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The State Of The Union


Deus Ex Biotica

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The Alloy Of Law is unique among Sanderson books I have read so far, in that it at no point involves a massive social upheaval (though Miles, at least, wants one). As such, we know less about the society it takes place in than his other works. The purpose of this Thread is to guess everything we can about the world in which Alloy Of Law is set. Here is what I have speculated thus far:

* Other than the mysterious "sea people" and Terris, all of known humanity seems to be roughly one nation. I suppose they were together for 1,000 years, but on the other hand, that was 340+ years ago. One assumes that the "Faceless Immortals" have been manipulating society to avoid war, but even so, this is impressive.

* As such, the name of the country is never mentioned.

* The government appears to be some sort of democracy, but there are still noble Houses, and those Houses are allowed to maintain standing armies, and sometimes have "skirmishes" with one another.

* Those Houses are, in fact, so isolated from the general public that Allomancy is still notably more common among them.

* House names include: Ladrian, Cett, Yomen, Tekiel.

* The Roughs are nominally under the authority of the central government, but a band of Koloss can destroy entire towns without reprisal. One wonders why people even go out there - it sounds like bad farmland, nobody talks about any valuable mines beyond the mountains which ring the Elendel Basin, and there is no indication of cattle trains or other major sources of revenue being brought into the Basin from the Roughs. As far as I can tell, they don't run train tracks or canals there, either.

* There are labor unions, and the Houses clash with them.

* There are at least four major religions: Sliverism, Survivorism, Trellism, and The Path. Wax's descriptions of The Path imply that rather fewer than all 300 of Sazed's religions are practiced on a large scale, though a few others might be.

* Despite the Basin being some 350 miles across, with something like 40 notable cities, everyone calls Elendel "The City," and it seems to be the center of commerce and social interaction - Wax and Marasi might just be prejudiced, but Ranette doing the same seems telling.

* Terris seems to be isolationist, still experts in Feruchemy, and still training elite personal servants (since Tillaume is described as being trained in the Terris style). We do not hear about any particular stigma against Terrismen, or Koloss-blooded for that matter, but since they are the only ethnic groups we know, I have been assuming there is some among those less enlightened than Wax.

* Electricity is new, steam power is somewhat accepted. The canals are still used extensively.

* Gold and Aluminum are among the most valuable metals. I did not find a reference to what the coinage is called (presumably, not "Boxings," but I may have missed something.

Please, contribute anything I missed, and your own speculation!

-- Deus Ex Biotica

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The trade unions imply some form of socialism. I do have to wonder how the Noble Houses are able to be such major forces in the economy with the entire world as a frontier though, historically in America the frontier drove up wages significantly, and the American fronteir pales compared to the entire known and unknown world outside the basin.

It makes even less sense when you consider that most of the survivors of Hero of Ages would be ex-skaa who would be poorly disposed to the surviving nobles getting special privileges (cept maybe Breeze).

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Actually, the Skaa were quite willing to run back to the nobility when things got bad and confusing back in the Mistborn trilogy, too, but they were raised under that system. By this point, that is no longer true.

To be fair, Western Expansion allowed for the rise of the robber baron, with train moguls, mining companies, and, of course, John D. Rockefeller getting on top of developing markets and exploiting them. It might stretch credibility a little to assume that in Alloy of Law, these entrepreneurs are invariably in the nobility (the opposite happened in America), but then, maybe that's not true - Steris mentions that her family is filthy rich but not respected by the nobility, and her father has much rougher manners than most nobles, so they seem like the Noveau Riche to me.

As for expansion outside the Basin, as I mentioned above, are there any natural resources out there? At all? It's not clear.

In any event, I am not trying to critique the worldbuilding of the Alloy Of Law, just to understand what has been built.

-- Deus Ex Biotica

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Of course there are resources, there's an entire world outside the basin. Also, the robber barons didn't happen until the frontier closed shortly after the civil war. And the noble houses seem fairly old and entrenched in their power.

