Timing implications of SP#1

[cometaryorbit]

1 minute ago, teknopathetic said:

We know Iri was a Silver Kingdom, so that seems fairly conclusive. It could be possible that the Iriali were known as something different before Roshar and changed their name to Iriali when they emmigrated, but that seems to go against the Wandering Tribe vibe Brandon is going for. 

I am not sure the name itself is conclusive, if Iriali just means the inhabitants of Iri (the land/country) like American or British, then it would be natural for them to use the name once they lived in the land of Iri.

But would Hoid then call them Iriali, telling a story about times before they used that name? Probably only if he were talking to a Rosharan...

So yeah Lumar probably is post Roshar. But that has big implications on the timeline...

...or maybe it doesn't.  This story is supposed to not have major cosmere connections. Perhaps Lumar is *really* isolated, so it can take place after Mistborn Era 4 without spoiler issues, since those events didn't really affect it. Especially if Aethers are non-Shardic, so the question of Adonalsium getting reunited or not doesn't have to be addressed.

[+Oltux72]

2 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

The simplist solution is to assume this is a/the land after Roshar if we are considering timelines. I do admit there may be some issues with Tech, but at the same time Lumar is a backwater and may not have had many trade opportunities. 

That is the unrealistically benign explanation.

There is a far more plausible explanation. The Lumarans did not develop extremely slowly. They developed twice. The arrival of the aethers spored them back to the stone age. They have redeveloped the technology we saw. Yet another genocide.

[Elegy]

6 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

2. The Irali left Lumar 1,500 years ago for a new land

I might be misunderstanding you, but it's 300 years:

Spoiler

“They vanished, you know. The entire people: poof. Away they went, gone one day, their island left uninhabited. Now, that was three hundred years ago, so nobody alive has ever met one of them, but they supposedly had golden hair. Like yours, the color of sunlight.”

(Chapter 2)

5 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

Perhaps Lumar is *really* isolated, so it can take place after Mistborn Era 4 without spoiler issues, since those events didn't really affect it. Especially if Aethers are non-Shardic, so the question of Adonalsium getting reunited or not doesn't have to be addressed.

It would be a major spoiler because it would mean that Hoid survives Era 4 as one of its major characters. Also, Brandon has been pretty clear about his plans to make Era 4 the definitive chronological end of the Cosmere. He once said that even if he writes more Cosmere stuff after finishing Era 4, it would take place before that - though I can't find the WOB right now (I do find referenced to it on Reddit without a source, so I didn't just imagine it). There is this WOB though:

Quote

Johansj

Do you know which book is gonna be the Final book released in the Cosmere? Chronological/Release Date

Brandon Sanderson

Almost 100% certain it will be the final book of the space-age Mistborn trilogy. (Right now, that is Era Four--but it's not impossible that I'll slip another smaller era, like the W&W era books, in as a Mistborn cyberpunk story while working on the back five Stormlight books.)

General Reddit 2021 (May 27, 2021)

--

My guess is this: The Iriali are an established culture on Lumar by the time they vanish, so they have to have been there for at least a few generations. I'd say 200 years at least. Plus 300 years since they left, so at least 500 years after they left Roshar (might happen in the gap between Stormlight 5 and 6?). That would mean more than 500 years between Stormlight and Mistborn Era 4. My favorite theory about the Era 4 timing is 600 years after Era 3, which would mean 660 years after Era 2, which means 1000 years after Era 1 - a full cycle of the Well of Ascension. I know that the Well would probably not refill, but I like the irony/poetry of the story ending at that point.

Anyway, the Iriali have at least 300 years (plus the time between Tress and Mistborn Era 4) to spend on a sixth planet before potentially finding their seventh and final world in Era 4. After all, their story will be continued in space age Cosmere:

Quote

Koh-the-Face-Stealer

So ever since I read your various tantalizing tit-bits about the Iriali being not native to Roshar, I've been incredibly curious about this especially considering that the other humans of Roshar all originate from a different singular source, Ashyn (unless there were more migrations that I'm forgetting). Are we going to get more info on this in the near future? Is there anything, even a tiny crumb, that you could possibly drop for us now?

Brandon Sanderson

The Iriali story is one you should expect to be continued during the space age of the cosmere, not in current storylines.

General Reddit 2019 (May 28, 2019)

These are just some thoughts.

[cometaryorbit]

I can see that, maybe Era 4 really is going to be that far in the future.

It just seems weird to me since recent books have been bringing in more inter-world connections, and I would think that once those things become known and information starts really crossing worlds it wouldn't be *that* long from modern tech to interstellar, given the advantages of having magic to get FTL and the knowledge that there are other inhabited worlds out there to trade with pushing space development in a way we haven't seen in RL (I doubt RL humanity would have abandoned the ability to go to the Moon for 50+ years if we knew for a fact there were aliens out there, and had even had limited interactions).

