Vulture Interviews doug Dorst

Just published is a new interview with Doug Dorst on the Vulture Website, conducted by Jennifer Vineyard

There are some pretty cool questions and in depth answers, although not necessarily revealing any answers to mysteries in the book !

References

It is worth pointing out a few items that have recently been found that are direct comparisons to items and words found in S.

The first is from @JillaggieARG and is the original postcard reference that the postcard in S. that Eric sends is based on. As you can see the original is not crimped and has the Rio De Janeiro name present on it.

Oddly I was looking through my folder of S. images for the insert reference I have and found that I had already had this original from a different source. I can't remember if I put something in the comments or just found it and forgot it, but it is the same as Jill's version. Thanks Jill for sending it and a note to self - must remember to follow up on these things !

Next is @MyTheseus who mentions the comparison to page 147 of S. and Belloc's Cautionary Tales For Children

Then we have Clare (@CFish6) who sent in a reference advert used to construct part of the McKay's magazine article

See the original reference here

Finally for now we have @blackwellharb who tweeted this self referential tweet -

"@SFiles22 check out Lopevi (13th Straka book). Tiny volcanic island just like Obsidian Island. #whoisstraka"

Many Warblings

A few small updates for you in one easy to digest post.

First we have had Jana contact us to say the following about the Lampa newspaper clipping -

In the insert pg. 69 (Czech headline) there is a grammatical error. It should have been divákY. This version (diváků) is wrong and would only work in combination with "skokem diváků", which would mean: (Suicide shocks by) "a leap BY witnesses". Wasn't there speculation that members of S. Jumped after Straka in order to save him?

(By the way: "Opice-Tance" is not a proper way how a Czech would write the term "Monkey Dances")

So mistake or clue ?

Next, in case you didn't see it in the comments, Jordan is putting together a task force to see if a co-ordinated effort can decipher the mystery of WhoIsStraka.com.

Read more on Jordan's blog - Notes From A Standing Desk

Finally for this post the BOLO Books Blog has published an interview with Doug Dorst.

The interview talks about Ciphers, the books creation and Stephen King, head on over to the Bolo Books blog and read the interview

Poll Results

Really sorry about the lack of updates, lots of things happening which have prevented me updating.

So the first update of many I have for you is the result of the poll, the vast majority of you, 205 of 238 votes, do not write in the margins of your own copy of S.

30 of you have written in different pen colours and 3 lonely souls are making their own conversations with Jen and Eric !

Fellow Birders

I realise we haven't posted much recently on the blog, but there hasn't been much to write about and unfortunately the old enemy of time has meant I haven't been able to make any more sense of some of the mysteries of S. Hopefully these small snippets of information will spark some theories and questions of your own.

This post has a couple of updates and potential rabbit holes for us to fall down and I will shortly post a small poll suggested by a reader of the blog.

First of all Jill Aggie sent a question about this postcard via email, it is the Postcard from Eric on the 18th of April and what is intriguing Jill is the postmark. Unlike the other postmarks, this one has a string of numbers to the left of the usual circular stamp, it could just be a product of that particular post office of course but it is interesting as it is almost a regular pattern. Minus two single digits it is a 4 x 8 grid.

-9004100
-9807082
04575220
19644144

If anyone can make sense of these numbers or suggest a potential cipher to try and use to decode them please let us know.

Next Danielle Parker mentioned in the comments that the Santorini Man murders that are heavily referenced by Radio Straka, in the book and on the Eotvos Wheel website has striking similarities to the Taman Shud Case an Australian mystery where a body is found with the last page of a book in his pocket. This is also know as the "Somerton Man" which is again very similar to the S. version.

Inspiration for the events in Ship of Theseus or is there a firmer link to the S. Santorini Man mystery ?

As pointed out by Mystimus in the comments there is another blog with an article about this - The Monkey Dance

Finally for now I was thinking about the negative space mystery that may be something we need to solve and also the twitter icon that @EricHusch had a while ago (see earlier post).

I had a go at manipulating the S. logo and creating a mirror image any laying one S. over the other, in a Palimpsest manner, I came up with this.

Looks a little like an Owl to me, and also seems to form a sort of mask for reading a hidden message, if only I knew where to look ! I have tried printing it, cutting out the holes and placing it over some of the pages but have got nothing so far.

Again if you can find a way of using it to find new information please let us know.

