don't know if that means he claims some kind of ownership over those souls. This is a wobbly guess from me.
- The reason the Houses don't have much in the way of technology is because the radiation renders it null. Otherwise they'd definitely have SOMETHING after 10,000 years. You can't just kill everyone who ever had the idea for an internet.
- Again, WHERE IS THE MOON. We see no references to it at all.
Y'all are bringing up some great points, keep 'em coming! My original Megatheorum included most of this, but I had no scientific explanation that fit the clues. So far Electromagnetic Radiation is the *best* fit I've found that explains Tor's Scifi designation while matching the text provided.
FYI, my knowledge of EMR is based in astronomy, one of my finest hyperfixations. However I have no schooling in such and am going largely by Wikipedia articles and sheer determination.
I’ve seen a tiktok lately talking about Jesus being two different people: Jesus Christ, the mythical figure, and Yeshua, the man who may have inspired that figure, and I couldn’t help but think about how this applies to Gideon.
She, as this twisted version of the son of God, follows a similar dychotomy. We meet Gideon Nav, a reluctant servant of the Ninth House, with apparently nothing special about her except for being the only competent person available to be Harrow’s cavalier. Then, when we meet her again in Nona the Ninth, she isn’t that person anymore. She has been resurrected as Kiriona Gaia, God’s daughter.
When she first appears we barely see the Gideon we know. We don’t know what her resurrection took from her, and even at the end of the book, when we perceive a glimpse of the old Gideon, she still feels like a different person. She was transitioned from normal person to mythical figure but instead of being turned into this ideal good-natured godsent woman, she turned more bitter and, as Nona said, the saddest girl in the whole entire world.