Salt Lake City signing

Event details
Name
Name Salt Lake City signing
Date
Date Dec. 16, 2017
Location
Location Salt Lake City, UT
Bookstore
Bookstore Sugarhouse Barnes and Noble
Entries
Entries 26
Upload sources
#3 Copy

Brandon Sanderson

I once--don't do this--I once lit a book on fire. Because I was reading at night, and my mom kept turning my light off so I got out a candle and I was reading by candlelight. And the book started on fire. Yeah, so don't do that.

#5 Copy

Questioner

I was wondering, with resonance. Is that a sort of constructive interference?

Brandon Sanderson

Constructed? No. Resonance is more about the way-- It's more of a natural interference.

Questioner

So what I mean like, you have two waves, right? And if their troughs, you know--

Brandon Sanderson

Okay, is that the formal term? For the constructed.-- Oh constructive? I thought you had said-- yeah. So yes, I would say that that is an accurate phrase. I mean obviously it's not exactly the same thing. But yeah, that's what I was looking at when I was building it, was kinda things like this with waveform patterns and whatnot. So yes. At least, it was inspired by this kind of idea.

#7 Copy

Questioner

So Voidbinding is-- one part of Voidbinding is seeing the future. And atium is also seeing the future. And I notice annotations for Elantris, you said something about seeing the future could go weird-- sends assassins. Is that a running--

Brandon Sanderson

It is a running theme in the cosmere. And it's-- Whatever path you take to do it is dangerous in the cosmere. It's kind of a sign of-- You are in dangerous territory, and drawing upon a Shard that is--

Questioner

Potentially...

Brandon Sanderson

Potentially-- Yes. I mean to say-- Dangerous territory.

#8 Copy

Questioner

So Roshar is pretty small on the map. Are there other species on the planet that we don't know about?

Brandon Sanderson

Roshar is primarily the one continent. There are no other continents.

Questioner

No other continents?

Brandon Sanderson

No other continents... There are no other major landmasses on the planet.

#10 Copy

Questioner

In our universe, mass and energy curve space. I was wondering if Investiture does the same or something similar.

Brandon Sanderson

It does something similar. It draws the three Realms together. So it's got like-- Imagine a gravitational pull piercing Realms. Right? Of kind of--

Questioner

And that's how a perpendicularity works?

Brandon Sanderson

That's not the only way a perpendicularity works, but one surefire way to create a perpendicularity is a massive collection of Investiture in the Cognitive or mostly Physical realm. But Cognitive's weird, doesn't always work the right way. But there are ways to do it that way too.

#15 Copy

Questioner

Do you have-- Or have you determined an equivalency between how much Breath it takes to make a certain gem's worth of Stormlight?

Brandon Sanderson

I have recently assigned Peter to this task, and he is feeling overwhelmed by it. It was actually during the writing of Oathbringer where I finally said, "Yeah we need to standardize this, so start working on it." So it was like, "Oh great". Which means he has to read through all the books for references and start figuring it all out. And we're going to need like an equivalent of a jewel or something like this, right? *gestures to a sphere that a fan made* And we've been putting it off because it sounds like an awful lot of work. 

So the answer is no, we don't have it yet. It's something I've known for years we're going to need. And on this book, I just started saying, "All right.  I'm going to have them do all the stuff they need to do. And then you're going to tell me how many spheres they need to start with." Right? Like, I write the book, and then we retrofit how many spheres they needed to have how much Stormlight, so that we could be consistent with that.

But we haven't done across magic systems calculations, yet.

#16 Copy

Questioner

Do you have, like on-- Like the actual gem inside a Stormlight sphere, do you have an idea of how large it actually is and--

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, we do have an idea of that, and how much it can hold, and things like this. And that's all known so that's going to start with the basis. But it's going to take math, it's going to take real math.

Chaos

Math is hard!

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, math is hard! And we're going to have to look at things like-- Yeah just make stuff up then make Peter shake his head.

#18 Copy

Questioner

Speaking of Rosharan calendar-- So seventeen year old Kaladin, is he the equivalent of a seventeen year old Earthling?

Brandon Sanderson

It's 1.1, I think is what is it. Right, they're 10% older than their accounting system. So no.

Questioner

So Adolin is 27, true?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah.

