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Only4DNDandCigars

I was reading Elantris, with my passive work being Jorge Luis Borges "Book of Imaginary Beings". The chapters are encyclopedic and short, and are meant to have a kaleidoscope style of reading. With Cosmere on my mind, I can across a really interesting entry:

Sylphs For each of the four roots or elements into which the Greeks divided matter there was a corresponding spirit. In the words of Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician, we find four elementary spirits: the Gnomes of the earth, the Nymphs of water, the Salamanders of fire, and the Sylphs or Sylphides of air. The words are Greek origin. Litre has sought the etymology of "sylph" in the Celtic tongues, but it is most unlikely that Paracelsus would have known, or even suspected the existence of, those languages. Today, no one believes in Sylphs, but the phrase "a syphlike figure" is still applied to slender women, as a somewhat cliched compliment. The Sylphs occupy a place between that of material beings and that of immaterial beings. Romantic poetry and the ballet find them useful.

I don't think it is a far stretch or much of projection when I say that reminds me of a certain Spren. Either way, it made my day to come across this while reading.

Brandon Sanderson

If you poke around a bit, you can probably find where the names of some other spren (like Notum) come from. In a lot of their names, I'm looking for something similar to what I did with Syl. My rationale is that if you heard her name in-world (which might not actually be the exact sounds Syl) you'd have the benefit of local traditions, word roots, and mythologies. You'd hear it and say, "Huh, that sounds like a word for wind." So, when the books are "translated" to English, the translator creates names in English that evoke the same feel in readers here.

CheddarCheeseCurds

Will there ever be a cosmere cookbook, with official recipes for foods from each world, or the best Earth approximation?

Brandon Sanderson

We get this occasionally. I always say it's a possibility but it's not very high up on our list right now.

Karen Ahlstrom

Deana Whitney has actually been working on this and has a series of articles on tor.com. It's not recent, that I've heard about, but she asked me what kind of food they have on Scadrial and I gave her a list, because types of food is a thing that I have a list of, and I can just copy and paste, and there you go, Deana.

Brandon Sanderson

I'm going to have to make those weirder and weirder, to make it more and more difficult.

ArtemosHyre

There was a really neat recent post that showed how they use a rotated Copper symbol like we use the "cent" symbol ¢. Are there any other examples in your mind?

Isaac Stewart

I'm glad someone noticed that we took copper and rotated it to mean "clip." Since Scadrial is the closest planet to being like Earth in the Cosmere so far, it's fun to do little things like that. I could see us doing something similar with one of the other symbols to use it to mean a boxing, maybe the symbol for Gold.

Deana Whitney

What would Rock's favorite vegetable be in a soup? Like the Earth equivalents?

Brandon Sanderson

Ooh! Well, see, Rock is gonna base it based on the soup, because he's a chef. But if it's his perfect favorite, he's gonna want something crunchy, so he's gonna want like—

Deana Whitney

Well, I know he'll want the, the essentially the equivalent of crawdads.

Aubree Pham

She's trying to write a cosmere food article...

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, yeah. But there are-- like, if you can get like a... radish, that's going to crunch, he's probably going to look for that in a soup, because that's going to be closer to what he likes. Something that's got some variance in the texture.

usuyami

Are there any languages with clicks anywhere in the cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, though I'm loathe to use them in text because of how people roll their eyes at fantasy novels that try to be too cute with non-standard (meaning non western Earth) symbols in naming.

Markus

What do Rosharan sporting events look like outside of Alethkar?

Brandon Sanderson

Most places in Roshar, I would say they have not hit the point in society, quite yet, where mass sporting events are really a thing. Basically, sporting events are martial training during non-periods of war, even in the less martially-focused places. I would have to think about it. I haven't built any. I mean, there are sports that were played non-martially on our Earth, but even the ball game in mesoamerica had some pretty brutal aspects to it, that is almost kind of a way to have a battle when you're not having a battle.

I think that the modern concept of sporting events, the only place you're gonna find that right now in the cosmere is on Scadrial. And Wayne accidentally started a sporting league. I'm not sure if I'll get to that in the next book, or not. If you remember, in the last book, where he was like, "What we need is a way to get everybody drunk at the same time without them being drunk." And there are some implications and ramifications of that for the advent of professional sports, let's say.

Questioner

Is Skyward gonna be related at all to Silverlight universities?

Brandon Sanderson

It is not, good question. Skyward is not related to the cosmere. It does mention Earth, which is kind of one of my dividing lines. But it is related to something else I've written.

Janci Patterson

If there were ever future Skyward novellas, could I name a taynix "Hoid"? They made the very good point that, technically, since we have old Earth, those would be in their literature. So, technically, one could...

Brandon Sanderson

That is reasonable. What I don't like to do is to confuse people on whether the cytoverse is in the cosmere, which it's not. But this would totally... I mean, in the Alcatraz books, someone at some point says that Alcatraz's mom killed Asmodean, which is a Wheel of Time joke, there's a mystery of who killed Asmodean. There's stuff like that. So yes, you may name a slug "Hoid."

Janci Patterson

I've seen the Boomslug sticker. Fun fact: we actually change the color of the Boomslug because it looked better on the sticker. They were black-and-red, and now they're red-and-black. Because Isaac actually sent me, "Here it is black-and-red; here it is red-and-black." And I was like, "It's cool. We can change it in the books." He was right; it looked better.

Adarain

It has been stated repeatedly that the cognitive realm is geometrically flat. Like, flat earth flat. However, it is mathematically impossible to turn a sphere (such as the surface of a planet) into a flat plane without cuts or overlaps [by the Borsuk-Ulam theorem]. So my question is simply… how does the cosmere resolve these issues? Are there places on every planet where if you walk across a line in the physical realm, you’d now be in a completely different spot in the cognitive realm? Or perhaps places where two points of the physical realm collide in the cognitive realm?

Peter Ahlstrom

Good question. And I don’t have an answer. I’ve always like Dymaxion maps, and those have big gaps. I would be fine with Shadesmar being non-Euclidean.

Adarain

Thanks for the answer! If I may ask for clarification, when you say non-Euclidean do you mean going back on the whole "Shadesmar is flat" thing (since Euclidean just means flat), or do you mean it having a structure like e.g. the mentioned Dymaxion map (or perhaps even wilder things like planets being entirely disconnected)?

Peter Ahlstrom

I mean something like when you get to where the edge of a segment on a Dymaxion map would be, you step across seamlessly into the next section even though there should be a huge gap.

Accomplished_Debt932

I had always envisioned the cognitive realm as a Möbius strip. Flat, one sided, infinite, and ultimately a (sort of) loop. Is that accurate?

Peter Ahlstrom 

I don’t know if it’s a loop at all.

Questioner

Skyward. Is that gonna be a Cosmere story?

Brandon Sanderson

Not right now... I've decided mostly. It's possible I'll pull it out, but I feel like I need to reference Earth for some of the things I'm doing. That's kind of my baseline.

A_Dunyain

This is just a stab based on perceived hints, but is Yolen the most "Earth-like" planet in the Cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Scadrial is, actually. Sel isn't too far off either. Yolen has some strangeness to it. Two competing ecologies, and some strange geography. But I have wavered on how to convey all of this, so none of it is set in stone yet.

Daniel Greene

Has there been something [with worldbuilding] you decided to put in that inadvertently has pigeonholed you in a way? Where it’s like, “Oh, that element shouldn’t…” Basically, any regrets, in terms of worldbuilding, that now, in hindsight, that was a little too solid; something you wish you had left a little looser?

Brandon Sanderson

I think one of my big worries for a long time was in the White Sand books. I made a bunch of mistakes there, because it was the first world I ever built. So the magic system in that, there are some very cool things about it; there’s some very non-cohesive things. I had people have the ability to turn sand into water for no good reason, that does not fit the cosmere magic system as it developed. That one, I’m like, “Why did I even put that in?” I think I tried… I can’t remember if we got that cut out, or not. It was in the early drafts of the White Sand graphic novel scripts. I remember trying to cut that out, and I can’t now remember if we got it cut out. It might have been too integral to the story. But regardless, there’s things like that that I’m like “eh…”

I wish I, at the end of the Mistborn trilogy, had been more clear about how many metals there were left to discover. That’s definitely a mistake. But I just went ahead and was like, “You know what? I made the mistake, I’m just gonna explain it after the fact. I made a mistake, and we’re doing it the way I intended it to be, rather than the way it came across.” And I’m okay copping to mistakes and letting people know.

One of the things I keep wanting to do is have Peter, every time a book comes out, release a notes file that’s kind of like… you know how, when a video game gets an update, you have the bug fixes and power rebalances? I want to release a bug fixes and power rebalances thing for this. Where we’re like, “This little aspect of the world just never made sense. We’ve retconned this out. Now you can understand.” Stuff like that, I feel like we should be doing that.