Mckay's Magazine Review Ship Of Theseus

A short while ago Doug Dorst tweeted these pages from McKay's Magazine.

They contain pages from a review of Ship of Theseus and are from February 1950.

A brief scan of the review shows that the reviewer is not exactly a fan of the book - "a vulgar ouroboros of a novel, filled to bursting with apathy, anomie, and omphaloskepsis." (Yes I did look that last one up !)

The second page has some adverts and other articles and I am going to work my way through them to see if there are any further clues in them. This post will be updated if any new information comes to light, please let us know in the comments, via twitter or email if you think there is anything new in the article or other material.

This is great news for fans of S. as it means to me that there are other things to come, whether this is a gentle push to get us to look further or just part of a planned activity I don't know, but interesting never the less.

Update 1 - I just realized Edsel B Grimshaw, and this review, is referenced on the Eotvos Wheel Website, on the candidates page

@ObFuSc8 also reminded me that this is mentioned in the book - "Chap7 IIRC along with the obituary). Magazine owned by Bouchard/ARP."

Lady Lobster also points out that it is mentioned on page 106 in Eric's margin note.

Update 2 - The WhoIsStraka Wordpress blog has a transcription of the review.

Update 3 - There was a lot of discussion yesterday about the contents of the review and the adverts, I have collated most of it in a Storify list

I think the main points are -

From one of the adverts an address could be the New York Public Library and a search reveals it has books by Václav Straka - (Link from @CFish6) Does anyone live near the library that could call in and take a look at the books to see if anything is hidden within ?

@ObFuSc8 has posted a list of references used for the adverts in the comments below.

@MyTheseus mentioned the "magic burgoo" mentioned in the review and wondered if this points to anything within the book, a search for links and references was started.

@MyTheseus also said "Review mentions 450 pages in SOT, but there are 456. Six pages missing…" - So does than mean the original version of SoT has been extended for our benefit ?

LONOE

I must admit to being slow to recognise the significance of this map, I saw it a few days ago from a comment by Tonzi in the Cipher Explanations page and didn't realise what it was.

If you haven't finished the book yet you may not want to read on.

Then last night @MyTheseus on Twitter pointed out a new blog post on WhoIsStraka.WordPress.com which had the same conclusion, although arrived at via a different thought process.

Firstly the map is quite important as it explains the relationship of the coordinate system to the codes used, they are linear as you can see and these aren't locations from the book, these are all coordinates that can be found when LONOE is in the wheels window.

When you look at the map you can see that Maraú in Brazil (blue pin) is close to this line, on the postcard dated the 20th of April (insert on page 201) Eric writes that he is near this place.



So the conclusion is that the missing letters L O N O E are actually a pointer to the location of FXC should Straka have ever picked up the message hidden in the footnote cipher.

Tonzi very kindly created this as a Google map for us all to use and see this linear relationship.

Nine or Ten Clues ?

So where are we ? Short answer is not very far forward I'm afraid, assuming there are mysteries left to uncover we haven't got a handle on what they are.

I thought I'd post about a couple of things that haven't been mentioned in a main post, but have been discussed in comments or emails.

First of all are these two pictures from @RadioStraka the first to be sent was the poem written on a wooden door. What is odd / interesting about this is that, as ObFuSc8 told us via Twitter, the first verse and a little of the second appear to be taken from a poem published by Illy Kotz in 2010

Perhaps Radio Straka just likes the poem, or part of it at least, but who added to it and put it on a door ?

The second picture was the birds as you can see, this coupled with the twitter feed for @EricHusch changing to the image you can see here, two of the S. symbols which when arranged like this have a picture of a bird between them may be significant.

These led to a few people speculating about the chapter 9 cipher that we don't currently know how to solve.

The Chapter title is "Birds of Negative Space" and the space where the bird appears in the EH profile picture is most definitely negative space.

So do we use this bird to solve the cipher, or is this a pointer that we need to find out own negative space in this chapter ? Mark Voorneveld commented that perhaps we need to use the cut out parts of the S. symbol to find a hidden message, but as yet I've been unable to find anything.

Finally for now is the suggestion that came from Karen via email, since the clue from J J Abrams last week was Ten, perhaps there are alternative versions or at least small differences in the pages of chapter 10.

I don't want to post the whole chapter here, but I have posted three pages which I think are significant and if you can check your own version of S. maybe we can find some differences.