[Isilel]

On 30 March 2022 at 5:52 PM, cometaryorbit said:

I am not sure the name itself is conclusive, if Iriali just means the inhabitants of Iri (the land/country) like American or British, then it would be natural for them to use the name once they lived in the land of Iri.

Indeed. Personally, I think it's most likely that modern Iriali only came to Roshar after Aharietam. Why would they have stayed through the Desolations? The last wars of the Heraldic Epoch were supposed to be utterly devastating and there logically should have been a lot of vacant real estate. I am also convinced that Iriali in Stormlight are about to decamp to the next world and are cooperating with Odium so that he would help them or at least not hinder their departure. 

BTW, there is already an example of a Silver Kingdom having a completely different population than in Heraldic era - Dalinar's Midnight Essence vision takes place in Natanatan, but people look completely normal rather than being blue-skinned. Their kingdom may have been called something else too, I don't remember.

As to why they would have still called themselves Iriali - they had lived on Roschar for a long time, but my impression was that they didn't spend more than a few centuries on Lumar, so tradition? Alternatively, Iri may have been called something else before Iriali took it over. What we know of the Silver Kingdoms comes from post-Recreance, after all, a couple of millenia after Aharietam.

 

[i’m in the details]

There also could be multiple groups of Irali that all think they are at different stages of the 6 world religion 

[The Unknown Ajah]

Why are all of you so convinced that the events of the story are cosmere future? I think Brandon's wording is easily ambiguous enough to say that the story is simply being told in the future.

 

 

[Elegy]

11 hours ago, The Unknown Novel said:

Why are all of you so convinced that the events of the story are cosmere future? I think Brandon's wording is easily ambiguous enough to say that the story is simply being told in the future.

We know because of this WOB:

Quote

Captain M

How far apart on the timeline are the events of Tress of the Emerald Sea and Hoid's retelling of them? Could you give us positions of them relative to other Cosmere works?

Brandon Sanderson

He is telling this story within years or decades of the events, not within centuries.

Where this is in the actual Cosmere timeline, I will leave you to figure out, because I think that will be fun to figure out as you are reading.

Secret Project #1 Reveal and Livestream (March 8, 2022)

 

[The Unknown Ajah]

11 minutes ago, Elegy said:

We know because of this WOB:

 

Thank you. That has very interesting implications. 

[+Harrycrapper]

I think he also said fairly recently that all of the secret projects in the cosmere take place after where Stormlight and Mistborn are at now(i.e. as of RoW and The Lost Metal.)

[Elegy]

7 minutes ago, Harrycrapper said:

I think he also said fairly recently that all of the secret projects in the cosmere take place after where Stormlight and Mistborn are at now(i.e. as of RoW and The Lost Metal.)

Yeah, that's this one:

Quote

Matt Hatch

I like how you're timelining your RAFOs. Like this is a RAFO but with information.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah. Like I consider where the Cosmere is right now in its main timeline to be right around the 10 to 15 year period that Stormlight and Wax and Wayne are happening. And that's where we are in the Cosmere right now. But this is taking place way in the future. Actually, all three Secret Projects are fairly future era Cosmere. Basically I'm just kind of building out- what's going on with some of these things is, I want the Cosmere to be pushing towards a Star Wars/Star Trek-esque large universe of planets where lots of interesting stories are happening. And that's the future of the Cosmere. And so as I'm reaching to build more stories, I'm reaching to stories on those planets.

Secret Project #4 Reveal and Livestream (March 29, 2022)

But there's still a bit of room to interpret it as "they are told in the future" - it's not the most plausible way of reading it, but still possible (but then the other WOB seals the deal that it's all told and also actually happening in the future).

[+Harrycrapper]

1 hour ago, Elegy said:

Yeah, that's this one:

But there's still a bit of room to interpret it as "they are told in the future" - it's not the most plausible way of reading it, but still possible (but then the other WOB seals the deal that it's all told and also actually happening in the future).

I'd say it's hard to work around the timeline of the Iriali on that one. They've been on Roshar for thousands of years, likely since before Aharietiam given that Iri is one of the silver kingdoms. It's a bit of a stretch to claim that the time of the Desolations is "fairly future" in the Cosmere timeline. Maybe relative to stories like Elantris and White Sand, which are supposed to be pretty early in the Cosmere timeline, but I don't think Brandon is trying to deceive us on this one. 

Edited May 27, 2022 by Harrycrapper