Are the three realms of Realmatic Theory are based or inspired by Viktor Frankl's dimensional ontology?
No. I was reaching more toward Platonic theory when I came up with those, and the idea of a place where everything exists in a perfect version of itself, and that was where my mind was going when I was developing this.
If you had creative input on a Stormlight Archive adaptation, how would you design the music of Alethkar? Which regions or instruments would inspire you or have inspired you while writing in the world?
One of the core inspirations for Alethkar is medieval Mongolia. And I don't know if pulling from things like throat-singing is going to just be too immersion-breaking for people, but that's the first place I'd start looking. Really, I kind of imagine the Alethi... if you're really getting down to their core influences, it's kind of like when the Mongolians conquered China, and Kublai Khan and that era, where the Mongolians became empire-builders rather than just conquerors and raiders. And that's what I was looking at specifically, kind of, in the Dalinar/Gavilar era, where it's like, "We were these kind of ruffians. And we got some momentum and had a leader with vision, and suddenly we made a kingdom out of a bunch of different groups. Reforging a kingdom that used to exist. But now we have to deal with running a kingdom." Which Genghis Khan never had to do. Genghis Khan was all about "we ride in, we pillage, then we ride off with the goods. We're not interested in empire building." So that whole concept interests me a lot.
And then, of course, there's also a lot of Middle Eastern influences on the linguistics for the Alethi, and kind of some of their scientific learning and things like this is leaning on those medieval-era Islamic scholars, and things like that, are a bit of an inspiration. Though I've said before, Shallan's more Pliny the Elder, so that's reaching back a little bit further.
I would look around for those sorts of things. Really, I would want to hire someone who's just really good at this and let them research into it. I would probably give them an explanation like I just gave you, and then let them look at it, and let them dig into it. Because my music theory is very surface-level.
Was Lasting Integrity inspired by Escher, or the movie Inception, or something else?
I'm sure that both Escher and Inception had a role in that. Absolutely. Though, curiously, I was writing these weird walk-on-the-walls things long before I saw Inception, so it's probably both kind of reaching toward the same dream-like state. One of my earliest stories involved this surface-specific-gravity stuff, and I read a little bit from a later story that did the same thing. (The story I read at the launch party, The Sixth Incarnation of Pandora.) That dream-like quality. I wanted something about Lasting Integrity that said, when you got to it, "This is just not part of our world. This doesn't feel like it could be in the real world. The laws of physics are different here. And it's inhabited by beings that see the laws of physics in a different way." And that was what I was reaching for in creating that situation. Where my inspirations were? Probably all over the place. But Escher is definitely an inspiration there. And some of those descriptions in the Harry Potter books, of how the stairwells in Hogwarts work, I'm sure, were partially inspirations.
Was there any trepidation before putting a graphic novel in the cosmere?
Yes and no. Basically, it was the trepidation of: "We want to do graphic novels, but we haven't done them before. So how's it gonna work? Can we do it?" These sorts of things. It was less worrying about the cosmere, and more just worrying if we were gonna do a great graphic novel.
And I think it was a learning experience. I don't think White Sand turned out great. I think the revisions that Isaac's doing in putting the omnibus together hopefully will get there, but that's as much our fault as it is the fault of the people who made it. Like, Rik Hoskin (who wrote it) was fantastic; we really enjoyed working with him. And all the people at Dynamite were great. It just didn't convey Sanderson-style worldbuilding in the way that the novel does. But we're hoping that the omnibus (Isaac's put a lot of work into the omnibus) will do that.
And I think that my opinion on it is kind of shared. If you go on Goodreads, the responses are: "Eh. It's okay." Which is not what we want to have. But I don't know that it was trepidation for the cosmere as much as us knowing "graphic novels are gonna take some work." Dark One is just a lot better; and hopefully the White Sand omnibus will be up to that level of quality.
I do appreciate those who supported it, because it's basically you financing us figuring out how to do this, and hopefully then eventually learning how to get you more cosmere stories in different formats. It would have been much safer to pick one of my novels that was already out and finished and do an adaptation (which is what people normally do), but it just wasn't interesting to us. We want to be telling new stories, not telling the same stories over and over again.
How often do you wish you could go back and change something in one of your published works? Even something as small as a piece of dialogue or the name of a character or place?
I go back and forth on this. At the end of the day, I've kind of settled on "I'm fine not changing things." We do change things; every time we do an update for, like, a leatherbound or something, there are little continuity things we are going to tweak here and there, and I've talked about them kind of at length on stream. Way of Kings, we cut out a few of the references where I had made metaphors to things that characters in-world just wouldn't make metaphors to, because I had not written in Roshar long enough to really settle into how to use the language right for them. So that sort of stuff.
