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We have some small discussions about the Source, but most of that has been connected to discussions of Norman and the journey. I thought it would be a good thing to add a thread dedicated to the Source. Any thoughts?

I wondered what the Source would do once everyone was dead.

I kind of envisioned it being like Lavos from the game Chrono Trigger...has anyone else played that?

Don't know the game reference, can you give us a quicky description, Brooke?

I wondered the same thing about what would happen when everyone was gone. Is the Source mobile? Would it fold up on itself? Would it remain unchanged? I mean, the bodies didn't seem to be getting absorbed into the Source. The pit was almost like a landfill.

Lavos fell from the sky and burrowed into the earth, I think to feed off the life on the planet, and then once it was done, it would travel to another planet and do the same thing.

ETA: I realize now that I was definitely projecting the Chrono Trigger villain onto the Source. Now I'm wondering what people who haven't played the game thought of the Source. Alien invader probably didn't rank high on their list of "Possible things the Source is."

I spent so long thinking that the Source was a myth when reading the book that I was pretty shocked when it became tangible, and at that point I was thinking more about it as a spiritual manifestation than a physical, alien one. But I remember vaguely thinking about some sort of alien Source at one point.

Did you ever think the Source was nothing, Brooke?

I always figured it was something. It wasn't until the end when Norman went down the hole that I started thinking about Lavos - it was the underground bit that really did it for me.

Up until that point, I was expecting it to be something manmade. I was half-expecting to find out that the doctor in Seattle was actually making the Despair rather than trying to cure it.

Brooke wrote: "Up until that point, I was expecting it to be something manmade. I was half-expecting to find out that the doctor in Seattle was actually making the Despair rather than trying to cure it...."

That had crossed my mind as well. I was glad it wasn't that, actually. It would have felt a little too much like a James Bond villain, only wildly successful.

I kinda imagined that it didnt have the "power" to physically manifest itself and get rid of people, but that once everyone was gone, it would start up a new civilization of beings/entities. I figured it to be something alien/supernatural (not necessarily aliens from Venus or something goofy, but alien in the true sense of the word)

There was a moment or two when I was taken back to A Fire Upon the Deep, the book from two months ago, and it kind of reminded me of the Blight. I imagine that is "alien" of the sort you were thinking of Ubik. There was talk with Vinge's book that we didn't get enough of the Blight, that we needed more of the Blight, and I always thought that less was more in that case. Do you think that we needed more time with the Source? Or was the simple impression that we got all that we needed?

Im really undecided on that. I just know I loved the visual feel of the end where he is completely in the dark and stepping on squishy rotten bodies. Maybe the ground devours them. Maybe the source is under the Earth's surface and if we only dug a hole big enough we could find it and it would emanate the desire to commit suicide...

Ubik wrote: "I loved the visual feel of the end where he is completely in the dark and stepping on squishy rotten bodies. Maybe the ground devours them. Maybe the source..."

I loved the squishy bodies too. I could really feel that and it made me squirm. Nasty.