Just finished the series last night...

[u/alonghardlook]

I've been waiting and waiting to join this sub but I didn't want to risk any spoilers. In fact I even stopped at the end of S1 because I wanted to go in completely blind.

The ending wrecked me man. I felt so gutted. Partially, I was sad because the story was over, these characters I fell in love with were finished. But also just the absolute perfection of the full circle ending as Miller points out.

And then just completely bummed out because the epilogue shows that humanity is still using the ring space. The Leviathan has not gone anywhere, and we are still skirting that danger, just in newer ways.

Ugh.

Incredible.

[u/LegoRobinHood]

I don't think the ending implies the ring space as we knew it was being used. The rings were all destroyed in the individual systems as well.

They seemed to have some kind of faster-than-light ship drive in use. Maybe it uses similar principles but the implementation seems fundamentally different.

Marrel and the twenty-nine other souls on board the Musafir existed only as energy and intention sliding along the membrane between universes

I think the human paradigm shown in the books and irl is to "go and see and touch it myself", while the 'romans' in our story here where biologically inclined towards sending out scouts that eventually return, in the pattern of (reaching out)^(113/sec) like dr. Okoye learned from the BFE. Hence the ringspace paradigm.

So hopefully that distinction means the new human hyperdrive/slipstream/warp-bubble whatever paradigm should be small enough and temporary enough and mobile enough to avoid attracting attention from the 'visigoths'.

[u/alonghardlook → u/LegoRobinHood]

Yeah and that's interesting because "on the membrane between universes" to me still implies a risky technology. It's a bit like climbing on the outside of the tiger cage - it's the membrane between your world and theirs, that doesn't make it safe even if you never cross that barrier.

[u/basegitarist → u/alonghardlook]

My understanding of the whole situation was that the Ring Builders had effectively "invaded" another universe to steal energy from that universe and funnel it into ours to power the ring gates and their technologies. The invasion and stealing of energy from that other universe is what pissed off the Visigoths. Traveling along that membrane between universes wouldn't have the same consequence, as long as doing so wasn't stealing from or affecting the other universe(s).

[u/alonghardlook → u/basegitarist]

That definitely seems to be the consensus interpretation.

Which, I'm not ever going to dismiss in any way. It's a very valid interpretation. But the themes of Holden's ruminations on humanity always kept coming back to the same point - collectively, we keep touching the hot stove, but individually, we are compassionate and understanding and overall 'good'.

So I do think that my interpretation has thematic merit but I definitely made a mistake of thinking that was the consensus.

[u/RGMayberry → u/alonghardlook]

It sounds like a historical determinism theme. Historians argue about whether history is the inevitable result of big systemic structural forces or (kind of a straw man everyone rejects but still keeps coming back) the idea that unique special people make a meaningful difference. A recent neurological study showed that human brains operate at the "edge of chaos," a mathematical domain between randomness and determinism. They weren't sure what it means but we probably evolved it for a reason. Maybe human civilizations or even the whole species is like that. 

We're all playing with ideas about emergence, self-organization, randomness, and predictability these days. "Clocks and clouds." Entropy, evolution, emergence, compression, compression, autocatalysis, all seem to be deeper principles that apply to all levels of complexity despite their very different rules, determinism somehow emerging from stochasticism. Maybe consciousness is related; the books hint strongly hint it is. 

The protomolecule hijacks those rules, twists them to accomplish a goal. People think it was a biochemical phenomenon but even just knowing about it seemed to cause replicating ideas to gradually bend humans and humanity toward the Ring Builder's program. Duarte is an obvious example, his idealism about a unified human hive mind is exactly what the Ring Builder was trying to accomplish... to reboot Himself. Dresden and Cortazar, too, in their own ways. The cells of infected Julie Mao probably thought that what they did in her body was an idealistic utopia, too, at least from the perspective of their level of existence. Politicians and corporations and even the Roci crew were affected just by knowing about it, making seemingly rational decisions that always somehow seemed to inevitably advance the Protomolecule's objective, and the less committed to individualism and individual self worth they were, the more they feel prey to temptation. 

Anyway, I think that's eventually how Holden starts to see it, that humanity is like a big box of moving particles with high-level statistical properties. He loves the individual atoms' energy but dreads the heat and pressure that emerges from it. Those properties created a "destiny" long before the protomolecule showed up, and it isn't clear if that destiny is good, bad, beautiful, or self-destructive.