Mulholland Books Cipher Contest Answer

If you entered the Mulholland Books S. Cipher Contest you should have heard if you were a winner.

I was not, mainly because I am from the UK and was ineligible to enter ! However I did submit an entry and received an email to say that I was not a winner but had solved the cipher correctly. As the answer is now published on the Mulholland website I think we are safe to post the answer here as well.

The clue in the original question was of course "Follow these lines, from first to last, and play fair" so like in the book you take the first and last letters of the passages in the tweets - MC FR NM SH XM CS - and feed the result into a play fair cipher.

For the grid code word you need to use the next part of the clue "the bearded sailor sees all", the bearded sailor in S. is of course Maelstrom, which gives us this grid

MAELS
TROBC
DFGHI
KNPQU
VWXYZ

Using the Playfair cipher rules the result is - ST RA KA LI VE SZ, which gives us the answer "Straka Lives" (The z is a filler letter)

If you don't know the rules of Playfair, then there is this online version you can use to decode the message.

So apart from a bit of fun is this another clue ?

If you won the competition we would love to hear from you especially once you have claimed your prize and had your lunch with J J Abrams and Doug Dorst.

***UPDATE

We have heard from the winner, Kris from the BOLO Books website, he won and has had his lunch with Doug Dorst and J J Abrams.

Read all about his experience of this and the talk at Symphony Space on his BOLO Books write-up

Who Is Straka Update

I'm still not sure if the Who Is Straka Website is legitimate, but there are definitely more things to find there.

We had an email from Terrance to say that he and a friend had found some hidden images on the site, Kristin Rix also mentioned this in the comments yesterday, I went back to the site and I couldn't see anything different to what was there previously.

However I persevered and looked at things from a different perspective, that perspective was the Chrome browser. When you look via Internet Explorer you see a PNG file of the S symbol, when you look with Chrome you see a GIF file.

That Gif file is actually an animated one and contains all the images you can see here. 4 Rorschach style ink blots, and the phrases "SEEK SHELTER FROM THE STORM", "SAFETY IN NUMBERS WONT KEEP YOU DRY" AND "6483kHZ".

If you notice the S's in the phrases have what looks like a . under them similar to the Chapter 3 code.

The .GIF file isn't the only difference when viewed in Chrome.

As you can see the source code is different, there is an extra couple of comment lines and the unusual dot pattern after the encrypted lines.

As always if you can make any sense of this please get in touch in the comments, via Twitter or on email.

*** Update 25/11/2013 ***

The source code has changed again, more information has been added -

!-- Please direct all correspondence to whoisstraka@gmail.com --
!-- using secure communications protocols and encryption --
!-- to avoid detection and unwanted surveillance. Unsigned --
!-- messages with no PGP key will have to be ignored. They --
!-- are watching and it is raining. --

Doug Dorst and J J Abrams in New York

If you were following the conversation on Twitter yesterday you will have read all the fun that Mr Dorst and Mr Abrams were having in New York.

I will try and sum up some of that information and point you to where you can see more of the events.

First of all J J Abrams was at the NYC Soho Apple store, he was doing a live chat and this was also being relayed via twitter by @iBooks and @Bad_Robot

I have created a Storify version of the chat for you to read if you want to. Not related to the chat but interesting for us, while I was over at Storify I noticed there was a page for Radio Straka created by Anna Frame.

Anyway back to the book chat, most of the questions were the usual things people ask about the book and it's creation, but at the end there was something quite interesting for us.

@AmandaKennedyuk, who is a follower of this blog, asked a question about whether there is something major we have yet to uncover. The response was first that there are quite a lot of things hidden online, but then this clue was given - "TEN". In typical J J Abrams style nothing is easy ! Does this mean there are 10 websites, we have to solve something big in chapter 10 (have we already solved that ?), is this a reference to the roman numeral X ? Answers on a postcard from Brazil please, or in the comments if yow want.

So now on to the next part of the event, where the picture at the top of this post comes from courtesy of Paul (@TK10815) who was at the event.

I haven't got much detail yet from this part of the event, but Paul did take a short snippet of video which is on Instagram. He also mentioned that the full chat will be online at some point on the iTunes Meet The Author pages.

As soon as that is available we will update this post and send the information on twitter.