Way of Kings is a great example. Way of Kings ended up using more Earth metaphors than the rest of the Stormlight Archive. If you read Way of Kings, there’s more references to grapes, there’s more references to ravens, because I just was not into the world as well (even after doing all this worldbuilding) as I eventually got into it. I’m like, “They wouldn’t use a raven metaphor here. They wouldn’t say something looks like a flock of ravens. They don’t see ravens.” And finally I said to Peter, “Go ahead and bug-patch these out of Way of Kings, for the newest version.”

I see in the chat, “flock of chickens.” Well, really, it should be “debris flying in front of a storm.” Something that they have seen a lot that becomes a natural metaphor for their language. Not even a flock of chickens, because they don’t see a flock of chickens.

Questioner

With The Reckoners you had to make the decision not to put it into your cosmere cosmology, was that a difficult one?

Brandon Sanderson

It was not difficult once I realized I did not want Earth to be part of everything else.

Questioner

If it had been would Calamity have been a Shard of Adonalsium?

Brandon Sanderson

That’s an interesting question.  Maybe.

VeryNiceName16

Sigzil mentions that perhaps billions of people die every day in the Cosmere. This would require about 6000 modern earths. Was this a mistake, or has the scale dramatically increased from the 50-100 stars you mentioned?

Brandon Sanderson

Nah, it's Sigzil exaggerating. He's Hoid's apprentice, he has dramatic license and hyperbole as a tool that he can use at will. He has no idea how many people actually die, he's not gonna run the- well, he could run the math, he's that type of person, but he has not run that math.

emailanimal

From a very recent signing, we have this new Word of Brandon...

chasmfriend's son: Is there a finite amount of Investiture?

Brandon: Yes.

chasmfriend's son: So is Nightblood consuming it?

Brandon: Yes. Very, very slowly.

This worries me somewhat because of the following observation.

Nightblood consumes Breath (and other Investiture, but let's limit ourselves to Breath for a second).

Every person on Nalthis is born with one Breath.

Populations tend to grow. Which means that under normal rules of demographics, population of Nalthis should keep increasing.

This in turn means that under normal circumstances the number of people with Breath on Nalthis should be growing.

I can see the following possible explanations to this:

1. Endowment can give Breath to many more people than are currently living on Nalthis. So, the exponential population growth has not yet reached the level at which Endowment's ability to award a Breath to each Nalthis-born human is seriously challenged. When it happens though, things will not go well.

2. There is some built-in mechanism controlling population growth on Nalthis, making certain that the population stays within the limits. Nightblood's consumption of Breath makes these limits smaller, and overall may lead to Endowment's inability to grant Breath to Nalthis-born, but not for a while (essentially, Endowment controls population trends at she sees fit).

Thoughts?

Brandon Sanderson

Just as a point you should understand, the amount of MATTER in the cosmere is finite too. As is the amount of energy.

Worrying that Endowment will run out of Breaths to give is a little like worrying that the amount of carbon on Earth will run out because people keep being born.

uchoo786

So just for clarification, once Nightblood consumes investiture, that investiture gets recycled? That's what I've always assumed. That it enters the cognitive/spiritual realm?

Brandon Sanderson

The investiture he consumes is not gone forever--it's not leaving the system, so to speak.

Questioner

Do you ever consider going back to some of your earlier work and doing a prequel or expanding the world?

Brandon Sanderson

Did I ever consider going back to one of my previous books and doing a prequel or expanding the world? Yes, I will be doing these things. The Cosmere Sequence. So if you are not familiar my epic fantasy books, so anything that doesn't mention Earth, they're all set in the same universe. So Elantris, and Mistborn, and Way of Kings, and they all have crossover characters that you can spot if you look really closely, that are interfering. So there will be some parallel stories that show what some of these other people were doing behind the scenes. There will be a series that starts it all off, long before the first books happen, and then there will eventually be--

Mistborn kind of forms the core of this. I pitched Mistborn to my editor as an epic fantasy trilogy, followed by an urban fantasy trilogy, followed by a science fiction trilogy--a science fiction trilogy where they've learned to use the magic system to make space travel possible. That was my original pitch. The Alloy of Law was actually a happy accident, and so we've added a fourth one in, an early industrial era. I'm actually doing four of those, because I really fell in love with them. So you'll be getting two more of those, one in September or October and then one in January. And then the final Reckoners book should come sometime early next year like probably April or May and then the new Stormlight book will be in the fall. So yay Stormlight. *cheers*

Jean_Santos45

Are Legion and Emperor's Soul contained in their own worlds or are they part of the universe of The Stormlight Archive, etc (anywhere with Hoid in it. lol)

Brandon Sanderson

The Emperor's Soul is set on Sel, the world of Elantris. It's far off, though, so you have to have your eyes open to catch the clues. Hoid shows up in a deleted scene, and is referenced in the story.

callumke (paraphrased)

Can you tell me something about the cosmere that you haven't told anyone before?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

There are inhabited planets in the cosmere that don't have any Shards there. There may be inhabited planets that only have a Splinter of a Shard. There are 10 core cosmere planets, which tell the overarching story of the cosmere.

callumke (paraphrased)

Are all the cosmere books so far set on these 10 core worlds?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes. 

callumke (paraphrased)

Are there any of the 10 core worlds without a Shard?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

All 10 core worlds have significant Shardic influence.

Questioner

How many of the worlds in the cosmere do you eventually plan to talk about that we don't know about?

Brandon Sanderson

...From what's been released, you've gotten almost all the important ones. There's, like, two or three ones I would consider relevant to... for instance, the planet that the Aethers, from Aether of Night, which is an unpublished book-- that's still part of the cosmere, I'm gonna do some stuff there. There are a couple of other worlds, one is mentioned in Oathbringer, just very briefly, in one of the epigraphs. There are others that I'll get to. But, when I designed the cosmere: Scadrial (Mistborn), Sel (Elantris), and Roshar were my pillars of the Cosmere story. With Yolen, the planet where it all started, just kind of being behind-the-scenes relevant. Those are the pillars of our story. Other planets will come into it, but those three-- there's nothing more important than the ones you've seen already.

Lance Alvein

To get us started, Brandon, do you want to give everyone a quick idea of what the cosmere is?

Brandon Sanderson

*laughs* Okay. So, here's what's going on: When I first was trying to break in—this was over ten years ago now, like fifteen—someone told me that your first five books were generally unpublishable. That was fairly good advice; I found that for most people it's really just your first novel; your second novel tends to get really good. For me, I did end up writing five experimental books that I never published; Elantris was my sixth book. Another piece of advice I got while I was working on it, however, was: you don't want to start with a big epic, the reason for that being is that you want to give a chance for readers to read something, you know, a single volume, or maybe one or two books before—so they can see, so they can trust you to finish a story before you jump into a big epic. It actually seemed like pretty good advice to me; it also works very well with publishing because approaching editors and things like that, you want to be able to send them a book, and if they reject it, but say, "Hey, I'd like to see something else by you; this wasn't the right project for me, but I like your writing." You can't really send them book two of that series, right? Because, you know, they want to see something new, and so I sat down to write a sequence of three or four standalone epic fantasy novels that potentially could have sequels maybe, but the idea was to make them standalone. But, kind of in my heart, I've always loved the big epic. You don't grow up reading Robert Jordan and Tad Williams and Melanie Rawn and people like this, without saying, "I want to do that." And so, what I started doing was actually building a hidden epic behind the scenes with all of these books, the idea being that there were characters who were crossing between the worlds that would have a story that someday I would tell that wouldn't be directly important to the book itself, but would lay the groundwork and give foreshadowing to something very large coming.

And so I designed this thing—you know, I'm a worldbuilder—I designed this thing with a sequence of planets and a story behind the story, and people crossing between them. And so, when I wrote Elantris, I embedded all of this in there, and then my next books were in that sequence jumping around—some were before, some were after—and things like this, so there are these continuing characters. Well, years and years later, I decided I would finally start writing something big and epic; I was tired of not getting published; I was tired of all the advice people were giving me; I had written a couple of books that were not very good based on the advice that people had given me. I said, "I just want to write my big epic," and that's when I started Way of Kings, and wrote that. And I'm like "I'll the launch into the big epic, some of these things are going to be more important to the series" It was kind of me honestly giving figuratively the bird to all of publishing, saying, you know, "You've told me that my books are too long, that two hundred thousand words is too long; I'm gonna write one that's four hundred thousand," so, you know: "I don't care; it's gonna be big and awesome and it's the book for me." I spent eighteen months working on this book, and right after I finished it, I sold Elantris. It sat on an editor's desk for a year and a half. He finally picked it up and read it, and tried to get a hold of me the next day wanting to buy it.

