Questioner
Have we seen Wayne in any other series besides Era 2?
Brandon Sanderson
No, you haven't. Good question!
Have we seen Wayne in any other series besides Era 2?
No, you haven't. Good question!
So Kaladin's in charge of the Windrunners, right?
Yes.
Is Lift in charge of the Edgedancers?
You'll have to see in the next book. Lift is the first Edgedancer they've found. Lift is not so good at being in charge of anything... So I wouldn't probably say the first one discovered has to be in charge. Different Orders of the Knights Radiant lend themselves to different styles of organization. Like, some of them are a lot more disorganized than the Windrunners, who you'll see have a very militaristic organization to them.
At Emerald City Comic Con earlier this year, you stated that Singer gemhearts are a "milky white" color, and looked like bone/bone marrow. You also said they were related to something in Dragonsteel. Having read the sample chapters of The Liar of Partinel a while back, I couldn't help but be reminded of the skullmoss, which is a bone-white color. Are the singer gemhearts related to the fainlife in any meaningful or important way?
Yeah they are very similar to Tamu Keks.
Tell me Rand went to the Wise Women.
I believe he did. Absolutely. Now Robert Jordan did not say for sure. He just wrote what he wrote. But if I have any influence over it, yes.
Who is Vin modeled after? Is she modeled after a real person?
She was not... I don't think there was a specific model for Vin.
If you could have any two characters cross over from different series, which ones would they be?
Well, you will be seeing that as it happens, right? Because Stormlight and Mistborn are in the same universe, so you will see. If it were not limited to the Cosmere, then I'd be very interested in seeing Moiraine from The Wheel of Time.
At the present who is Odium more afraid of? Harmony, Dalinar or Hoid?
Harmony. Odium is extremely confident that he can out-smart Hoid
Is Hoid's real name Cephandrius?
No, but it is one of his earliest aliases.
You've always said that your favorite sort of magic was being a Coinshot or being a Windrunner because you really want to fly. So I thought that iron Feruchemy you can fly using just iron Feruchemy. So if you had a paraglider and a place to jump off of, you're paragliding, go downwards, your momentum increases, you increase your weight when you're going downwards. You pull upward and then you decrease your weight. Your velocity will increase and you'll go up--
We have thought about that. I'm not sure if the math-- Like, we're trying to conserve momentum. We're trying to follow the math of that. So the question is, would that work? It probably would, but I'd have to look at the math. Because I tried to make very clear in the Wax and Wayne books that we conserve momentum...
Really what we're doing is, we're breaking potential energy, right, when we're doing this. Because iron Feruchemy is just the weirdest of all of them. Because we're breaking potential energy, what you just said probably works, doesn't it.
That was in context with the thing I was saying yesterday, about Feruchemical savants. If you did that every day for years, would you potentially get to the point where you could potentially make one side of your body heavier than the other side?
...There are many people in the cosmere who would think this idea has merit and they would want to test it.
In your magic systems, they all require the character to go over a great stress before they obtain that-- Do you use the concept of the price that comes with magic in a plausible magic system when you came up with that idea, or was it more about the idea of flawed characters are awesome?
In the cosmere magics, a lot of times in order to get the magic, there needs to be-- the internal logic argument is: Souls, once they have gaps in them, those gaps can be filled with other things, which often give you access to magical powers. Great trauma or stress--this is an age old fantasy idea, goes back many many years in the genre--will let you attain some of these powers, kind of as a balancing thing and mostly this is for narrative reasons.
Flawed characters are just way more interesting to write, and I gravitated to it pretty naturally as I was building the magic of the cosmere. And I would say it was mostly narrative reasons, as opposed to, when I was building the magic, some rule that felt like it needed to be there. But it's also a little of a balancing factor. It's trying to build into--whoever asked the question about the god--having god-like powers, but their flaws making it hard for them to use it.
It's a check on giving the powers to my characters, if I make sure to establish, this character has some holes in their-- some gaps and flaws in who they are, that might make them use their powers wrong once they get them, and that is in some way a narrative check on that, if that makes sense.
How do you do the Bridge Four Salute?
It's very similar to the Wakanda salute. When they did that movie I'm like, "Oh no!" If we ever do get a live action thing, they'll probably have to do it differently. But I've always done it out in front. *Does the salute*
Like that.
The fandom found out about The Way of Kings pretty early on. I don't know how this happened, but Amazon put up a listing for it in like, 2006. The book was eventually published four years later. I hadn't written it in 2006. I'd written a version of it that I sent to my editor at Tor when he wanted to buy Elantris. I said, "Here's the other thing I'm working on."
