j_papshmere16
How long did it take you to develop the idea / world of The Stormlight Archive?
Brandon Sanderson
I wrote down the first ideas 1993. Kept working on the world through college. First draft done 2002.
How long did it take you to develop the idea / world of The Stormlight Archive?
I wrote down the first ideas 1993. Kept working on the world through college. First draft done 2002.
I have a question about copper. Wouldn't a coppercloud also end up hiding their enemy's allomancy?
That is one of the dangers of using one.
If you cut a plant with a Shardblade, does it die like an animal, or cut like an inanimate object?
Shardblades would treat plants as they would an animal, not cutting them, but severing the soul.
Would it be correct to view pre-Shattered Adonalsium as either a perfect God or perfect power of creation?
That would be one way of viewing things. Depends on your perspective.
So basically, RAFO??
Not TOTALLY a RAFO. More a “That works. But some would not agree.”
Are spren alive? Can splinters be alive?
RAFO!
Is “Cryptics” the canon name for the spren Shallan draws? Should we use that instead of symbolhead/truthspren?
Yes, you may call the symbolheads “Cryptics” which is what they call themselves.
Will Marsh continue to shadow the Mistborn series?
Yes that character will continue to play a role in the future of Mistborn.
Would burning atium and duralumin together grant view of single far future or widespread of everyone's near future?
I haven't answered specifically what happens, but there is a hint at the end of Hero of Ages.
So, does every Stormlight book begin with the sound of drums playing?
The first five books will all offer a different perspective on the same night.
Is the plan still for all books in the series to be named after in-world books?
Yes.
So, I have to wait until book three to get Szeth’s book?
Yes, Szeth is 3. Eshonai (she is the Parshendi Shardbearer) is probably 4. Dalinar rounds out the first five.
Will all shardholders from all the worlds/realms eventually meet in one "place"?
They have been in the same place before. Many are dead now, though.
How many pages of notes do you have on your own universe?
I’m only around 1,000-2,000 or so, at this point. (I guess I’m slacking.)
If a live Elantrian entered the pool outside of the city, could they also use it to travel to the Cognitive Realm?
Let’s just say that the characters in the book do not fully understand the pool or its power.
How many shards has Hoid received powers from, whether taken, stolen, given, etc?
Well, he has a bead of lerasium.
Are the Ghostbloods associated with Odium?
Odium has his fingers in a LOT of things.
Does the chasm on Sel have a counterpart in the Cognitive Realm?
Yes, it does. But moving around there is really tough…
Can you give us any hint what Hoid is, and if you'll ever tell us his whole story?
You will get the whole story someday. He is a person who turned down what others accepted eagerly.
Have we met Odium's champion yet?
RAFO!
So is the Wax and Wayne trilogy the second trilogy in the Mistborn trilogy of trilogies?
No, it's actually not. I'm going to need better terminology…
So, there will be a total of four Wax and Wayne era Mistborn novels. Alloy of Law, plus a Trilogy I plotted after finishing it.
so this 5 and 6 are not the end of this era, there is one more we should wait for, right?
Yes. The last of this era is tentatively called The Lost Metal.
Just threw away the prologue to Shadows of Self. Sigh. Need to try something else. (My third attempt.)
Would you mind answering these? What defines a high Epic? How does Tia's tier system work?
A high epic is one where you have to negate their powers somehow to kill them.
Can either one of you, pretty please, tell us if Alethi was inspired by the Elian Script?
It was not. The inspiration for the shapes was an EKG readout.
He might be speaking of the Thaylen script, which looks more like the Elian script than Alethi does.
Right. I was thinking Alethi glyphpairs, which seem to share some ideas with Thaylen letters.
The glyphpairs are more Chinese influenced. But Isaac will have to answer on Thaylen.
Late to this conversation (forgot password!) Similarities to any Earth scripts is coincidental.
I was thinking more conceptually, less visually. Just trying to crack the writing system :)
Thaylen and Alethi are related kinda in the same way Korean hanja and Chinese chars are related.
Do you mean hangul? Since hanja and Chinese characters are pretty much the same thing.
I defer to Peter on this one. :) And add a small RAFO, which looks a lot like 'rafo.'
I thought (hoped) you meant you were working on the next set of Mistborn trilogies… Still, Shadows of Self is good too…
Trilogy two doesn't get to be written until after Stormlight 5, I'm afraid.
Listening Words of Radiance. Can't wait for the next book. Will this be a trilogy? Thank you.
5 books! With another series in the same world to follow about another set of characters.
I was thinking about some assumptions I have made. Are you going to write Hoid's series in first person?
I have tried it both ways in test scenes, and am undecided, but leaning toward first person.
