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The Sleepless' role in Era 4


Overlord Jebus

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In Era 4, I believe the Sleepless will be used as the main form of interstellar communication.

Brandon has mentioned before that the Sleepless will play a major role in Era 4 Mistborn, the sci fi era.

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Questioner
Will there be a major part in the story for the Sleepless?


Brandon Sanderson
Yes, but much later on.


Questioner
What means later on?


Brandon Sanderson
Well, they have a major role in the science fiction Mistborn trilogy, but that's pretty far off. So they will be very important very much later on.


https://wob.coppermind.net/events/122/#e3341

We also know that the Sleepless are a single consciousness, with their individual hordelings being more like cells than the actual Sleepless itself.

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Brandon Sanderson
That's a good question, you'll-- that I'll RAFO. But they are a single consciousness, but they would argue that all your cells are independent of you. So they are cells that can move around. They're really fun... they started in a non-cosmere book when I was 22. Obviously a bit inspired by Fire Upon the Deep, one of my favorite science fiction books. And I read that book and I'm like, "Group consciousnesses are cool!" what if you had a species that was made up of-- Not like one of these Ender's Game y'know, one, but each swarm was an individual and they could breed and evolve their own things to do different stuff. 


https://wob.coppermind.net/events/36/#e1543


And I’ve personally asked him about the limits on the Sleepless hordelings based on this comment about the Tines on Fire Upon the Deep. For those that didn’t read it, the Tines were packs of dogs that shared an individual consciousness via subsonic sound. This meant they couldn’t have pack members more than a few metres away from the pack before the pack member lost contact with the pack and basically became feral (This is until radio became invented at which point the packs could operate over much further distances). They also couldn’t have too many members in a pack (8 or 9 was seen as excessive) due to the amount of “mindnoise” this produced confused the thoughts of the inidividual. It’s a great book and the Tines are cool aliens. Anyway, here’s how that went:
 

Quote

Overlord Jebus [PENDING REVIEW]
You've said the Sleepless are inspired by the Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep. They rely on being close to each other to survive. Are the Sleepless under the same restriction?


Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]
I would say not nearly as strict.


https://wob.coppermind.net/events/324/#e9348


Brandon wasn’t super willing to dive too deep into this but I’m going to say now, I think that Sleepless share a single Spiritual and Cognitive aspect across all hordelings with distance being irrelevant to them. We’ve seen multiple occasions of individual hordelings being used to spy on our main characters which I feel supports this claim.

So we have a race of individuals made up of hordes of insects that are seemingly able to act, listen, and watch events regardless of distance from the rest of the horde who will apparently play a large role in the series that will involve space ships and planets and all that fun stuff.

I don’t know about you guys, but having a species with many ears, mouth, eyes and fingers that are able to communicate as one single individual regardless of distance sounds like the perfect species to act as an interstellar communication network. 

You could do it with individual hordelings, give them a little computer with a little hordeling sized keyboard and have it type out messages it receives, you could have whole human sized beings like Arclo speak and listen and watch as well as any human to your crew. There are many ways you could implement the Sleepless as a communication system.

When I suggested this to someone previously, their first question was “Why would the Sleepless agree to this?” to which my response was “Why WOULDN’T the Sleepless agree to this?”. If they became the main way of communicating between ships/worlds, they’d become privy to basically all information and goings on in the Cosmere. And to me, they definitely seem the type that would be more than happy to act as the secret keepers for everyone.

Thank you for reading.

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3 hours ago, Calderis said:

Huh. As the holders and transmitters of basically all information, they'd be extremely powerful, and basically untouchable. 

That's amazing and terrifying. 

Reminds me a lot of the Spacers Guild in Dune. Or the spanreed centres in Tashikk...

36 minutes ago, RShara said:

Hehehehe bug ansibles.

I know right? He even mentioned Enders Game in the same breath :lol:

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I was going to say this reminds me of the Spacer's Guild, but OJ said that first, so instead..

It reminds me of Schlock Mercenary's hive-aliens, combined with the Fsherl'Ganni.

This could create lots of Plot around groups acting without a Sleepless Guide to remain hidden.

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