*** Update *** This is now live.

As you can see from the picture Paul got to meet Doug Dorst and have a photo taken with him. Paul said this after the event - "Thanks for being a gentleman and a scholar, @dougdorst, for answering (&avoiding) my questions after the NYC Apple chat tonight"

Paul also said on his Instagram page for this picture that "Doug then thanked everyone at SFiles22 for their passion and commitment. He's well aware of the blog and what is being posted there :)"

So I think it is appropriate to say Hello Mr Dorst, we really appreciate your work on the enigma that is S. and are still puzzling away at the mysteries.

J J Abrams Talk in the SoHo Apple Store NYC

@Bad_robot just sent a tweet about J J Abrams speaking at the Apple Store today in New York.

There was no timeframe given in the tweet, so if we hear anything we will update this post.

The link given is for the Apple store website -

Apple Store
SoHo
103 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012

Who Is Straka .com

A new website has appeared !

Amanda has let us know via email that she found a website called WhoIsStraka.com

When you visit the site all you see is what you can see in the image a styalised S. symbol.

However that is not all there is, there is a hidden link to a PGP public key (Click here) and if you look at the website source code there is an email address and at set of Eotvos wheel coordinates.

The email address says - "Please direct all inquiries to whoisstraka@gmail.com" but it also says please use secure communications protocols and encryption.

There is some encrypted text following this, but I have thus far been unable to decrypt it.

At the end of the website source code there is this set of coordinates - 35° 46.865', -5° 48.797 - this appears to point to Tangier in Morocco and on the wheel it gives us C G E U Z.

Amanda also mentions there is a related Tumblr account which was set up today and the first post was today.

The web address was also only registered today (the 19th !) so it is unclear whether this is something official or not, but any suggestions are more than welcome in the comments.

If you send a PGP encrypted message to our new friend please let us know.

Cipher Explanations

I thought it would be a good idea to try and explain the ciphers used in the book for those that are not too familiar with how the ciphers work. I want this page to act as a reference specifically for the ciphers.

If you have read the book you will know that in each chapter there is a code in the footnotes, some Jen and Eric solved, some we have solved and I am sure there are a couple we have yet to solve.

Most are solved by Jen and Eric and the answers appear in the margin notes, but apart from mentioning the cipher used and some key words there is not much extra explanation so to the uninitiated it may be confusing.

Just a quick warning, that the full post here contains information that you may not want to see until after you have read the whole book.

Doug Dorst Book Signing Event in Austin

Details of another S. book signing have been released.

Doug Dorst will be signing copies in Austin Texas on the 9th of December.

See the Book People website for more details

Making Connections

A couple of things were tweeted to us in the last week and I thought they might be of interest.

First of all is something sent by @MyTheseus, who have their own connections to S. with the name and profile picture !

The information sent was about the poster image you can see here and the Etsy store where it came from.

On page 225 in footnote 10 "Fukuzawa Yukichi" is mentioned and it is underlined, probably by Eric. On the Etsy store listing it says "...Boilerplate has recently been optioned by Paramount Studios for a major motion picture to be produced by J.J. Abrams." Doing a search for Boilerplate and J J Abrams shows the news was mostly from 2011, so not exactly a new connection.

I would put this in the Easter Egg category rather than the clue category, but it is a nice thing to find.

Next we have the movie "The Ship of Theseus", I had been aware of this, but @tikirama mentioned a connection to the book which was interesting.

While the name and main theme of the movie is obviously a connection, on page 101 of the book Eric writes about Hollywood versions of the film and then says - "Heard once that an Indian director was trying to do it but haven't heard anything since." Well the Indian director is Anand Gandhi and he did make it happen.

Again I am not linking this to the book in terms of clues, but it is a nice Easter egg to tie us into the real world.

You can read more about the film on IMDB and see the official Facebook page

If you have seen the film why not let us know your thoughts on it and parallels to the book.

Barrel Code

Since the solution for the Chapter 10 code has been found it seems logical to me that there is another code in Chapter 10 that needs resolving.

As with other posts like this, don't read this full content if you don't want to know what the code might be or see the discussion on how to solve it that might get posted in comments.

Friday Catchup

First of all we have a possible / probable solution to the footnote code in chapter 10 of the book.

In the comments "The Fourth" gave a solution, followed up by some extra info from ObFuSc8.

As this is something in the book that isn't explicit in the book I will put it in spoiler tags just below in case you don't want to read about it just yet.

Click here to see the possible answer

In the first footnote for Chapter 10 the words "Spinning Wheel" and "locate" are in italics, so this points us straight at the Eotvos wheel contained in the book.