And so, suddenly I sell Elantris which I had written like five years before, which had all these things embedded in it, and I sent that editor The Way of Kings, because you know he wanted to buy two books from me. He's like, "Alright, the standalone is great; what else do you have?" so I sent him Way of Kings, and he panicked. *laughter* He was like, "Ahhhhh, this is huge, and what are all these illustrations that you're talking about, and I don't know if we can-- can we break this into like four books?" And I'm like, "No no, it's gotta be one book." And he's like, "Ahhh...." But fortunately for him, I didn't feel the book was ready at that point, otherwise I might have forced him to publish it. I felt my skill wasn't up to the task of doing that since I'd practiced only doing standalones up to that point, and so I said, "I want to do a trilogy so I can practice the series format; I've got a pitch on this book called Mistborn that I want to write for you." And Mistborn was the first book that I ever wrote knowing it would get published. So when I sat down to write Mistborn, I had already sold Elantris, and Elantris was coming out, and it all of this stuff embedded in it, and I'm like, "Do I keep going with that or not? Do I just go all in?" And so I decided to go ahead and do it, and so Mistborn has all of this behind-the-scenes sort of story things built into it, and there's a character from Elantris—it's the beggar that Sarene meets near the end—who is also in Mistborn, who is the beggar that Kelsier talks to, that they wanted-- pretending to be blind, that he gets information from, and then this character keeps appearing in all of the books as kind of a little Easter egg that was not so Easter-eggery because the fans found it right away. *laughter*

And so the cosmere is my name for this big universe, which is actually, you know, just a play on "cosmos"—it's not the most original word—but it's something I had actually come up with when I was a teenager, so, it's one of those relics that's in there that if I were to do it now, I might name it something a little less obvious. I don't know; it does work, and it is a fun name, so that's there. The character's name is Hoid, and there are other characters moving between the planets, and so there is a buried, deeper story to all of my big fantasies. The thing that I want to tell people, though, is that you don't need to read them in order because these are just Easter eggs; there's not a story there that you can really piece together yet. I don't want people to feel they have to read Elantris before Mistborn, or they can't, you know-- If you read them all, at some point you will have some little extra tidbits of information, but there's not something there that's going on that's chronological that you need to know about right now, but that's in a nutshell what's going on there; there is an underlying theory of magic for all of the epic fantasies that they all follow. I love the concept in science of the unifying law, right? If you guys have studied physics, there's this belief that somewhere out there there's a unifying theory that will unite all of physics, and because right now, you know, the things that happen on the macro scale don't really match what happen on the quantum scale, and you kind of have to have two sets of equations, and people believe that someday we'll find that link that'll put them all together, and that's fascinating to me, science is, and so I have a unifying theory of magic for all of my worlds that people in-world on various planets are figuring out with regards to theirs, but if they had all of the pieces they could kind of put it all together.

Questioner

Given Sanderson's Laws about limitations...

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Questioner

What would you say are any spiritual, cognitive, and or physical limitations to a Returned's healing ability?

Brandon Sanderson

That they can do it once.

Questioner

That they can do it once, and that's it?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, right? The Returned get one heal and then they die. That's a pretty big limitation. Like you have to choose really well. However, what they can heal is bounded by cosmere limitations on healing, but it is a supercharged version.

Questioner

Okay. Could you define more cosmere limitations on healing?

Brandon Sanderson

Cosmere limitations on healing can be affected by your own perception.

Questioner

Okay. Cognitive stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

Cognitive stuff. And so there's a part of that, and... But that's really-- cognitive interferes. And if your spirit is gone? Right? Cosmere healing, you know, if your spirit is passed on you just get a dead body even though you've healed it.

Questioner

So potentially Vasher, having a much greater cosmere knowledge than others could potentially have a much greater usage of that healing than regular--

Brandon Sanderson

Well the healing-- What I mean by that is yourself. You impose limits. So the person being healed can impose some limits on the healing working. It doesn't happen as often as I'm making it sound. But, you know-- why Kaladin's scars have not healed, right? So Kaladin being hit by a Returned would still not heal his scars. He's got a major hangup about those scars.

Questioner

When is the official timeline gonna get released for the whole cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

So, I only gave it to Peter, who is my continuity editor, like, in September. And that's the first time he'd seen it. I think it's gonna take a little while, he says he wants to go through in minutia and make it work. Plus there's major spoilers for things that Odium has done, and stuff like that.

Questioner

From the very beginning did you already know-- like cosmere? Like was that your goal setting out?

Brandon Sanderson

It was my goal very early on. In fact, before I wrote any books I wrote a short story about Hoid. So he goes back to before the very first book that I wrote. So yeah it goes back pretty far. I can trace inspirations back to Asimov tying Foundation and Robots together and feeling like that was really cool and wanting to do something like that, if it makes sense. And so I would say that’s probably like the first seed was when I read the later Foundation books and they tied them together.

Questioner

Before you started on all of your books, did you already have an idea of how they all came together or was it a sort of--

Brandon Sanderson

I did by the time I was writing Mistborn. But the thing you have to know about my career is that I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one. So, in a lot of those early novels I had no idea what I was doing, that's how authors are. By the time I wrote Mistborn, which was book number fourteen--it was the second book published--but I really had an idea of what I was doing then. Elantris had to be retrofitted a bit to fit into it, because Elantris had been written when I was still figuring things out, but by Mistborn the whole thing was coming together and I had quite a good idea of what I wanted to do.

Brandon Sanderson

Okay. The overarching story of all of my novels. I wrote thirteen novels in different worlds, all with their own different magic systems and own characters. But secretly I loved the grand epic, and so I started connecting all these worlds during my unpublished era, and telling a hidden epic behind them all that I was setting up for.

Well, eventually I sold book number six, and embedded in book number six was a bunch of this stuff for the hidden epic, of course, and six is actually one of the ones where I first started doing this. My first five were kind of throwaway novels. It was six, seven, eight, and nine that were really involved in this. Six was Elantris; seven was a book called Dragonsteel; eight was a book called White Sand; and nine was a book called Mythwalker, which eventually became Warbreaker, which I eventually rewrote and released as Warbreaker. So that four-book sequence was very ingrained in this kind of hidden story behind the stories. When I started publishing these books, I just kept it going, the hidden story, the hidden epic.

Questioner

I loved Firefight... what happens to Houston?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, what happened to Houston, yeah! *laughter* One of my favorite things is, like, destroying my favorite cities. I do this in my epic fantasy. If you've read The Rithmatist, I turned my hometown in Nebraska into the dark tower that all the evil comes out of. And Chicago, one of my favorite cities, has turned to steel. I just melted Houston. Because it's hot here, it kinda made sense to melt, but yeah. Sorry. *laughter* I apologize for melting you. But, y'know, you-- You probably got out. *laughter* You were smart enough to go "They're all evil. I'm going to go somewhere else." It was all those people from the political party you don't like that melted.

Questioner

I know you're doing a lot of sequels, and stuff like that, like other worlds. Are there gonna be any books about new worlds?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, there are still a few major worlds important to the sequence that I need to squeeze in somewhere.

Chaos (paraphrased)

Will Hoid's character arc, as well as the whole Adonalsium arc, get a satisfactory conclusion eventually?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It depends on what Brandon decides to do. We also might or might not get the rest of the story (pre-story). From a market standpoint it's not wise, simply because if the books require you to have read 32 other books before you read them it doesn't make sense to work on them. However, if the demand is high enough he MIGHT do them after all of the rest of the cosmere books.

Questioner

So with the cosmere, do you come up with stories and see if they fit? Or does the cosmere  kind of lend itself to stories already?

Brandon Sanderson

It's mostly the first. *audio obscured* When I come up with a story I'll ask, "Does this fit the cosmere?" and if not-- Like, for instance,  this one, that I read tonight [Perfect State], just doesn't fit the cosmere. I don’t want to be doing far-future science fiction stuff yet in the cosmere, and when I do, virtual reality is not a cosmere thing. So I can't write that as cosmere. Or the Rithmatist which I bounced back and forth. Would have been, could have not been. I just eventually decided it didn't fit the story. When things do fit, I put them in.

Questioner

Is that a really exciting moment? Or just sort of "Ohhh that's nice"

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, it's just like that. I like all my stories.  The Cosmere-- One of my rules for myself is "The Cosmere is not my entire body of work" because then I would just be shoehorning  things in and I've found sometimes when authors create a multiverse they shoehorn everything in. Stephen King did this, Asimov did this. It doesn't work. I think if it is an intentional thing I'm deliberately doing, then it gains more power, it's cooler than if I were trying to make everything connected.

ckannan90

I have a cosmere question. At the end of Words of Radiance, Szeth receives Nightblood. The wiki told me it was a sword from Warbreaker, but I didn't realize how significant it was till I read the book. This, to me, seems like the first major cosmere crossover. All the other crossovers so far seem to have just been cameos (Hoid tells stories, or there are mysterious people hunting somebody, etc). I will RAFO, but it does seem like Szeth getting the sword means Nightblood will play a not-insignificant role in Stormlight 3. Does this mean the cosmere books are going to converge more going forward? Specifically, would someone need to have read Warbreaker to understand Oathbringer? Till now your different cosmere series have been readable in any order (and I didn't read them in publication order). Similarly, Mistborn: Secret History seems to be a prerequisite for at least the next Mistborn book.

