Now I’m finally finished with this book, I read the Team Ibex translation. While it was interesting, I had multiple question marks after reading. As I now learned from reading TvTropes that this was supposed to be the prologue for a whole series, making me interested in the world was probably the goal. But do we have nowadays any more information regarding some plot points?

  • First, which English translation is considered better in your eyes? I only read this one and while my confusions might stem from that translation, I didn’t exactly like the book well enough to read the other translation to check.

Now to the plot points:

  • What happened to the girls? In TvTropes its said they run away? I never picked up anything like that while reading. For me it was an undisclosed mystery all the time.

  • was there any mention in DE of the total end behind the pale, the Rodionov trench?

  • also how did Rodionov know about all the future stuff? Is it supposed to be like in Asimov’s Foundation: everything is just mathematics in the end and with the correct formula, you can calculate the world’s trajectory?

  • What happened with Jesper leaving Khan? As Jesper is going North, I do not really share Khans assumption that it was too much for Jesper. As prologue of the series it probably was supposed to set up the protagonist trio and then distribute them all on different paths.

  • Are the girls similar to Innocents (with capital I)? Or is there any explanation why they have such a strange connection to the pale that the text directly says that Zigi gained pale related superpowers from their vanishing? And they realized “something is going wrong”? Wrong compared to what?

  • also regarding the Innocents: What exactly is the connection between the Pale and the Innocents? From DE I got more the feeling that they were mystically connected to human thought, but here Saint Ambrosius says human nihilism brought him into being. But at least the people shown in the books weren’t exactly nihilistic. I mean even Ziki didn’t seem to really believe it in my eyes. So to me it read more like a normal “crazy person in a position of absolute power in a nuclear armed theocratic country” instead of the mystical “advances human technology and thought simply by existing” that I remember about Dolores Dei.
    I remember that there was this one fact sheet from the start of DE development that explained the Innocents as beings who receive future thoughts and technologies through the pale. But I’m sure it also said that those were only earlier ideas and they scrapped that. But since DE started development after the book, does it hold true here? So does that mean its a closed loop time travel? People in the future are nihilistic, because SoMeBoDy is nuclear carpet bombing the world while simultaneously the world is getting memory wiped and these thoughts then influence a certain person to start sending out Easter eggs for the whole worldin the first place?

  • And on that topic: why is the genocidal campaign of Ambrosius advancing the Pale? I thought the Pale was Human thought or rather the combined human remembering of the past. By eliminating humans, shouldn’t that instead stop the Pale, since there are less humans who can remember?

So in general: I don’t think my time was wasted reading the book, but I also wouldn’t really recommend it to anybody but hardcore fans.