If you work out the locations referenced from the footnotes and write down the 5 letter codes in a grid you get a message -

Which if you read left to right top to bottom is

I HAVE LOVED YOU FROM THE BEGINNING. I WILL LOVE YOU TO THE END.

There is still the question of the location of the 6th column, as the footnote mentions Calais but the coordinates for Calais France do not match the code necessary to make the whole string work fully - L O N L E



The list of locations is -

1 - Bergan, Norway - 60N, 5E - I Y B W U
2 - Biabou, St. Vincent - 13 N, 61 W - HOEIT
3 - Portland, Or - 45 N, 123 W - AUGLO
4 - Thunkar, Bhutan - 27 N, 91 E - VFILT
5 - Santiago, Spain - 33 S, 70 W - ERNLH
6 - Calais, France - 51 N, 0 E - XBTUP (??)
7 - Morondava, Madagascar - 20 S, 44 E - OMIVE
8 - Havana, Cuba - 23 N, 82 W - VTNEN
9 - Sofia, Bulgaria - 42.70 N, 23.33 E (approx) - E H G Y D
10 - New York City - 44 N, 73 W - DEIO*

You can see the discussion on the Eotvos wheel code page, Click here to see the first comment and then scroll down slightly to see the post by ObFuSc8

Next, not really book related, Mr Toasty has kindly set up an IRC room for us to chat in about S if we want to - Straka IRC

Then we had an interesting tweet from @sFileSerin, who said if you look at this website for UViRCO Technologies, the name Vaclav Straka and CORIOLIS General Trading is mentioned.

I'm sure it is a complete coincidence, but fun never the less.

Finally for now is this article from the San Marcos Mercury

It interviews Doug Dorst and talks about the secrecy behind the books creation.

S. Book Signing

There is quite a lot to catch up on from yesterday, but lets start with the big event, the book signing in Waterstones Piccadilly, London.

It was a really well managed event, and although not huge amounts of people were queuing initially there was certainly lots of interest. I arrived around 3pm and some friends had been there since around midday so they were right at the start of the queue, one of those friends was the Bad Robot you can see in the video below.

I have edited a few photographs and a little video together, so please take a look, it shows a flavour of what happened without you having to wait for 5 hours on the streets of London !

Overall the signing was excellent and J J Abrams was fantastic to all who wanted to talk to him. I mentioned the blog and he thanked us for creating it and the fact that S-Files is in the book :-)

There were quite a few books signed for the three of us in the queue but as you can see in the video there was one special book signed and you could own it, if you can wait until next year.

As the inscription says it is for Cancer Gets LOST, which is a charity set up by two of the biggest LOST fans I know. Read all about the charity and the plans for the next event, which will be in September 2014, at CancerGetsLost.org

The Isla Files

Our old friend @JuriMoller mentioned this Tumblr Blog - The ISLA Files.

As we know Isla is a key figure in the story of Jen and Eric and almost Jen's nemesis in her story, she is also searching for Straka with Moody.

The blog is mostly just information we have seen before, but it does have this video from You Tube which is supposedly a confession from Summersby purporting to be V M Straka.

According to the Eotvos Wheel website list of candidates Victor Martin Summersby has odds of 15-1 of actually being Straka.

There is a comment on the video - "I cannot disclose where this recording was found, please do not contact me. The book that is coming out is missing some key details that some of us have known for many years. I needed this recording to be heard."

I do not know if this website is from the "Real" Isla Dirks, but it was seemingly set up in April this year and the post about the video was on the 20th of October, well before S. was released, however the video was only uploaded on the 28th of October so there is a discrepancy there.

This got me thinking about other Social Media accounts that may be out there for us to find.

There are a few twitter accounts that may be of interest, and even one for Straka himself !

@VMStraka

@FXCaldeira

@JenTheUndergrad

@EricHusch

Most of these accounts were set up very recently (5th Nov) so I am not convinced they are something we should be focusing on at the moment, but possibly worth keeping an eye on.

While looking for those I came across another blog looking at the Mysteries of S. which coincidentally I have just noticed Brandt Warsley had posted a comment mentioning the same blog.

Glad to know there are others searching for answers.

Bad Robot Clues Us In

A short while ago the @Bad_Robot twitter account sent these messages out.

They if we can solve the clues there might be a super charged version of S. for us to win.