Large-scale changes, though, I've kind of decided that the books have to remain a snapshot of who I was when I wrote them and not become a continual work in progress, constantly having fundamental style and narrative changes. The artist in me wants to. Totally wants to. Wishes that that were normal for books. But the fans need to be able to rely on... if they've got a first edition copy of Way of Kings, that things are not going to fundamentally change between editions. A line here or there might get tweaked to work better or to fix continuity errors, but it's still gonna be the same book. And I kind of just have to accept that as an artist. Creating this large-scale thing that is the Cosmere, there's gotta be both give and take here. The give from me is: acknowledging some of the earlier books will end up being the weakest as I get better as a writer and as I understand what to do with the Cosmere. But the take is that I can kind of continue to give context to those earlier books by developing the rest of the Cosmere in interesting ways.
Is Investiture with its deep, inherent connection to sounds/tones/rhythms inspired by a sort of magical version of string theory and its idea of vibrating strings making up everything?
Yes. I would say yes. A direct inspiration. (In my own goofy way, as I tend to do.)
If you could be given one object from your books and brought into the real world, what would it be? And why?
The Bands of Mourning would be pretty handy. They might be the single most powerful object that is an actual object. Unless you count, like, the Well of Ascension. I don't know; the Well of Ascension's, like, less an object. The Bands of Mourning might be it, though I'd be hard-pressed not to pick a living Shardblade, assuming that they could turn back into the spren. If having a living Shardblade meant that the spren came through and could bond with me and I could have my own cool spren and Shardblade, that would be pretty awesome, even if I couldn't get a hold of Stormlight to power it, that would be pretty cool.
You wouldn't bring Nightblood?
I don't think I would bring Nightblood here, no. I do not think that I would bring Nightblood here.
Which Cosmere character would make the best political candidate?
Here's the thing. Best candidate is not the same as best... Who would be best in the office? Because Taravangian could probably do a really good job of running a candidacy. Jasnah could probably do a really good job in the right circumstances.
If I had to put one completely in charge? Sazed is a good choice. And he would be my default choice. Sazed would never run for the office. But he is a good choice.
We joke the best politicians are those who don't want it; I don't know that that's actually true. I think that there are definitely people who could very much want it, and that wanting it is an advantage. I joke that I'm gonna vote for Emily's dad, who is just a good person, but he would never want to be President. And I don't know if he would actually make a good President because of that. And there is something to be said for political experience, experience being in the public eye, and being the type of person who seeks it out because you know you can deal with it, because it is not easy to be in the public eye (even as a novelist who writes stories about knights who live in space, or whatever). It can be difficult. Someone who's self-selected can be a bad thing, but it can also be a really good thing, I think. So somebody who wants it, who understands how politics works, and things like that. And in that case, Jasnah becomes a better choice, because Jasnah can navigate those political systems and can be in the public eye and make difficult decisions, but also has a moral grounding for the things that she's deciding.
But Jasnah's also a little dangerous. The scene in Book One with Jasnah and the thieves is supposed to make you a little worried about the way that Jasnah views power.
Sarene, she would be a good choice after she's had a little more experience. She's not as good as she thinks she is, is the problem with Sarene.
Elend is a good choice. Elend is a political theorist, and particularly if you get him at the right point after some world experience has forced him to see some other perspectives, he might actually be the single best choice, now that I think about it, to just make into President.
Have you ever talked with another author and found a fun opportunity to drop a small easter egg in each others' universes? Something small that only big fans of both would notice?
I haven't ever done this yet, I don't believe. I know of friends doing it. The closest I've gotten is just kind of dropping my friends into my books in little cameos. I would totally be on-board for doing this, but I just haven't had the chance, haven't had the right thing. I mean, I've done it in my own works; there's a line in Alcatraz where I'm proving how bad a person a character is using great rhetoric and exaggeration, and I believe one of them says "she killed Asmodean!" or something like that, which is a reference to the Wheel of Time (which I also worked on). But I don't think I've done it with another person's books. I haven't done a cool thing like where E.T.'s race shows up in Episode [I] of Star Wars, or something like that. It would be a lot of fun to do something like that. The reason it's so fun in Star Wars is because we know that those two are friends; Lucas and Spielberg have worked on many things together, so there's just something kind of wholesome about that. Where if I dropped a reference to E.T. in my book, it'd be fun; but it's not the same sort of "here's my friend's cool science fiction story showing up crossing over with mine."
The trick is, I don't want to break immersion in the Cosmere, and I've been very careful to try to not do that. That doesn't mean I don't stick my friends in the books though, and things, so I'm sure we could find a place for something like this. I just wouldn't want it to draw too much attention, to break immersion.