Reading this [The Amulet of Samarkand], with a djinni viewpoint, really makes me want to write a book I've been planning for years, one told from a magic sword's VP.
I wondered if I could follow up to that Machiavelli question. Would Elsecallers be a-- one of those other, uh-- one of those...
So, yeah. Elsecallers are fairly compatible. Like, Elsecallers feel like the journey is... the journey is the entire species, right? And that the journey is the destination. *inaudible*
Because you've talked about alloying the god metals with other ones-- I was wondering whether you would be able to melt them down as you would with normal metals.
If you could distill the god metal: you could distill it out of the mist, that's theoretically possible.
White Sand, being my first book, even though I re-wrote it... doesn't sometimes follow as much rigor with the worldbuilding scientifically as things like Roshar. When we-- If I were to ever write books in it, I would beef that up. But for right now, since the actual y'know-- I haven't actually released any of the books, I don't feel bad that some of it is a little more vague.
The other thing is about the atmospheric composition, since-- Well on Earth we've got plants which supplies us with oxygen, which can't really exist on a planet like that.
Right. They can-- The plants on the other side grow really well, they're just adapted to UV. And they grow with the UV. And so a lot of the oxygen is happening there, and, of course, in the oceans.
*audio obscured*
Yeah, a lot of algae from the oceans, which is helping out. Oxygen content is pretty solid there. I mean, it's not Roshar which is high-oxygen.
Did Kelsier really hear Preservation's voice telling him to Survive when he was in the pits of Hathsin? Or was it Ruin pretending to be Preservation?
If it was Preservation, does that mean Kelsier died in the pits? Or were there special circumstances that allowed Kelsier to hear Preservation's voice without dying?
Special things often happen in the cosmere when someone is very close to death, or undergoing intense pain (either physical or emotional.) Barriers between the realms weaken.
I can confirm that the Kelsier who left the pits was not a Cognitive Shadow.
Could he have become a Shadow using the pits if he died immediately after snapping?
Possibly.
How did you get the temperature differential between the two halves of the planet such that life could survive on both sides and travel between them?
Right, yeah. We've got a couple things going on here that are helping with it. The thing about Darkside is-- And I've had to run this through my physicists, and they're all kind of "Ehhh", so we're still working on the physics-- But the idea is there is a light source over there, but it works like a black light. And so, there's warmth, and there's radiation, and that's why people over there are dark-skinned. They've actually adapted to this radiation, there's a lot of UV and things like that. But there is-- It works like a black light. So for a Daysider going over, it's all-- it feels dark and dim, but it's more twilight-ish than it is completely dark, if that makes sense. And with that and with... jet-streams and stuff we were able to kind of justify it mostly. I mean, it's still going to be colder on the other side and things. But I didn't want it to be like snowing and things like that, all the time over there. And so we kind of had to do some jumping through hoops astrologically to make it work.
The number 10 seems to be a recurring theme in this world. Are the "ten fools" the antithesis of the ten orders of the knights radiant?
Yes, ten is a number of mythological import in the world. The Ten Fools are, essentially, the opposites of the Ten Heralds--who each represented an ideal. (Those ideals were later adopted by the orders of Knights Radiant, so yes, there is a connection--but there's a step between them.)
So in the trilogy, we see that when someone has a Hemalurgic spike implanted in them, they can hear Ruin talking to them, both as a vision and in their head. However, we learn in the Hero of Ages that Ruin cannot hear a person's thoughts no matter how much under Ruin's influence they are.
In Alloy of Law, we see that Wax (and other Pathians) uses an earring to "pray" to Harmony, and we see that Harmony can hear his thoughts and respond.
So I guess this leads to three questions: How does Harmony hear the thoughts of Wax, when it's explicitly pointed put that Ruin cannot?
Are the earrings that the Pathians use Hemalurgically charged, as otherwise they would be of no use to Ruin, and therefore Harmony?
Or did Harmony completely change how that aspect of Hemalugy works?
How this all works dates back to the original design of the magic system.
I wanted Ruin and Preservation to be complementary opposites, like many things in the Mistborn world. Allomancy, for example, has Pushes and Pulls were are less "negate one another" opposites, but instead two sides to the same proverbial coin.
Ruin is invasive. The power is more "Yell" than "Listen." The philosopher would probably have some interesting things to say about the masculine symbolism of Hemalurgy and its spikes.
Ruin can insert thoughts. That power, however, can't HEAR the reactions. It's about invasion.
Preservation, however, is the opposite. Preservation listens, Preservation protects. (Perhaps to a fault--if there were no Ruin, there would be no change to the world, and life could not exist.) Because of this, Preservation can hear what is inside people's minds. It cannot, however, INSERT thoughts. (This is important to the plot of Hero of Ages.)