We have been sent a possible answer on our twitter feed @Sfiles22, but see if you can solve the riddle and send Bad Robot your best answer.

Click here to see the possible answer

The first picture is of part of the Lincoln Memorial inscription, the word "enshrined".

The second picture is of EWA beach in Hawaii.

Courtesy of ObfuSc8 the third picture is a painting "Lincoln the Rail-splitter" by F. A Schreider (1909) - which is in the Library of Congress.

All this adds up to the Lincoln the Frontiersman statue which is located in Hawaii near EWA beach, @MrToasty on twitter was the first person we saw with this answer and a link to a web page about the statue

The answer that has won the Prize is that Lincoln is depicted holding an axe. "The Grandfather's Axe" is another title for the "Ship Of Theseus" paradox.

*** Update ***

We have a winner !

In the comments someone identifying themselves as Tyler has mentioned that their answer (in the spoiler tag above) has earned them the prize from Bad Robot.

Really looking forward to knowing what the Super Charged version of S. will contain.

Footnotes 9-10

Thinking about the Eotvos Wheel and potential clues to the code to decode it these two footnotes jumped out at me.

They are the only two chapters with footnotes 9 and 10 on the same page, and they do seem to allude to a code of some sort. That combined with the Eotvos Wheel website saying lots of Santorini man pages were 9-10 is looking more like a deliberate pointer rather than a coincidence.

Page 225 Footnote 9 again has an instance of 19 - "He argued that while these were separate conceptions of individual identity, they were equally true, as were seventeen other “Lesser Variant-Selves” between those two endpoints."

Jen also underlines the name and two dates "Mariusz Mytych (b. 1853 or 1854)" she says Mytych doesn't exist and that the 60 + 24 are what is important, which don't correspond to the dates that are part of the Nihilist Cipher used in that chapter.

Page 225 footnote 10, the only thing that seems significant is - "I do not know whether Straka would have agreed, but one could argue that this conflict is at the very heart of the book you are now reading." Possibly alluding to an underlying mystery.

I can't read anything relevant into Footnote 9 on page 270, so if anyone has any theories please let us know.

Looking at footnote 10 on page 270 I think the relevant part of the footnote is - "but modifying its suite of disorientations to include the additional dimension of Time"

A possible reference to the date being significant to the code being deciphered as well as the longitude and latitude of the locations we have seen, both in the Santorini Man murder locations and the locations in Ship of Theseus.

Where does this leave us ? not very far forward I'm afraid I have tried combinations of the date year to get a digit between 1 and 5 to read a single letter from the wheel code, but have not managed to find any combination or calculation that is plausible. Of course we may need to take the whole line of the code at the selected location and use them in something like a Railfence or Play fair cipher as people have suggested, however this would drastically limit the amount of coded messages that the wheel could produce for us.

Any suggestions and theories on this are more than welcome.

Parallels in S.

When we started the blog we didn't really see ourselves as a literary review team, as I don't think we had enough experience or training to do that.

However we have received this nice comparison of characters from Nimy Leshinski and I thought you might appreciate reading them too. Needless to say that this covers insights from the entire book so you may possibly class the information as spoilers if you haven't already read the entire book.

If you have any insights or reviews you would like to share we are more than happy to receive them and publish a selection of them if we can.

The information below covers the parallels in S.

Theseus > Straka > Eric

- All three navigate a maze to take on a monster, though they're hopelessly outmanned. With Theseus, it's the labyrinth and the Minotaur. With Straka, it's the deceptions and Bouchard. With Eric, it's the codes and Moody.

Ariadne > Filomela > Jen

- All three help their man through the maze by giving clues, yet they cannot participate themselves. With Ariadne, it's the ball of thread, which is where the term 'clue' originates. With Filomela, it's the footnotes in the book. With Jen, it's the margin notes.

Ship of Theseus > The S.

- As with the 'Ship of Theseus' paradox, the S. always exists, despite its members constantly getting replaced. This stretches back all the way to the writing of The Archer's Tales, or maybe even to Greek mythology, as the Theseus title would suggest. Admittedly, this one's pretty obvious.

Vaclav Straka > Eric

- Both men 'die' while young, only to be reborn in secret and with a new name/identity. With Straka, it's a literal death, and later, the emergence of the V.M. Straka identity. With Eric, it's the death of his academic career, and later, its rebirth.