Brandon Sanderson

One thing you have to remember is that in my cosmere outline, Warbreaker was a prequel to The Way of Kings, explaining Vasher's backstory. So I consider them more closely connected than some other things. But you could consider this the first major crossover.

Nightblood will be re-introduced, so those who haven't read Warbreaker will be brought up to speed.

Thoughtsunthought

Wow. Cool to see this.

One of my "concerns" is that eventually the cosmere stuff will overwhelm the individual series arcs.

Kinda like the Marvel Avengers movies, whilst they are great on their own, they lose some of the individuality that an Iron Man movie might have. If the overall story adds characters then you may end up with a Captain America: Civil War movie which whilst was amazing. Wasn't really a Captain America movie and would lose so much to someone who had only seen Capt America movies.

That being said I totally trust your judgement on this, I say concerns but I don't mean in a bad way.

That being said is any book flagged for an Avengers style "battle for the cosmere"?

Brandon Sanderson

I do have some plans for mixing later on, though I'll be very forthright about when those books come out. Meaning, so long as I'm not talking about these things as the main focus of a series, you don't have to worry about it taking them over. Conversely, you can be very excited when it does happen, as those stories will be very clear about what they're attempting to do.

One thing I do try to warn people is that the cosmere isn't an "Avengers" style concept--the goal here isn't to collect a variety of heroes from a variety of worlds and then throw them at a problem. It's more of a, "What if you could watch the world of something like Star Trek develop, by seeing individual engaging stories from various planets, then slowly watching them merge into a larger universe."

While some characters will, obviously, continue on through the series, and the Vessels of the Shards will be very important, the focus of the greater cosmere storyline is the cultures, the magic, and the evolution of the planets, while the individual stories are about the people who live on them during turning-points in their history.

Brandon Sanderson

Hey, welcome to the Brandon Sanderson Frequently Asked Questions. We're going to take some of the questions I get the most often and record me answering them on YouTube. And our first one is, "What is the Cosmere?" This is indeed a frequently asked question. Most interviewers ask me this when I begin, though most fans have kind of figured it out by now. The Cosmere is my shared universe of epic fantasy stories. What happened is ... when I was 16-17 and was really getting into science fiction and fantasy, I read Isaac Asimov's later Robot books—later Foundation books, actually—he was combining Foundation with the Robot novels, and it blew my mind. I had never seen anything like this before. Now, granted, Marvel in comics and DC in comics had been doing shared universe for a long time with continuous continuity across multiple books. But in novels, Asimov was the first person I saw do something like this, and it really, really interested me.

Meanwhile, as I'd been reading these books, I really got into Anne McCaffrey's books, one of the very first authors I read, and then I got into Melanie Rawn's books, and then I got into David Eddings, and I got into Tad Williams, and I got into—I was just reading a lot of books. And however my mind works, I started to add my own characters to their books. It's a very weird thing. I've found out that other people do it too. So, I guess it's not individually weird, but we are collectively weird, those of us who do this. I would be reading a book and imagine a backstory to this side character, because I wanted to add something to the book, put something of myself into it, I guess. And then later on I'd pick up a different book by a different author and I'd be like, "Ooh, this side character, that's secretly the same person in disguise." And I started imagining this kind of back story where characters that I had devised were jumping between these different worlds and were having this big adventure behind the scenes where they were slipping in and out of other people's epic fantasy worlds. And I thought that was just really fun. It's something I continued doing all through my teens and 20s as I was reading. I still do this a little bit with games and books I read. I'll rewrite the story to match how I want it to be for me, particularly in video games, which gives me volition over my character. So, I figure I should be able to change what the character says, even if the dialogue option isn't there. My canon version of various video games is very different from the actual canon version.

Regardless, I had this character, Hoid, who was jumping in and out of books. When I started writing my own books in my early 20s, I started adding him as cameos to my books. I wrote 13 novels before I sold one. Book 6, Elantris, is the first one that got published, and it's the first time where I really sat down and said, "You know what? Epic fantasy is really what I want to do. Let's start building something here." And so, I wrote Hoid into that book. Then I wrote a book called Dragonsteel, where I jumped back, and I told his backstory on a different planet. Then I wrote something called Aether of Night a little bit later, where I delved into what had happened to some of those characters on a different planet far, far in the future. And I started building this thing that I called the Cosmere, which was an interconnected world of all these epic fantasy stories that people were moving around behind and jumping in and out of these worlds with different magic systems and different lore, but [which] all had some fundamental rules for the way the magic worked and where all these places had come from.

Well, eventually I sold Elantris, and Hoid was in there as a cameo. And I'd been giving a lot of thought to the Cosmere at that point. So as Elantris was getting published, I sat down and did an outline for the Mistborn trilogy, which I expanded to nine books in the middle of that outline and said, "what if I made this backbone series to the Cosmere", as I was then kind of officially calling it in my head. I went to my editor. I pitched it. I talked about Adonalsium, this god who was shattered long ago and sixteen individuals took up pieces of that god, the intents of the god, like that god's honor, or that god's sense of entropy, which was called Ruin, or things like this, and then went out into the Cosmere and were kind of ruling over these planets, or involved in these planets, or sometimes just lightly touching these planets. These sixteen Shards of Adonalsium, as we call them. And I grew, out of Mistborn and Stormlight, this idea for this large, super mega series, so to speak, behind the scenes.

Part of where this came from was me knowing that, as a new writer, pitching people on something that big was going to be tough. But if I could sell them a standalone novel like Elantris, they would be more likely to try that out, or a standalone trilogy like Mistborn. So, the whole goal was to have this hidden epic behind the scenes. And I wasn't even sure if I was ever going to get the chance to do more with it than just have it be cameos. You'll notice, if you watch for Hoid in the early books, they're just very cameo-ish. He briefly shows up here and there. In Mistborn 3 he's mentioned by name and you see him off in the distance. You don't even talk to him. This is because I wasn't sure if this was going to fly. One of the things that is difficult, particularly about storytelling back in the ‘80s and '90, was that you couldn't always rely on your audience being up to date with everything in the series. You couldn't expect them always to re-read everything. A lot of the books from the ‘80s and ‘90s will take a large chunk at the beginning to try to catch you up to speed in as non-annoying a way as possible. Well, that all changed once the Internet came around, and we were all able to just go look up summaries, or if we forget a character go to the wiki and find about them and things like that, which really is what I believe allowed something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe to actually exist and work, to have this deep and complex continuity.

And I was writing books just by happenstance that was doing all of this at the same time that this became a viable way of telling stories, at least a more viable way of telling stories. And people really latched onto the Cosmere and gave me the opportunity to really launch into it deep, so that there's a lot of interconnectedness growing between the books, as I always dreamed that I wanted to do but I wasn't sure if anyone would go along with me in it. And people have.

So, there's the long version of "What is the Cosmere?". The short version is it is my interconnected world of stories. But the long version is, it is the mega epic hiding behind the scenes, starring characters who make cameos in the other books.

Brandon Sanderson

I've watched this conversation with interest, and wasn't planning to step in, as it's exactly the sort of thread that's generally better without me. Author intervention can derail a good discussion.

But after considering, I decided I did want to talk about this topic a little. There are two things going on here. One is the mistake I made with Jasnah in Words, which I've mentioned before. One is a larger discussion, relevant to the cosmere.

Warning, WALL OF TEXT. This is me we're talking about.

You see, Jasnah wasn't originally meant to be a fake-out. Jasnah originally was going to go with Shallan to the Shattered Plains--but she was really messing up the outline, diverting attention from Shallan's character arc and pointing it toward Shallan/Jasnah conflicts instead.

My biggest breakthrough when outlining the book in detail was the realization that the book would work so much better if things I'd planned to do with Jasnah in it were diverted to later books. When that came together, WORDS really started working. Hence her jaunt into Shadesmar. I initially wrote the scenes with it being pretty clear to the reader that she was forced to escape--and it was super suspicious that there was no body.

In drafting, however, early readers didn't like how obvious it was that Jasnah would be coming back. I made a crucial mistake by over-reacting to early feedback. I thought, "Well, I can make that more dramatic!" I employed some tools I've learned quite well, and turned that into a scene where the emotion is higher and the death is more powerful.

HOWEVER, I did this without realizing how it mixed with other plotlines--specifically Szeth's resurrection.

