The Ritual of Tellann: Immortality and Its Refusal in Steven Erikson’s 'Malazan Book of the Fallen'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Tolkien presents his immortal people, the Elves, as naturally long-lived paragons of culture and community, Canadian fantasy author Steven Erikson follows a different approach to immortality in his Malazan Book of the Fallen (1999–2010), in which he conceptualizes his T’lan Imass as teleologically rather than naturally immortal, becoming so at the cost of social cohesion but supposedly for the benefit of others. Constructing a Nietzschean-Adlerian framework for power relations, this paper examines the narrative rhetoric Erikson employs to communicate his vision of the challenges their teleological immortality entails for the T’lan Imass in a world reluctant to buy into their supposedly altruistic motivation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".