- to paraphrase Dr. Henry Jones Sr.View original post
It's just... Wow.
I've rather slowing been making my way through listening to the audio books(tending to listen in burst), and while doing so I've found myself paying a lot more attention to all the surprisingly numerous examples of pre-retcon Traveling we see...I can't speak to the contents of the audio books, as having people read books to me at a glacial pace has never been very appealing, but while I am sure that Jordan didn't really have the rules for Traveling codified until tFoH, when he ready to having the main characters do it, he also was very careful not to be specific about how Traveling worked. For example, Rand's earliest ancestor in the Rhuidean columns was going to get to another city by having an Aes Sedai Travel with him, instead of open a gateway for him; but it could also be one of those changes in terminology mentioned in the glossaries about the names of Talents, or else a layman simply referring to all methods of One Power transport as Traveling, including Skimming.
Pre-retcon Taveling. Well, it's basically just bog standard teleportation.
I mean... Just THINK about how different such a thing is to post-retcon's wormhole Gateways.
Post-retcon Traveling... Is just out and out faster then light travel, and an extremely versatile form of it at that.
And suddenly... Everything from "why would the AoL with all their tech have overpopulation issues,
And setting aside the lack of any evidence of continuity, there is also the nature of Traveling and Skimming, both of which rely on certain knowledge of the position from or to which one intends to move. In the Breaking of the World, such knowledge was not at all certain, since the very geography was changing under their feet. What if one of the points of reference involved in "knowing" a place well enough to Travel from, or Skim to, was a mountain range in the background, that suddenly didn't exist? Or what if the location changed, WHILE you were Traveling or Skimming? How many channelers found themselves inside of a mountain or stepping out of a gateway where a plateau used to be, to plunge into a canyon?
While on the flip side, just picture the plots of any of the post-retcon books WITHOUT the ability to move around whole armies easily... Entire PLOT LINES just wouldn't of even of been able to happen. Yet even without them everything would gotten dragged out to hell and back in universe just be pure travel time alone. Well, ether that, or we would of gotten sick the overuse of the Ways.
There is still no real evidence that people Traveled with teleportation in the early books. There is a lot to suggest it, but RJ left himself sufficient wiggle room to argue it away, regardless of our convictions of his sincerity. You couldn't even indict him on the tangible evidence, let alone convict.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*