We get into sticky RAFO areas here, but one of the biggest themes of the Cosmere is Rebirth. The very first book (Elantris) starts with a character coming back from the dead. (As I've mentioned before, a big part of the inspiration for Elantris was a zombie story, from the viewpoint of the zombie.) Mistborn begins with Kelsier's rebirth following the Pits, and Warbreaker is about people literally called the Returned. (People who die, then come back as gods.) The Stormlight Archive kicks off with Kaladin's rebirth above the Honor Chasm, and Warbreaker is meant as a little foreshadowing toward the greater arc of the cosmere--that of the Shards of Adonalsium, who are held by ordinary people.

Szeth's rebirth, with his soul incorrectly affixed to his body, is one of the things I've been very excited to explore in The Stormlight Archive--and the mistake with Jasnah was letting her return distract from that.

That said, you're not wrong for disliking this theme--there's no "wrong" when it comes to artistic tastes. And I certainly wish I'd looked at the larger context of what happened when I shifted Jasnah's plot in book two. (Doubling down on "Jasnah is dead" for short term gain was far worse than realizing I should have gone with "Jasnah was forced to jump into Shadesmar, leaving Shallan alone." I consider not seeing that to be the biggest mistake I've made in The Stormlight Archive so far.)

However, the story of the cosmere isn't really about who lives or dies. We established early on that there is an afterlife (or, at least, one of the most powerful beings in the cosmere believes there is--and he tends to be a trustworthy sort.) And multiple books are about people being resurrected. What I'm really interested in is what this does to people. Getting given a second try at life, being reborn as something new. (Or, in some cases, as something worse.) The story of the cosmere is about what you do with the time you have, and the implications of the power of deity being in the hands of ordinary people.

More importantly (at least to me) I've always felt character deaths are actually somewhat narratively limp in stories. Perhaps it's our conditioning from things like Gandalf, Obi-Wan, and even Sherlock Holmes. But readers are always going to keep asking, "are they really dead?" And even if they stay dead, I can always jump back and tell more stories about them. The long cycle of comic books over-using resurrection has, I think, also jaded some of us to the idea of character death--but even without things like that, the reader knows they can always re-read the book. And that fan-fiction of the character living will exist. And that the author could always bring them back at any time. A death should still be a good death, mind you--and an author really shouldn't jerk people around, like I feel I did with Jasnah.

But early on, I realized I'd either have to go one of two directions with the cosmere. Either I had to go with no resurrections ever, stay hard line, and build up death as something really, really important. Or I had to shift the conversation of the books to greater dangers, greater stakes, and (if possible) focus a little more on the journey, not the sudden stop at the end.

I went with the latter. This isn't going to work for everyone. I'm fully aware of, and prepared for, the fact that things like Szeth coming back will ruin the stories for some readers. And I do admit, I've screwed it up in places. Hopefully, that will teach me better so that I can handle the theme delicately, and with strong narrative purpose behind the choices I make. But do warn you, there WILL be other resurrections in my books. (Though there are none planned for the near future. I took some extra care with the next few books, after feeling that things happening in Words and the Mistborn series in the last few years have hit the theme too hard.) This is a thing that I do, and a thing that I will continue to do. I consider it integral to the story I'm telling. Hopefully, in the future, I'll be able to achieve these acts with the weight and narrative complexity they deserve.

If it helps, I have several built-in rules for this. The first is that actual cosmere resurrections (rather than just fake-outs, like I did with Jasnah) can happen only under certain circumstances, and have a pretty big cost to them. Both will become increasingly obvious through the course of the stories. The other rule is more meta. I generally tell myself that I only get one major fake-out, or one actual resurrection, per character. (And I obviously won't use either one for most characters.) This is more to keep myself from leaning on this narrative device too much, which I worry I'll naturally do, considering that I see this as a major theme of the books.

...

(Sharders, please don't start asking me at signings who has had their "one death" so far. This is me drawing the curtain back a little on the process, I really don't want it to become an official thing that people focus on. Do feel free to talk about the mechanics of resurrection though--it should be pretty obvious now with Elantris, Warbreaker, Szeth, and a certain someone from Mistborn to use as guides.)

Questioner

Will the tenth book of the Stormlight Archive be the last book in the cosmere universe, or there a plans to continue with other stories in the cosmere universe indefinitely?

Brandon Sanderson

So, the last chronological book of the cosmere sequence is the final Mistborn book. So the way that the structure works right now. Elantris, Mistborn era 1, Stormlight Archive first five, Mistborn era 2, Elantris 2 and 3, Stormlight Archive 6 through 10, the the final Mistborn era, is how I'm going. 

Right? Did I miss one? I missed an era. So, I'm going to do the Wax and Wayne era and the 1980s era kind of together, and mash those together. 

So, era 1, era 2/3, Stormlight 1-5, Stormlight 6-10, era 4 of Mistborn, is how it is right now. Era 4 of Mistborn will the the last chronological. We will have the flashbacks to Dragonsteel after Stormlight 10 but before era 4 of Mistborn. 

I do not intend it to go indefinitely. If I manage to get all of that done before I die, which I hope I will - I move pretty quickly, then there's a decent chance I will write other cosmere books that happen in the cosmere, probably during this time frame at some point, unconnected or only tangentially related and things like that. But I do intend that to be the final book of the cosmere sequence, and I have no plans for anything chronologically after that. 

Questioner

Did you mention Warbreaker in there?

Brandon Sanderson

Warbreaker is a side project. I do count Warbreaker, there will be a sequel to Warbreaker. But Warbreaker, Emperor's Soul, Silence Divine, all of these things I might write, the unnamed Threnody novel, these are not what I consider the core, essential cosmere books that I need to write. I need to do Dragonsteel, Mistborn, Elantris, and Stormlight, and that's like your core sequence of stories, and if I can get Aether of Night in there - I sure hope that I can - if I can get the Threnody novel in there - I sure hope I can - and some stuff like that.

The requirement I placed on myself is no more than three years between Stormlight books, with a slightly larger break between 5 and 6, cause the first five are an arc. But I'm hoping no more than five years there, but we will see. And gotta just keep moving, keep going, keep writing, so that my own mortality does become a factor in the cosmere sequence.

kdt05b

Can Megan manifest a Cosmere reality? The Reckoners is not part of the Cosmere, but one of they main character's power is reaching into alternate dimensions. I want to see some epics on Roshar!

Brandon Sanderson

I wanted to avoid multi-verse theory type things in the Cosmere, in part because the Wheel of Time delved into these concepts, and even before working on the WoT was looking for ways to keep the Cosmere distinctive from it.

Beyond that, multiverses (along with time travel) really play havoc with continuity. I felt the cosmere was stronger if I kept to the three Realms--that's complex enough. Assume that in the cosmere, while different possible futures/pasts do branch (and can be seen) things like Allomantic gold are NOT looking at other realities--and there is only one reality, once events actually occur.

This does mean that time travel into the past is not going to be a factor in the cosmere.

This separation does let me divide these concepts off and play with them in other realms (like the Reckoners) where they're 'quarantined' so to speak.

Questioner

Do you have intentions to have a conclusion to the Cosmere, or is it something that's going to be ever expanding?

Brandon Sanderson

I did build a conclusion in, and I will write toward it. My goal is to get to it before I get too old. And then if I want to still noodle in the cosmere, do planets that we didn't get to or things like that. So the cosmere main timeline that I'm working on, my plan is to try release a book every year or so in this main timeline. Depends on how long the Stormlight books are. *laughter*

Oathbringer rough draft was 540,000 words. A normal novel is considered 90,000-100,000. The Way of Kings was 300,000. This happens to us fantasy writers. It depends on how long the Stormlight books take. But the main line is 10 Stormlight books in two 5 book arcs. First 5 book arc, then there'll be a break in-world of about a decade. So it won't be as big as the Mistborn jumps. But there'll be a break in world and then we'll come back to it in book 6. And book 6 is where we kind of refocus on different characters, some characters go through the whole thing. Some characters kind of fade more into the background and new characters become the focus. So you can imagine it as two series set in the same world.

We have the mainline Mistborn series, which is taking Mistborn through a bunch of different eras, eventually landing us in science fiction, space travel. I originally plotted those as 9 books, but then I wrote the Wax and Wayne books as more part of that... But the ending of the Cosmere is the science fiction Mistborn trilogy. Chronologically, that's the last thing I have in the plot. That science fiction Mistborn trilogy is space opera. It's Star Wars meets the cosmere. That's our endpoint. 

Right before I write that I will do Dragonsteel, which is Hoid's backstory. Which is flashing back to the beginning of the cosmere, before Adonalsium was Shattered. So that's our time line. You'll get that-- So right now, it's finish the first 5 Stormlight books, do the 1980's level Mistborn books, next 5 of Stormlight, Dragonsteel, ending.

