David Udell comments on David Udell’s Shortform

David Udell 20 Jun 2022 13:45 UTC
2 points
Minor spoilers for planecrash (Book 1) and the dath-ilani-verse generally.
When people write novels about aliens attacking dath ilan and trying to kill all humans everywhere, the most common rationale for why they’d do that is that they want our resources and don’t otherwise care who’s using them, but, if you want the aliens to have a sympathetic reason, the most common reason is that they’re worried a human might break an oath again at some point, or spawn the kind of society that betrays the alien hypercivilization in the future.
--Eliezer, planecrash
- David Udell 12 Jul 2022 16:00 UTC
  3 points
  Parent
  Minor spoilers for planecrash (Book 3).
  “What actually happens if you break a real [dath ilani] oath?”
  “There’s only one copy of the real oath. Anytime that anybody anywhere breaks it, people over literally all of Reality, the greater Everywhere, everything that there is, become a little less able to trust it.”
  “Also, in Golarion terms, Asmodeus is probably now really really really pissed at you, and requests the entire country of Cheliax to drop whatever else it’s doing and turn you into a statue so you can’t ever do it again including in an afterlife. Though that part is just a guess.”
  …
  “What do they do to people who break oaths in dath ilan?”
  “I don’t seem to know, now that you ask that. I know that low-ranked Keepers have sworn thirteen million oaths over the last forty years, and broken twenty-three of those, and that most but not all of those cases were due to insanity. I don’t know what happened to them, and don’t see a simple way of deducing what the ethical theory of that would be. But it would not involve threats, punishments, attempts to scare anybody off doing it again. If what happens to them is that they get put directly into cryonic suspension so they can’t do it again and eventually the Future decides what to do with them, maybe we wouldn’t be told about that, exactly so that it didn’t sound like a threat.”
  “The Abaddon thing—is sort of sad, you know? People shouldn’t think that’s needed. Shouldn’t think that’s how oaths work.”
  --planecrash (Book 3)