Headscratchers / Riven

• If creating Linking Books only opens a door to the linked age, rather than creating the age, then how would the poor quality of Gehn's books make Riven unstable?
  • He was sloppy and didn't go as much into detail as one would need to create an age such as Riven. Presumably, there were multiple ages that could fit the parameters set down by Gehn in the original linking book, and they all got spliced together into what we know as Riven. Which explains why the Star Fissure even existed in the first place.
  • That's not how it works. Riven was always unstable, with or without Gehn. Gehn's bad writing caused the book to link to an unstable Age; however, he also tried to fix their problems by adding additional text to the Descriptive Book that, because he didn't have a real understanding of what the words he was using meant (only what they tended to accomplish), the side effects of all his modifications resulted in a somewhat dangerous environment becoming the brittle catastrophe we see in the game.
    • And Atrus, having taken the time to experiment with how much detail is necessary to change an age, could fix Riven better the Gehn could.
    • No, sorry, this is close but still wrong. The entire problem with Gehn was that he believed the D'ni were creating rather than linking; by extension, he believed the entire substance of an Age was contained in the words of its Descriptive Book, and (rather sensibly, scientifically speaking, if you accept the previous premises) that this substance consisted of smaller parts into which it was reliably divisible (sentences, phrases, words). Therefore instead of actually writing an Age, he would go into the ruins of D'ni, find Books that linked to Ages that had something he wanted, locate the relevant passage in the Book, and copy it verbatim into his new Age. Riven was unstable- and it's made explicit that all of his Ages are unstable- because that isn't how the Art works. (He stubbornly refuses to accept this and blames his failures on the quality of his materials.) In my opinion it's meant to tie in with the general theme of "the world is more complex than we'll ever understand (even if we do understand quite a bit)". (You can confirm most of this in Riven and The Book of Atrus.)
  • Even if you buy that the Books don't create Ages, they just link to existing places, the idea that editing the Book once you've established the connection can change the world is pretty close to the same A God Am I trope as if you really were making them from scratch.
    • Not if there is a literally infinite number of worlds out there to link to. You're not changing anything except the destination of the bridge- and perhaps very slightly, such that the new destination almost totally resembles the old. This is the Great Tree of Possibility (or something) talked about in the lore (and it's a nice parallel with the many-worlds hypothesis too- Google that if you don't know what it is, chances are (as someone who is likely to be reading this page; ie. a critically-thinking Myst fan) you'll be intrigued).
    • Except if that were the case, then Catherine couldn't be rescued from Riven once Atrus had revised its Linking Book in an attempt to "stabilize" it. It would've taken the Stranger to a different Riven from the one where she was being held. Likewise, Catherine couldn't have saved her people once she'd added the dagger to her homeworld's book, because the people there wouldn't be her Rivenese anymore.
      • Except Catherine discovered that it was possible to determine the future of a specific world by writing content into its Description: the Art is far more powerful than either Gehn OR Atrus believed. Atrus later utilized this discovery to keep Riven stable, preserving the lives of the people trapped in it. Even given that no one was sure where the Star Fissure led to, it's far from certain that anyone would have survived that Age tearing itself apart.
  • It's also possible that the D'ni are wrong and it does create the age. Or that writing it causes it to have always existed, and links to it. Or maybe Yeesha did it, who knows?.
  • Or editing the Book doesn't actually change the Age. Rather, there are still multiple ages that fit what you wrote, and adding e.g. a dagger falling from the sky merely changes the Age to one that had a dagger about to fall from the sky to begin with.
    • That would have meant all the non-original inhabitants (eg. Catherine and Gehn) would seem to disappear when the book connects to a version of the Age that they didn't enter. Alternatively, entering an age would have to create a copy of you in every version of the Age that the book might potentially become connected to, and all of those clones would carry the same linking book back home.
    • Except in The Book of Atrus, he saw the Dagger appear out of nowhere with his own eyes, when Anna was adding to Riven while he was in it. (Man, this is confusing...)
    • As is established in the last novel, the Art is capable of reaching not just between worlds but between times. You don't need to run the risk of severing the link to a particular world in order to change it - you just write the events you want into that world's future and they will tend to occur. Which is what makes the Prophesies relevant to Terahnee - they were written by a master of the Art in order to influence that world's fate.
• In one of his journals from Real-Myst, Atrus insists that if you change a Descriptive Book's text, you don't alter the world, you just cause the book to link up with an alternate world that better matches its contents' new parameters. But if changing the book links to a parallel world, doesn't that mean that the real Catherine was never rescued? Both Atrus and Gehn had altered ("stabilized") Riven's book repeatedly since she left Myst Island, which would've caused its link to shift to an alternate version of Riven. It might be a very close match, complete with an alternate-Gehn and his alternate-Catherine prisoner, but it still wouldn't be our Atrus's wife whom the Stranger released from prison.