Questioner

So then a year is obviously a lot more than 1.1 but--

Brandon Sanderson

Well no. The years are 500 days, but they're 20 hour days. Keep that in mind. So when you run the calculations kinda together, you end up with around 1.1.

#19 Copy

Chaos

Is atium Invested?

Brandon Sanderson

Is atium Invested? Atium is Investiture distilled into the Physical Realm, right? So is electricity electric? Or is it--

Chaos

Well I think the question Sharders had was if it's Invested, how can people Push and Pull on it. That was the struggle.

Brandon Sanderson

Atium breaks a lot of rules, in the same way that you will see other things break rules. Atium plays weirdly. When you get distilled Investiture, you're starting like-- My kind of rule for myself is it's kind of like when you start going on the quantum level, the rules just start playing weirdly. Because it's like, what Realm does atium exist in-- is another thing. Because-- Pure Investiture like that is like a mini black hole, right? It's like existing in three Realms at once. Kind of, and things like that... There's lots of weirdness.

The writerly answer is there is lots of weirdness because when I built atium, I didn't have the rest of the cosmere built, right? And so it breaks a lot of rules that I later set up that everything else has to follow, right? So the writerly answer is we just have to accept that atium and lerasium and some of these other distilled Investiture things are going to play very weirdly with the magic systems. But that's okay. Nightblood will too, and some of these things that were built even after the cosmere was coming together.

#20 Copy

Questioner

When Marsh and Sazed go to the Conventical of Seran, Marsh kind of tells Sazed, "You go do whatever you want, I gotta go do something, I'll be back." What was Marsh's purpose there? Why was he there?

Brandon Sanderson

I intend to do some Marsh stuff, from his viewpoint, eventually. I don't know if I'll ever get to it. There is actually something there. There is something that I intended to leave a place for me to play later on with. So the answer is a RAFO, but a legitimate RAFO. Not a "I'm trying to lead you on," or a "I don't feel like answering this right now."

#21 Copy

Chaos

So, at the Forbidden Planet signing you said that when Adonalsium was Shattered, all Investiture in the cosmere was associated to one of the Shards... So, what happened with Adonalsium's spren on Roshar? Were those associated to Honor and Cultivation? What happened with them?

Brandon Sanderson

So they were very-- They were already associated to certain parts of Adonalsium and they went with those associations. There's a lot of Cultivation in all of the spren, particularly the natural spren.

#22 Copy

Questioner

I was wondering if Sleepless-- the Dysian Aimians-- if they could hold a Shard?

Brandon Sanderson

Could the Sleepless hold a Shard? Could they be a Vessel? Is what you're asking?

*hems and haws* There is nothing innate about the Shards that prevents any one with a-- I have to phrase this very carefully...

Non-humans can be Vessels. Non-humans have been vessels. Certain sapient creatures in the cosmere, could not be. But that's an asterisk, not the rule.

#23 Copy

Chaos

Is Uli Da a Sho Del?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah.

Chaos

Can we post that?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah you can go ahead and post that. That's fine.

Chaos

I figured that from the...

Brandon Sanderson

Right, the naming convention makes it really obvious. 

Chaos

But that's not posted on the Dragonsteel sample so...

Brandon Sanderson

Right. But that's canon. It's pretty obvious to me... And so it's fine with me canonizing it. I mean, I've been coy with it for years. But when I say there are Shards that aren't human. There are three races on Yolen... Adding the math together is going to get you a pretty obvious answer.

#24 Copy

Chaos

If you could take a Shard, what would be the one that you would want? If you were forced to take a Shard, you couldn't refuse?

Brandon Sanderson

*Mmmmms for a time*

Chaos

Feel free to name another one if you want to...

Brandon Sanderson

I've only got a few left that you guys don't know about.

Chaos

There's six.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah okay. So I haven't said-- yhm. *laughter* I would take one that I haven't talked about, probably. But, of the ones I've talked about--

I don't know-- What one would be the most fun? Endowment would be pretty fun. Autonomy? No, probably not that much fun. A lot of them aren't very fun. Let's go with--

Chaos

You mean Autonomy isn't fun? Splitting into different aspects?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, that is fun, I suppose. Yeah. *unenthusiastic* Yeah...

Event details
Name
Name Salt Lake City signing
Date
Date Dec. 16, 2017
Location
Location Salt Lake City, UT
Bookstore
Bookstore Sugarhouse Barnes and Noble
Entries
Entries 26
Upload sources