And he read Way of Kings and he called me back, terrified. Because it's 400,000 words long. Well, the print version is 300,000 words. And they say, you should shoot for maybe 120,000 for your first novel. So it's big, and I had all these notes for this art I wanted to put into it. So it was going to be really expensive to print, really expensive to edit. And he called and he was like, "Uhhh can we cut this? This is enormous!"
And I'm like, "No we can't cut it but it's not right yet." So we did a contract for Elantris and Mistborn. We never had a contract for Way of Kings. I don't know how anyone found out about it, but Amazon put up a listing for it anyway...
So the fandom started putting up fake reviews for this book. And they also devised fake pictures of it. Amazon has this Show Your Version. So they printed off fake covers and put them around books and took pictures and sent them in. So eventually, Amazon just put one of their covers up as the cover. And it had a picture of Elvis on the front. It was called The Way of Kings. And it had a quote from Terry Goodkind that said "A hunka hunka burning good book!"
This is what happens when you give fans a blank space on the internet and say "Fill this!" I didn't ask them to do this by the way. They just did this. I just started looking and people were like, "This book cured my dog's cancer!" Stuff like that! You know how they are.
How advanced is astronomy on Roshar? Because it's something you haven't really talked about, and I'm thinking--
Depends on the region. Some people, the astronomy's getting moderately well.
Surely they've seen Ashyn and Braize in the sky, and I'm wondering how long it will be before they start detecting signs of civilization on Ashyn.
That would depend on a couple of things, such as, the easiest way to detect civilization is with radio waves, so-- You need some good telescopes. I don't think that would be, even if they spotted it, as revolutionary as you might think it would be, because we thought there were people on all of our planets for most of the history of mankind, and it didn't really affect how we viewed cosmology. I think if you went to Roshar and asked them, they'd be like "Yeah, totally, people live on those planets. Obviously." Just like if you went back and said "Do people live on the moon?" in the 1700s, people would be like, "Yeah probably, seems like they must."
Could someone, using Investiture the right way, could a transgender person use Investiture to change their body to match--
Yes.
In Way of Kings, Jasnah recommends to Shallan the Devotary of Sincerity. Their motto is "There is always something more to discover." That sounds very similar to our favorite Mistborn psychopath's saying; is Kelsier connected to that at all?
RAFO.
Is the Cognitive Realm on other planets called Shadesmar?
For simplicity's sake in translation, for the most part, we are going to use the word Shadesmar, acknowledging that in some of the languages it may be a different word. But the cosmere standard used in Silverlight and things is Shadesmar. That's just for ease of talking about it but the scholars in Silverlight they use the actual word Shadesmar. I'm going to force Eric to do some heavy lifting for me on some other things like this.
<Expresses that not everyone will be pleased about this WoB>
Yeah I suspect that as I move into Era 4, Cognitive Realm might start replacing it, the more scientific term, but Shadesmar is the colloquial term.
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?
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.
Felt's in Words of Radiance.
Oh, is he in Words of Radiance? He's not even in Way of Kings.
*talking over each other*
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—
*correct the previous statement*
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.
Speaking of the cosmere, because it's this multiverse that's the setting for all these different epic fantasy series, do you ever feel restricted by the cosmere in a sense of sort of wanting to do with a plot or the magic or wanting something really epic to happen but be like, "Wait that's not legal in the system I've created?"
It doesn't happen very often because, most of the times in my outlining process, I notice these things and I move something out of the cosmere. If it's just not going to work with the cosmere magic, it just doesn't have to be cosmere. And I'm really glad I gave myself that freedom because I think that you can get too locked in, right? If I'm like, "Everything has to be cosmere!" then either I'm going to break it, which is going to decrease the value of the continuity, or I'm just not going to be able to write some books that I'm excited about. And I don't like either of those options.
And so being able to say, "You know what? This magic that I'm working on for FTL does not match any of the ways that the cosmere FTL could work. I'm going to move this out of the cosmere." That's what happened to Skyward. Skyward was in the cosmere for a little while, but then I moved it out. I'm like, "No this matches other stuff better. I'm going to go with this FTL, that is not a cosmere FTL." That frees me like--
Skyward is a science fiction space opera, starship pilots and things like that. And if I would have done this in the cosmere, I would have just had to avoid talking about things that would be spoilers for other cosmere books, which would have been terrible, right? So either you have the Skyward books that have their hands bound so that I can't give spoilers, or Skyward gives all the spoilers, and then cool things happening in the future of the cosmere are just like, "whatever". I take option number three, which is I'm just not going to do this as a cosmere book because obviously it doesn't fit.
Is, "Secret Project," Infinity Blade?
Secret project is not Infinity Blade. I'm sorry. Secret Project is a secret. Secret Project I cannot discuss for contractual reasons.