  • Myst is not a quantum multiverse - there is only one Katherine and Atrus). Editing a Descriptive Book is something like using a reality-bending version of Schrödinger's Gun; you can't just say that "the sea is warm" when everything else suggests that the sea should be cold, because the link will "panic" and either infer all sorts of requirements that go along with that edit which will probably make the Age unstable, OR, if the edit is significant enough (like striking out entire lines of text), jumping to a different Age entirely. BUT you can go through and systematically add additional phrases about things you haven't yet written or observed - peculiarities of magma flow in the mantle, say, which will soon cause a fault rupture that opens lava chambers here, here, and here, which will result in new thermal vents and cause the sea to warm up. As long as you haven't already described those kinds of details about the marine geology, it will have always been that way.
    • (This is only further complicated by the fact that the Descriptive Book is only a perfect description of the Age at the moment of the first link; the Riven book describes the enormous tree that Gehn later saws down, for instance, and if Atrus had tried any modifications that depended on the presence of the tree... yeah.)
  • Also, Myst was early on, and Cyan may not have had all the rules down yet. They didn't change much from Myst to Real Myst other than adding Ti'ana's grave and the stuff related to Rime.
• In Riven, they used a distinctly different sound effect for the linking books; during the ending, when Atrus arrives and when he exits back to Myst Island, they used the old sound effect from the first game, which suggests that Riven's books sound different because Gehn made them (and was Doing It Wrong, what with needing the fire marbles or geode crystal thingies to allow them to link). However, for some reason (probably laziness), the trap book Atrus gives you at the beginning of the game uses the "Riven" linking sound instead of the "Myst" linking sound.
  • Perhaps that sound indicates a link that is somehow less than perfectly stable, which would be true of both Gehn's retroengineered Books and Atrus' Trap Book.
  • My thought has always been that the style of writing defined the linking sound, and the "Gehn-link" sound was based on the ancient D'ni writing style that Gehn copypasted/imitated all the time. The "Atrus-link" sound was due to Atrus's style being his own, having mostly self-trained. The D'ni linking book would have to fit the style of the ancient writing to be a plausible facsimile of a D'ni linking book, so its link sound would be the D'ni (and thus Gehn) sound. This actually fits with the follow-up games, because the links that Yeesha created that you use in Uru (including the Relto book) sound like Atrus links, which makes sense considering she learned from him.
• It can be explained as budget constraints of the times and the interest of maintaining the Beautiful Void, but how is it the Stranger and Gehn never manage to cross paths on Riven? Sure, Gehn likes to spend a lot of time on Age 233 but he does return at one point to take his musket-like weapon from the Crater Island office, so logically a persistent stranger would be able to bump into them at some point at least on Crater Island and have a chat about the book that the Stranger had taken from them at the beginning of the game and how it needs to be retrieved before they meet again. Sure, Gehn would probably be suspicious at the Stranger snooping around his office, but he only sees them as a expendable if they outlive their usefulness, try his patience, or blow their cover.
• Atrus' actions at the end of Riven really bugs me. He just lets you fall into the fissure without even offering his Linking Book on the belief that you'll just find your way back somehow. And this is after already helping him deal with his sons, escape from D'ni, deal with his father, and rescue his wife.
  • He was banking on the idea that 1) the Fissure would spit anything dumped in it from Riven back out in the same place and that 2) you would survive the fall. If his Myst book didn't get pulverized by the terminal velocity fall through the fissure, there's no reason to assume the player wouldn't go at terminal velocity either. Also, he jumped into the fissure during Myst's opening credits; he has a glimpse of a feel for what the environment of the Fissure actually does to a human, and knew (or at least suspected) it would be non-lethal. Besides, "sending [The Stranger] back, to the place that [he] came from" was the carrot Atrus dangled in front of you at the beginning of Riven, and offering him a Myst book doesn't really help in that regard.
  • Indeed, letting the Stranger use his Myst book would only leave his friend back where it all started: trapped on Myst.
  • Except the Stranger is from Earth...which is where D'ni is...which can be linked to from Myst...
  • The Stranger found the original Myst book after its fall through the Fissure, so logically the Stranger's place-of-origin is the spot the Fissure leads to. Easier to just send them through the same way than to try and dig a way out of D'ni.
  • And neither the Stranger nor Atrus knew at the time that Earth and D'ni were one and the same. Or the writers hadn't decided on that detail just yet.
    • Atrus knew that D'ni had an inhabited surface world (he grew up there with his Earth Human grandmother) but probably didn't know that that was the Stranger's homeworld or that the Star Fissure dropped things there, only inferring that since he dropped his Myst book into the Fissure and the Stranger found it, that the Fissure must spit things out into the Stranger's home Age.
    • However how Atrus could have, ten years later, invited the Stranger to his new home in Tomahna if he didn't know not only where to find him, but not even if they were both on the same world to begin with? One way or the other, he ought to know that. Very likely, the writers wrapped up the "everything is on planet Earth after all" part of the setting while working on Myst III.