I'll probably work some Elantris books and a Warbreaker book in there but that's my main line. Anything that's not in there, like the Threnody novel and things like this, I plan to do but they have to fill a slot of a side project when I have extra time. Might be pushed to be a novella, instead. That's my main line plan. And that's plenty for me to do. And granted, I just finished book of mine number 42 or 43 or something like that, that I've written since I turned 21. So in 20 years, I wrote 40 books. That sounds like a lot but it depends on how long Stormlight books are.

*laughter*

Like, last year, I basically only did one thing. I had Snapshot and then Stormlight. Those take a lot of work.

Mateo Fileti

Do you have any plans of writing coauthored stories for the Cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Basically, my coauthorship slate is full, right now. I've found about where I can handle it, and it's about three people. Right now, it's Steven Bohls, Janci, and the Dan Wells projects we're working on. That's about all I can handle, where I can get back to people at a reasonable time, and things like that.

That said, I have left one asterisk on there. Well, I guess I'm gonna put two asterisks. Two different, separate asterisks. Number one is that if this is successful and people like it, then probably. There's a reason I'm trying this out, that the first one I did was not connected to any of my worlds, at all. (That was The Original, with Mary Robinette.) And then eased into picking up a series that I was planning just not to be able to get back to. The finally easing into one I'm actively working on. And I kind of eased into that, just to see what people are enjoying. And they seem to be enjoying the active, working-on one the most, of all of those. Which is a plus for doing Cosmere-related things. But, again, it's kinda gonna be: do people like this?

The other askerisk is: I have told Isaac Stewart he is welcome to write, in the Cosmere, anything he would like to, and I will coauthor it with him. I will work on it to make sure. Because Isaac was there from almost the beginning. Peter was the person who was working with me before the Cosmere was released, but I met Isaac in 2004, and Isaac started working with me on Mistborn art right then in 2004. I've told Isaac he can do whatever he wants; he's got a blank slate to be involved in the Cosmere in any way he would like.

Janci Patterson

There's one he's had kicking around for a long time that I really hope he writes sometime.

Brandon Sanderson

We're trying to find time for him to be able to do that.

I would say that there's a good chance you get some Cosmere stuff in the future, but it's not near-future. Near-future, I want to make sure that I'm supporting the things that I'm doing. It would be very easy, I think, to go all James Patterson, where suddenly I'm not writing anymore, I'm only doing this. And I don't think I would enjoy that. Not a dig against Patterson, but I don't want to go that direction.

Austin

How did you go about making all of your magic systems together in the context of the wider Cosmere in a way that feels natural?

Brandon Sanderson

I (like a lot of things related to the cosmere) had a leg up because I had written so many books before I got published. I had written thirteen novels before I got published, and among those novels were six or seven pretty decent magic systems. And I started to notice fundamental things that I did when building a magic system that were very common to my writing. And for a while, I'm like, "I want to make sure I'm doing lots of variety, so I'll push this further."

But I also kept noticing these connecting tissues, such as Intent being important behind the scenes to how the magic works, to the idea of the Three Realms. Realmatic theory showed up in Dragonsteel, which is the second Cosmere novel that I wrote and is based a little bit on Plato's theory of the Forms and things like that, but kind of taken my own way. And I always kind of start thinking of magic in that context.

And because I had designed all of these things and was noticing themes, I always asked myself, "Where does the power for the magic come from?" I'm going to bend the laws of thermodynamics, but I'm not going to break them; I'm going to have a different sort of power source. That's just fundamental to how I like to do magic. Where does the energy come from? So building a common energy source to all of these was the first thing that I started to do, just very naturally. And it's part of what made me want to link the Cosmere together. I kept having these stories where I wanted to tell stories about these kind of divine forces, the powers of gods put in the hands of mortals: what does that do? That's a common theme that started showing up in the stories that I was writing before I got published. And I said, "Well, if it's a theme, it's something you're really interested in, why not build it into the entire continuity?" And that's where the idea of the Shards came from, and creating Shadesmar and all of that. It grew out of things I did naturally and saw as themes in my writing.

And the linking then was very natural because they all were coming from the same essential power source, and they all had a few fundamental rules they were following. Mostly because that's how I build magic systems, right? If I have a problem, it's that when I try to build something that ends up not in the Cosmere, like Rithmatist, it still just basically works with Cosmere magic because that's a way that I build magic systems.

Good question, but like a lot of things, a lot of my career's success can be traced back to the fact that I was really bad at this when I started, and I got a long time to practice before I went pro.

Cosmere.es

We are more or less sure that, once you finish the last book from Wax and Wayne, this is going to have kind of an impact, maybe, on everything?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes and no. Wax and Wayne as a series, entirely, is more focused on the characters than the cosmere. Which is different from Era Three. Era Three, while it's very focused on characters, is more cosmere-focused. Remember, Wax and Wayne is the series I interjected. And I realized, as I was writing it, there were a lot of things I needed to do in it (that's good I started it), but they are mostly setup. You will get done with Wax and Wayne Four, you will know who Trell is. You will know what trellium is. You will know what's been happening there. But what it's not gonna do is give you definitive, cosmere-wide, large-scale changes. It is more going to be setting up and building for the big things that are coming next. So don't put too much pressure on the poor little Wax and Wayne series; they really are about Wax, Wayne, Steris, and Marasi, and kind of uncovering this stuff. You could consider it the buildup and prologue to the second large era of the Cosmere, if that makes sense. (Which, the second era of the Cosmere is basically going to be: third era Mistborn, second era Stormlight.)

DrogaKrolow

When was the concept of cosmere, one big Universe that connects all your stories was born? Do you remember the very beginning, the first thought of it?

Brandon Sanderson

I can start to talk about this because there's a couple of things. I remember being a teenager and reading books, and I would always insert my own characters into other writers' books. This is the beginnings of Brandon the Writer. So I would read, like, a-- an Anne McCaffrey book and I would insert my own characters and eventually Hoid started jumping between all the books I was reading. And so when I started writing my own books, I started inserting him myself. I blame that. I also blame how Asimov connected Foundation and the Robots series. When I read that it kinda blew my mind, and I wanted to do something like that.

I knew when I started writing Elantris I was going to do something like this, I wanted to start connecting everything together. I put Hoid into it and stuff like that, but as I've gone back through my notes, it was really during the years following that I really designed the cosmere. Like when I first wrote Elantris, I had no idea how I was going connect it all, I just knew I was going to. But like-- You know Shardpools. I put the pool in and then I'm like "I don't know what it is". By the time I got to Mistborn I knew all this stuff and fortunately Mistborn was the first one-- Mistborn I was working on when Elantris sold, right? And so I was able to go back and revise Elantris to make sure it matched everything that was coming for the future.

Though I do have to admit, when I first wrote Elantris, a lot of things I'm like "Ah this'll connect somehow. I'll put this in. Sure”.

DrogaKrolow

And by now, can you say that you already know how Cosmere will end?

Brandon Sanderson

I do know how The Cosmere will end, yes. I'm an outliner. It could always change. But I have-- So you know the core series, Stormlight and Mistborn, and the last book of The Cosmere is the last Mistborn book, which I have an outline for. So, we shall see. At least chronologically it's the last. I don’t know, I write a lot and so who knows. Yeah, you know, keeping track of it all, I’m sorry.

Questioner

This cosmere that you have is gigantic, enormous, and wonderful, by the way. But, it's one of those things... how long has that been kicking around in your head before you started putting it down on paper?

Brandon Sanderson

For those who aren't aware, and might just be here having read the Reckoners, all of my epic fantasy books are connected. But they're all connected through little cameos. And I did this before Marvel movies, let's just point that out! They're copying me, I'm sure. I'm sticking to that. But there's little cameos for the various things because there's a story behind the story. I started doing this because I knew, in my career, I was going to have to... just the way I am, I need to jump between worlds to keep myself really interested. But I also like big epics. So it's me trying to have my cake and eat it, too, right? Lots of little things, but a hidden big epic. Right now it's all cameos, you don't have to worry about it, it's never really relevant to the story. Each story is self-contained. And then, if you want more, you can dig into it, and... it goes pretty deep. The guy who bought the Emperor's Soul movie rights was like, "Oh, I hear that this is connected," so he went and started reading. And, like, a few months later, he called us and said, "Uhhh, I just read the whole Cosmere. Uhhh, my brain is breaking." So, you can jump down a rabbit hole with the Cosmere if you want.

So, how long has this been kicking around? I can trace it back to a couple of events in my youth, as a budding writer. First one was, I've talked about this idea that you're the director of the book when you read it. When I was a kid, what I would always do is, I would want to have some sort of... it's hard to explain. I wanted some control over the story, even though it was a book I was reading, I wanted to participate, and so I would always insert a character behind the scenes. Like, in the Anne McCaffrey books, when there's somebody who's a nobody, I'm like, "Actually, this is some secret agent type character," and things like this. And I would always insert these characters into the books. But I would even be like, "Oh, this is the character from this other book, that I'm now reading." I would have my own headcanon, is what you call it, that would be parallel to the book canon, with this story behind the story happening. I also remember really being blown away when Isaac Asimov tied the Robot books and the Foundation books together, and thinking that was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. Where I'd loved these two book series, and the conclusion to them is interwoven, and at the end of the Foundation books you kind of get a conclusion for the Robot sequence as well. That kind of blew my brain, and I'm like, "I need to do this."