On Sel, in the dialogue from Khriss, the Arcanum Unbounded, she mentions that the Cognitive Realm is especially dangerous because Devotion and Dominion were killed there. Why is it dangerous? Are there bad spren?
Well it's called the Expanse of the Densities in Roshar for a very good reason.
On every planet, do all the objects have the ability to know what they are and remember?
Yes, to an extent.
Odium said to Taravangian, "You did this without access to Fortune or the Spiritual Realm?" How does one access Fortune without the Spiritual Realm or Feruchemical chromium, as almost all future sight tends to utilize the Spiritual Realm in some way?
So, that line is mostly just me saying... *long pause* I think you're picking apart those things too much.
Right, that makes sense. Hey, Odium said it, so I didn't know-- Gotta take that seriously, so.
So, yeah, don't read too much into picking apart those two things. You can read it as-- Honestly, that is me making sure I am being clear in the text.
That there are those are two different things.
Yeah those are two different things, but they are just interrelated. Fortune is a property, and the Spiritual Realm is a place, but not a place. Do you know what I mean? To use Fortune, you're always involving the Spiritual Realm, but in the Spiritual Realm, you're not always involving Fortune.
So if you jumped off a high place and you were a steel Feruchemist, could you store the speed of you falling?
No, because-- I'm going to say you need to be moving under your own-- because otherwise it's all relative, right? If you're falling, it's no different than if you're traveling on the planet or things like that.
So it's related more to muscle contractions.
*hesitantly* Yes, kind of. Feruchemy bends all sorts of weird things, ever since I started doing the weight one. So, yes.
The thing about Feruchemy is it feels like you could be like a savant short of it, but it would be much more minor than something like a savant for-- It would be more things like what you could get for exercise and stuff like that.
Yeah. Yeah, that's possible.
Do Rosharans store their gemstones in spheres in imitation or inspiration of the spheres in [Shadesmar]?
No, they don't. There is a relationship there, but that's not what caused it.
If a Radiant brought some infused gems into Shadesmar, could they transfer that Stormlight into the black glass substance that seems to compose Shadesmar?
I'll RAFO that one.
If you had a spanreed, and you took one half into Shadesmar, would it still be able to write with the conjoined one in the Physical Realm?
RAFO.
Szeth has an afterglow because his soul is lagging behind his body slightly.
Yes.
So if he was moving fast enough, could a Shardblade pass through his physical body and not cut the soul?
Ummm, that sounds like the sort of thing-- I'm going to say, the soul is more stretchy, so I don't think that's possible. But you could do some weird things where you're cutting the soul and not the body.
How did Spook die?
That's a RAFO. There's your card.
When can we get a Herald of War perspective?
You've gotten one really brief one. You really won't get them until starting around book six. So, you got a little bit left. Taln is a main character in the back five books, but he's only kinda just a tangential character in the first ones.
The black glass beads in Shadesmar on Roshar. If you could somehow get that material into the Physical Realm, would it hold stormlight?
So, that's a RAFO. Because getting stuff out of the Cognitive Realm into the Physical Realm is a different matter from taking stuff from the Physical Realm to the Cognitive.
Well, you don't have to weigh in on whether they could get it to the Physical Realm.
Still a RAFO!
With Adhesion you can use it to either create negative pressure and stick two things together, or you can manipulate to create pressure bubbles around you, like Kal did facing down the storm. Or say with Gravitation, you can either do a Basic Lashing and change the direction gravity is acting on something, or you can do a Reverse Lashing and change the-- and have something with its own gravity field. So I was wondering then, if that is possibly caused by Pushing and Pulling on Surges?
Yes, that is a legitimate interpretation.
Is Ingenuity a Shard?
Umm... *long pause* Maybe. *smiles slyly*
Did the Aimians want Aimia to be Scoured?
No. But, doesn't mean that they--some of them may have seen what happened as necessary. But certainly that was not a prevailing thing.
Do you need a perfect gemstone to imprison an Unmade or a powerful spren?
Yeah. Well, the stronger the spren, the better the gemstone needs to be. Those flaws in the crystal structure are going to lead to leaking if it's not. But an Unmade requires an extra-special level of perfection.
At JordanCon, you said that Gavilar's black sphere was something that, "It's what you expect it to be." Does that mean that it's holding an Unmade?
Not necessarily. Voidlight can be trapped like Stormlight can. Unmade can be trapped like spren can. Does not mean that the sphere has an Unmade.
Is there a feminine Alethi nickname that means gift or blessing?
Yes, but I'd have to go look at the dictionary.
Is that dictionary purchasable?
No, but if you email me, we can hunt through it and see what we can find.