Harmony is both, the two complementary opposites combined. And so, he inserts thoughts with Ruin and still uses Hemalurgy. He can also listen.
Yes, Wax's earring is Invested. (Or, in other terms, it's a Hemalurgic spike.)
Doesn't that imply it was shoved through someone's heart at one point (ala Steel Inquisitor creation process)?
Yes, the metal would have to have been part of a spike that at one point was used to kill someone and rip off a piece of their soul.
Are Allomancer more or less common than in the time of the Survivor?
They are more common, but slightly less powerful.
How are there kandra and koloss? Kandra especially, since they did their "mass suicide" thing at the end of the original trilogy.
The nice thing about the kandra for me in the narrative was that, though removing their spikes turns them feral, you can always stick those spikes back in. TenSoon feared that this was the end of his people, and it could have been, if those spikes hadn't gone back in quickly. As it was, there were costs. Time spent without spikes causes a kandra's memories to deteriorate, and some that were left a relatively long time were essentially reborn as new people. But the race survived, even if it is unlikely that their numbers will be added to.
Did TenSoon survive, then (as the TenSoon who experienced growth under Vin)?
Yes, though he did lose some things.
You said that there are "multiple" people from Mistborn in [The Way of Kings]. Does this include Hoid?
Yes, it does.
Are they just vague allusions?
Vague, no. But I wouldn't say they, save Hoid, have any important impact on the events of the book.
So the number 16 is important on Scadrial, on pg 245, Wax is trying to find out where Miles is going to be next and he writes down the number "35.17" I couldn't help but notice that the 3+5+1+7=16, was that intentional or am I seeing things that aren't really there?
I slip it in here and there for fun, but it isn't actually important. It is fun when people notice it, though.
I have my own theory but I thought I should ask, if the koloss reproduce through Hemalurgic spikes how can there be half koloss in Alloy of Law.
I am holding this answer back for future books, I'm afraid. I have said some things, but the full truth is still subject to debate. I will answer this eventually in the books.
One question, two parts: If a double nicrosil Twinborn started Compounding and storing Investiture in a nicrosilmind, could they do something cool by tapping a whole huge bunch at once? And since Scadrialians have both Ruin and Preservation in them, could they store both those qualities in a one nicrosilmind, or would it require two different ones?
Ha. All things regarding Investiture (particularly in regards to Feruchemy) are instant RAFOs at this point, I'm afraid. I've got to save SOME things for future books.
If you burn nicrosil, will it deplete Feruchemial storages? Or just Allomantic?
Just Allomantic.
You've said that Inquisitors could have children. Would those children have a better chance at being Allomancers compared to if they had the kids before they were Inquisitors?
Yes, but there also could be...complications.
TenSoon wonders, and I wonder too- How can kandra think and be sentient without brains? Doesn't the body need a physical coordinator to relay between the Physical and Cognitive realm? Or do the spikes do a good enough job with that?
I imagine kandra having a non-centralized nervous system, with brain power spread through their bodies. Well, non-centralized is probably the wrong way to say it. They have lobes of thought and memory attached to muscles here and there, and don't have a single 'brain.' They certainly have brain-like material, though.
Does the general population know about nicrosil and chromium?
Yes, though they are like this world's version of advanced physics in our world. They've heard of them, but many an average person might be hard-pressed to say exactly what they do.
A little safer question- Why did you not have Waxillium fall for Marasi? Why stick with the contract with Steris?
Marasi, as she was in Alloy of Law, was just plain wrong for Wax. As I write books, I allow my characters to grow more free-form (while my setting and plot are outlined in detail.) In writing the book, I felt that a Marasi hook-up at the end would not only be wrong for the character, but wrong for the story. If I do direct sequels (which I probably will) perhaps things will change.
How long before [The Way of Kings] is Alloy of Law? I heard somewhere that it's a hundred years, but I don't think that's right.
I intended them to be happening roughly close to one another, with [The Way of Kings] slightly before.
Is it significant that Miles said that the "men of gold and red" would come and rule. Is there a connection between this and the "gold and red" cigar box that Miles keeps The Suit's comings and goings on?
This is all very significant.
Are those men of red and gold of any relation to the priests in the red and gold robes in Warbreaker?
I really have to RAFO this one. (Sorry.)
Why on earth does Marsh have a Feruchemical atium spike? You've said that Ironeyes is in fact Marsh. Did Ruin spike someone for him? Or did Sazed grant him the power?
Dead Inquisitors Vin killed. Some were granted the spike for reasons I haven't spoken of yet.