So that's the origin, and that's kind of really the origin of Hoid. He's in the first book that I started writing, in very proto-form. He's kind of the same character who had been hanging out in Anne McCaffrey's books and other people's books as I'd read them. And that was it for a while, until I became a better writer, and then started actually building an epic. So, it's been around for a while. I would say the actual origin of the Cosmere was when I wrote Elantris, and then jumped back and wrote the book called Dragonsteel, which was this next book that I wrote after that, which was the origin of the Cosmere, kind of the prequel to all of it. And then I went and wrote White Sand. And those three together were my beginning. Only Elantris, of them, got published so far, although White Sand does have the graphic novel.

Questioner

Is Khriss planned to be a major character in the future of the Cosmere, or will she be more of a behind-the-scenes source of knowledge?

Brandon Sanderson

I do plan some more--some actual Khriss stories. I mentioned I had a Silverlight story in the back of my head--she would have been one of the viewpoint characters of that if I ever get to write it. She will be in the background of most everything, but I do plan a few stories, that will have her. She will come the forefront the more the cosmere comes to the forefront, and more interaction between them.

For those who were curious, my plan for the Cosmere all along has been - now that I have something to point to, people say is it like the MCU? And, yes and no. I'm not developing specific characters to bring forward, some of them will of course will still be be around. My whole goal with the Cosmere is to push toward something a little bit more like Star Trek or Star Wars, in that lots of different cultures, lots of different things--more Star Trek I guess - interspace situation, the conflicts that come between cultures and ideals and things like that, is what I'm pushing for. Rather than taking like the champions of each book and having them. So the characters are important, certainly, but when you're reading a given book series, that's where your characters are important. If you're thinking about the future of the Cosmere, think more about the clash of cultures, is where I'm pushing that.

Questioner

Do you ever feel limited by the commitment you've made with the massive writing of the Cosmere, or is there enough variety within the Cosmere to keep you happy and feel like you have some flexibility to do what you want to do with your writing ideas and preferences, especially as they change.

Brandon Sanderson

The answer is no. Fortunately, I designed the Cosmere as the thing I wanted to do, and I had essentially been writing the Cosmere for like, eight books before I sold. So I knew pretty well that I would have enough flexibility and things like this.

I am very excited by large-scale continuity connections between stories - watching eras come and pass in epic story-lines and things like that. I've never felt constrained by it. If anything, once in a while I feel constrained by contracts coming at the wrong time when I'm super excited by something else - like when a deadline is coming due and I'm like "I need to get off of this and write this other thing".And that's just a matter of - it's a function of the popularity that we enjoy that I've talked about before. I think that if I were - I'm not going to go back to this, but when I were a little less popular, the publishers would sit on books for like, two and a half years after I turned them in, to find the right place to publish them, or the right time. The bottom-line of the entire company was not appreciably affected by my book releasing.

Nowadays, the bottom-lines of companies are appreciably affected by my books releasing, so they don't sit on them. You don't turn in a Stormlight book and have it come out two and a half years later. Fans would probably have a heart attack if they knew we were doing that. But what it meant was that this buffer that I had vanished unexpectedly out from underneath us and so suddenly everything I'm writing is at the last moment that it could get - the last possible moment for it to be turned in, to be published, is generally when it's getting turned in. And this is just because people are really excited to get the books out. What that means is that things will happen where it's like, in an ideal world I don't think I would have gone straight from Rhythm of War into Dawnshard. It turned out to be okay because I was writing different characters, but I really like space between books in the same series as a way to refresh myself, and ideally I would have written the next Skyward book and maybe the next Wax and Wayne book and then done Dawnshard and then written the next Skyward book, and then come back to Stormlight.

But that just wasn't possible because of the timelines that I've set out. Dawnshard really needs to be out before Rhythm of War comes out, and because of that tight deadline then I'm on another tight deadline, which now means that writing the next Skyward book has to happen next because my YA publisher has been waiting very patiently without a book for quite a while, and while I probably would want to go to Wax and Wayne 4 next because I've been away from that even longer, Wax and Wayne 4 is for the same publisher that's now publishing Rhythm of War and they've got plenty to do and are plenty busy, and I need to get something to the other publisher.

These sorts of things are the annoyances of the reality of being a professional writer, but I never feel constrained by the Cosmere. I've never felt constrained by "Oh I promised ten Mistborn books or whatever" (30 seconds of figuring out how many Mistborn books. 13?)

So do I feel constrained by that? No I feel excited by that. That's never been an issue. Do I feel constrained by the fact that I really need to get Skyward 3 and 4 and Wax and Wayne done in time to get back to Stormlight 5 to have Stormlight 5 come out on a reasonable timescale - that, I do feel constrained by.

Questioner

Is Obrodai going to be the setting of Dark One?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. That is also a RAFO. Sorry, sorry! This is partially because Dark One pops in and out of the cosmere a lot, depending on which version I'm doing. It's been the hardest book. For those who don't know anything about, this is a book I talk about in my blog once in a while... It's like the Harry Potter story, except you get told "By the way, you're the Dark One who's gonna destroy the world, so we're gonna assassinate you while you're a teenager, so that never happens." It's a really cool story that I have never been able to get to work.

Questioner

*inaudible* one of the starts of one of the chapters... 

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, and Obrodai is one of the Shardworlds, but I keep hopping Dark One in and out of the cosmere. Sometimes it feels too self-referential to the fantasy genre to actually be in the cosmere. Because I don't want the cosmere to be self-referential, right? Whenever something gets even a little too silly, I'm like, "Nah, this can't be in the cosmere anymore." So, we'll see what happens.

Questioner

At what point did you go, "Elantris was good, Mistborn was good, now let's do 40 more books"?

Brandon Sanderson

So, a brief, brief history (writer's side, not the in-world side) of the Cosmere is this. So, Elantris was written without the cosmere in mind. This was-- Elantris was the first, kind of, book in my--

So, the way my history works, I was told early on that your first five books are generally terrible. And this was actually really relieving to me, because I'm like "Oh, I don't have to be good until book six." So I wrote five books as, just, lots of experimenting. Lots of different types of stories. And I didn't really even try, I sent one or two of them out, but I didn't really aggressively try to publish them. They were White Sand--not White Sand that you can get from my newsletter signup, an earlier version--which is my first book. And then Star's End, which was a little science fiction book, and then a sequel to White Sand, and something called Knight Life, which was a comedy. Yes. But bits of that got repurposed into Alcatraz. And then The Sixth Incarnation of Pandora, which was a weird cyberpunk, far-future thing. And I got done with all of those, and I'm like, "All right. I kind of know what I want to do. I thought it was epic fantasy. I now know it's epic fantasy." And then I wrote Elantris. My next books were Elantris, a rewrite of White Sand, and Dragonsteel. And this was kind of me exploring "What do I want to do? How do I want to-- What is my-- What do I want to add to this genre?"

But the idea of the interconnected universe grew out of doing these things, writing these books. I started planning The Way of Kings then, I started planning the book that became Warbreaker then. It was called Mythwalker at the time. And I wrote a book called The Final Empire and a another one called Mistborn, which are neither of the ones that you guys actually have read. What eventually happened, is when I sold Elantris, this whole thing of the cosmere had really come together, this is what I wanted to do, I was really excited by it.

And so, the first book that I wrote knowing about the cosmere was Mistborn. And Elantris got retrofitted into this as I was writing the Mistborn trilogy. And it was while I was working on the Mistborn trilogy that I made the nine book arc that is kind of the core, though-line of the Cosmere, the past/present/future Mistborn. I called my editor in... 2005 with a really big, exciting, sort of huge outline for 40 books (it was 32 back then), I'm like, "It's gonna be this, it's gonna be this, it connects here, and all this stuff--" That's when it all kind of happened, and I built that all out. It was the process of working on the Mistborn original trilogy and building out the nine book arc for those that really solidified a lot of these ideas. By then, I had written Dragonsteel, so I knew--- Dragonsteel was book number seven, so I knew about Adonalsium and all of this stuff, but it was really kind of in Mistborn where I decided how I was gonna incorporate all of that. And even then, even in Mistborn, there are still things that I was still putting together.

So, yeah. There's a brief history of it. By the time I had those three books done, 'cause I wrote them in a row, I was pretty solid on how all of this was gonna come together.

next191

One of the few criticisms of Rhythm of War is that more and more Stormlight Cosmere lore is getting pretty complicated, and it's harder and harder to follow along without understanding the whole Cosmere. Will this trend continue? Will we need a degree in cosmere-ism to read Stormlight Ten?