Can we get a small, just a small tidbit or a reveal of what Marasi is going to be doing in The Lost Metal?
So, opening scene of The Lost Metal is her and Wayne. It's a couple of years later and Wax is basically retired to <a thing> and Wayne is her deputy now instead, mainly so she can keep him channeled in the right direction.
The Cognitive aspect of an object is the way that the object views itself and others view it. Say the Vessel of a Shard started to view their power in a somewhat different way than when they first got that power, and the people on the planet also start to view it that way. Would the intent/mandate of that Shard be altered by that changes?
Within some limitations, yes. Certain Shards--certain Vessels believe it can go further than others believe it can go. But there is at least some wiggle room there.
When you're sad, would a seon, especially when you're a kid, would it like nuzzle you and tell you nice things?
It would definitely tell you nice things. Seons barely have any weight to them, and touch, and so nuzzling is not a natural instinct, I would say, for them... But they will definitely comfort you.
Okay. So they're not born?
No, not really anymore. They were all created kind of around the same point.
I'm a geologist. I was wondering does Scadrial have tectonics the way Earth does?
Yes. Scadrial does have tectonics. Roshar doesn't. I think it's the only one I built that doesn't, because of some specific things. But yes, Scadrial tectonic.
*inaudible* also storing Stormlight. Did you decide the value of the gems first?
So I actually retrofitted it. What we looked at is how much food does it create, how much is that equivalency in our world, what factors do we need to change, and things like that. And we retrofitted how much things were worth. There's also a measurement in there of how much-- amount of Stormlight there is and how much that is worth, how much energy and work that can do.
*inaudible*
I assign other people to do a lot of that these days. I say, "Here is the situation I want, run the math on this and come back and tell me how much I may use here or there."
Was Syl starting to bond with Tien before he died?
No, good question. But Tien was starting to bond a different spren.
I was suspecting that he was bonding a spren, but then Syl says, at one point, I think she was familiar with Kaladin's hometown, so I was like, maybe!
Good question, but no, he was going in a different direction.
Can you tell me--
Lightweaver.
If you store one type of Investiture in a nicrosilmind, for example, if you store Stormlight, could you retrieve it as another type?
It's possible. It's not quite as simple as you might think.
Will we be seeing more of Axies the Collector?
Yes, but briefly. Axies probably won't get another-- Maybe there'll be another interlude from Axies' viewpoint. Maybe. He's just around to have fun.
He told me he consults with several people who are well versed in psychology when he tries to portray anything along these lines. He did say (and this goes along with other statements already made) that his intention was not to have Shallan diagnosed with DID like Kaladin is with Depression. He did take some ideas from the disorder to use in the story, but he didn't intend for her to be set into a specific mental illness category. Like we said before, Brandon's focus was mainly on the magical consequences, which makes her case weird anyways.
What are the official colors of the Alethi Highprinces?
(From the internal Dragonsteel wiki)
Can you put the Cosmere books into [chronological] order?
Here is the order that I have publicly confirmed. There are obviously other books and stories fitting in there. For those, you’ll just need to RAFO.
Knowing that you have already stated that the Listeners aren't originally of Odium or of Cultivation. Is it possible that they could actually originally be of what opposes Adonalsium?
I'm going to have to RAFO your question; good question though.
I have a Reddit PM WOB that says the Terris were given Feruchemy as a gift, and that Brandon may get into how that occurred at some point.
It was more of a gift than an accident, but I do plan to someday dig into it more.
How do your fans react to your being a member of the Church?
It's hard to say because I think most of my fans don't care one way or the other. The vocal ones send me e-mails, though. Occasionally, I get messages from people who say, "Hey, I'm not a member of your faith, but it's cool that you have one, and thanks for writing, and I appreciate your books." I've also received more than several e-mails from LDS people who are very pleased with the books and happy to see an LDS writer who produces works they can enjoy. Sometimes I have received e-mails from people who are not proponents of the LDS faith who challenge me on my beliefs. I'm a debater, but not an arguer, though, and I think the difference is that as a debater, if I feel that my side has been presented adequately, I'm not going to feel bad if people disagree with me. So when I respond to e-mails like that, I say something along the lines of, "Hey, here's why I believe what I do. Here's what the basis of my faith is. Here's why I believe in this doctrine that you are challenging. You don't have to believe in it. Believe what you want. But this is my reasoning." I think I usually have pretty good logic and every time someone has responded to one of my reply e-mails, it's been positive. Most of the time, the person will send something back that says, "You know what, thanks for not actually getting into an argument. I was kind of in a bad mood when I sent that and thank you for being respectful." I think being respectful will get you much further than getting into arguments will. I have had universally good experiences with people reacting to my LDS faith, even on such charged topics.