Brandon Sanderson

I try to write these scenes such that, if you want to let your eyes glaze over and read kind of to the end of them, generally people summarize "this is what we need to do." This sort of stuff, honestly, goes back to Elantris. This sort of stuff is going to show up in a lot of the Cosmere books. It is a fundamental tenet of how I'm creating the Cosmere. Rhythm of War was definitely the pendulum further along toward that aspect, with Navani being a main character, than a lot of them will be. But if we do write Khriss stories, you're gonna get a lot in the Khriss stories. All I will say is: don't interpret it as increasing in complexity the more the books are written. Interpret it as: as we get to characters that that is relevant to, their sections are going to involve more of that than others.

I see it increasing in all, a little bit, as we move along, but it really depends on who the characters are, what they're talking about, and things like this. My hope is that no, you do not need to. My hope is that you can (if it really is not your thing) skim those scenes, get an explanation at the end, and still know "okay, we need to do this thing." What I don't want it to be is just technobabble, also, that does not fit into the structure and worldbuilding. It is a fine line to walk, and I would accept... I think that criticism is valid of Rhythm of War, but it's one of those sort of things, like the first book having a steep learning curve, that is an aspect of the story that I'm trying to tell.

I hope not. I hope you will not need one. This is something I am aware of, and we will see. If it gets to be way too much, I think fans will let me know, and beta readers will then pick up on that and start warning me "maybe this is too much, Brandon." We'll see.

Argent

Do the constellations have actual names you can share with us?

Isaac Stewart

Clockwise from Threnody: the Mourner, the Dragon, the Fisherman, the Giver, the Lamp, the Knight, and the One Tree. The names are a bit generic, mostly because they are working names I used to refer to the different constellations during the process of painting the piece. It should be noted that the people from the spot in the Cosmere where the night sky does look like this would not see these pictures in the constellations nor give them these names. The pictures the patron saw in the stars here are based on their own observations and knowledge about the Cosmere as a whole. The locals would see entirely different pictures in their stars, for those who can even see the stars from their vantage.

One tidbit I should mention is that the lamp used to be a constellation called the Lover and was a man receiving breath from the Giver. I dropped it mostly because it's reference to Devotion wasn't working visually. Another thing to note: Not all the stars on this chart are physically within the Cosmere. Some are in the parts of Space beyond the Cosmere.

Questioner

Is Hoid gonna get his own book?

Brandon Sanderson

So, here's the grand Cosmere timeline as I have it right now... I'm going to write Wax & Wayne 4 this fall. This will be the end of the Wax & Wayne sequence. They have been really fun to write, those books. And I've got some really good Wayne stuff in this one, so be excited. So, I'll finish that, and that is the next Cosmere book I will do. January 1st, my requirement is I-- What I'm trying to do now, is I'm trying to do half my time Stormlight, half my time other stuff. That's the kind of balance I'm looking to do for my sanity. So, January 1st is when it's been 18 months since I turned in Oathbringer, and at that point, I have 18 months to get Book 4 done. So, I will start January 1st writing Stormlight 4, rain or shine. Everything else kinda has to be put aside. And then, we'll go until that book is done.

After Stormlight 4; at this point, the Wax & Wayne books are done, so we finally have opened up room to do either an Elantris sequel or a Warbreaker sequel. I'll do one of the two of those in between. And then we will do Stormlight 5. And then, we have the first sequence of Stormlight books finished. And at that point, my goal is to do Mistborn Era 3. Three of those. 1980s level, spy thriller-ish Mistborn stuff. And then we will come back and start on Stormlight 6. 6-10, different cycle. This is how I make sure this all kind of fits together. So, we will do that.

And at that point, we will do-- plan is, right now, the Dragonsteel sequence. Which is however many books I decide to do about Hoid's backstory. He has shifted to be the main viewpoint character of those. He was a side viewpoint character when I originally wrote them, but now I've kinda stolen all the pieces of that story that were not about him and put them in other books. So what remains is his backstory. I plan those to be first-person stories that he's telling, if I can get them to work.

So, then, we wrap out the Cosmere with the Mistborn science fiction series, the kind of Dune-esque far-future science fiction Cosmere thing. That is my grand timeline. Somewhere in there, I want to get one sequel to Warbreaker, two sequels to Elantris, and one Threnody novel. So, that's my goal. And that, I think, is doable before I die. We're just gonna keep that as our goal moving forward, and try not to add too much more to it, though there will be novellas and things like that as they pop up.

Questioner

You have two characters, Hoid and Vasher, who really stand out even if you don’t know anything about the cosmere. Are people who aren’t cosmere-aware going to be left wondering what the heck is up with them?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, probably. But it’s okay to have some mystery, I figure, as long as I don’t let the cosmere stories really distract. If there are occasionally things where you think, “That was weird, I don’t get that” or “That guy’s kind of different.” That’s fine. It’s when you start to feel like everyone else is laughing at a joke you don’t know, when you’re not part of something and you can’t understand the piece of fiction because of it, then we’re in trouble. Unless it’s a side story. Like Mistborn: Secret History, you’ve got to know the cosmere to get most of that, and that’s okay. But the main line books I will write in such a way that… So the Stormlight Archive is the story of Roshar. It’s not necessarily the story of all the different elements influencing Roshar. Maybe someday I’ll do one that has that, but I’ll be very up-front about it.

Brainless

If you had a chance to go back for Elantris and the early Mistborn books and stuff like that, would you potentially consider adding more crossover characters, because you did put Hoid in all of those, but would you potentially put other smaller things from other planets, like other worldhoppers, in it?

Brandon Sanderson

So, the cheeky answer to this is, I've read The Monkey's Paw, and I've read enough science fiction stories to know that if someone says "Do you want to change this thing about your past?" that you say "No." Because depending on the writer you are either going to end up in a horror story, or you are going to have to learn some lesson about how important you are, or your family is, and then it will all be a dream, so no, I wouldn't.

But really the answer is no, I wouldn't change. I like the fact that the cosmere has a very light touch on those early books. I like it in part because I feel like people who are just getting into my fiction, I don't want them to feel like they have to follow everything to enjoy one book. And yeah, I'm adding little bits more into Stormlight, but that's inevitable because so much will take place in Shadesmar, which by it's nature is far more cosmere-aware, and so we're going to have to do more things the further Stormlight gets and the further Mistborn gets, because it will become inevitable. And that's fine, I'm embracing that. The further we go in the cosmere, the more you're going to have to be on board for the idea of the crossovers working. But I don't want the initial books that you get into to have to be like that. I was very intentional with my light touch on those early cosmere books and I wouldn't go back and add more. Even Way of Kings, right? Has what has Hoid and Felt in it, and that's just about it.

Chaos

Felt's in Words of Radiance.

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, is he in Words of Radiance? He's not even in Way of Kings.

Several Questioners

*talking over each other*

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, you saw Galladon, you saw the seventeenth shard. So there's like one scene in the whole book, maybe two, depending, but Hoid isn't even very Hoid-like in that first one. It's the second one where he mentions Adonalsium and stuff—

Several Questioners

*correct the previous statement*

Brandon Sanderson

Is it the first one? It's the first one. It's that party at the thing with Dalinar. So there's two scenes in Way of Kings, and that's very intentional. By the time we get to the second stage Stormlight books, and the fourth stage Mistborn books, you'll just have to be on-board. But by then you're entrenched. If you're reading Stormlight seven, then the Stormlight series is already longer than everything else, so you might as well just've read everything else.

Questioner

Will we ever see an entire map of how the different planets are spaced out in the Physical--

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, yeah, the Cosmere collection will have a star chart of the cosmere.

Moderator

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Cosmere, if you will…

Brandon Sanderson

Now, you've got to remember that at the point that this comes out-- The collection's been interesting for a couple of reasons. For one reason, the collection's coming out before Sixth of the Dusk happens in the cosmere, right? And so Khriss gives an introduction to each world, so you'll find her introduction to First of the Sun to be a very interesting introduction that doesn't know things that you know because of that. In addition, the star chart is a star chart created by people who are not spacefaring, right? And so it is a star chart more along the lines of-- It may not be one hundred percent to scale and things like that, like they've been able to figure out a lot of things by using the Cognitive Realm, so they'd be like "alright, here's the relationship", but it will be a while before you get what feels like a Star Trek star chart. Your star chart you're gonna get in this is a fantasy star chart, which will give you the relative positions and things like that, but it's not gonna be like you can measure exactly, which we do have! But I'm not gonna give you yet. *audience laughs*

Moderator

Are you referring to Arcanum Unbound?

Brandon Sanderson

Arcanum Unbounded, yeah.