Edited by Aranfan
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The political system reminds me of the Roman Republic; there's an elected body but most of the common people are aligned with a particular noble house which is expected to look after their interests. I assume they're running off a sort of Divine Right system, since with the exception of House Tekiel (who were a Great House before getting wiped out in the Final Empire and appear to be cursed) they're all descended from people with major roles in the New Empire or who were critical in deciding the outcome of the battle with Ruin. Presumably the reason they aren't having serious conflicts with the new rich is that two out of three religions are of the opinion that rising to prominence by hard work is totally awesome and definitely not a perversion of the natural order of things.

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I believe the currency is based on notes, but I'll have to double check.

In terms of the roughs, they're like America's frontiers back when people were just starting to move west. There isn't enough influence/power to be expended to reprimand koloss attacking cities. I see it as an "at your own risk" type of living. At least until it becomes more developed and "civilized."

You bring up an interesting point about no country name being given. Maybe right now it's just Elendel. My current guess is that Elendel is like a county or region, with a known concentration and with smaller "cities" under it's domain. The poeple may not have expanded enough at this point to feel the need for a "country" name. Remember, although advanced, Sazed created the Basin to have all they need. There isn't much reason to expand beside curiosity/adventure and maybe space at some point.

In terms of labor unions, my thoughts are similar to Aranfan.

With the religions it makes sense that there are only a few prominent ones. They were birthed from the people themselves and thus have the emotional connection. For the most part, the other 300 are probably just interesting tidbits/history to the people currently. With exceptions of course.

I also found it very interesting that the Terris stewardship is still held in high regard, as opposed to as a negative oppression from the past.

It will be very interesting to see how this world progresses. It's magic will help it excel in some areas, but also cause it to neglect others.

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A few additional comments

I would have liked if we got a little more information about the non-roughs parts of the Basin. I am kind of skeptical that you could have a 19th century city of two million people as a quasi-stand-alone entity without corresponding supply/manufacturing/resource chains, smaller cities, and trading partners. I guess that Sazed could have played around with things to make it work.

I'm kind of curious what the new "natural" Koloss are like. They're still somewhat barbaric, but do they have human-like intelligence? The Koloss-blooded guy seems to be reasonably intelligent if somewhat violent. Are there human-Koloss relationships or are we to infer that all Koloss-blooded people are the result of rape?

I agree that Allomancers are more common among the high families, but it seems to be more dispersed than before-enough so that the broadsheet mentions allomancer trade unions, pewterarms doing industrial work, etc.

I'd also be curious if there is some sort of numerical quantification of how many people are Allomancers now. Sanderson says that they're "more common" in this world, I presume as a result of the relatively large number of Allomancers among the founders. Sanderson also said that Snapping happens differently now, so it may be that many people who previously would have needed supernatural intervention (the mists) to trigger their abilities can access them more easily.

Did Spook have a house? Obviously people trace their lineage to him, but it doesn't sound like there is a house with his name.

The Alloy Of Law is unique among Sanderson books I have read so far, in that it at no point involves a massive social upheaval (though Miles, at least, wants one). As such, we know less about the society it takes place in than his other works. The purpose of this Thread is to guess everything we can about the world in which Alloy Of Law is set. Here is what I have speculated thus far:

* Other than the mysterious "sea people" and Terris, all of known humanity seems to be roughly one nation. I suppose they were together for 1,000 years, but on the other hand, that was 340+ years ago. One assumes that the "Faceless Immortals" have been manipulating society to avoid war, but even so, this is impressive.

* As such, the name of the country is never mentioned.

* The government appears to be some sort of democracy, but there are still noble Houses, and those Houses are allowed to maintain standing armies, and sometimes have "skirmishes" with one another.

* Those Houses are, in fact, so isolated from the general public that Allomancy is still notably more common among them.

* House names include: Ladrian, Cett, Yomen, Tekiel.

* The Roughs are nominally under the authority of the central government, but a band of Koloss can destroy entire towns without reprisal. One wonders why people even go out there - it sounds like bad farmland, nobody talks about any valuable mines beyond the mountains which ring the Elendel Basin, and there is no indication of cattle trains or other major sources of revenue being brought into the Basin from the Roughs. As far as I can tell, they don't run train tracks or canals there, either.

* There are labor unions, and the Houses clash with them.

* There are at least four major religions: Sliverism, Survivorism, Trellism, and The Path. Wax's descriptions of The Path imply that rather fewer than all 300 of Sazed's religions are practiced on a large scale, though a few others might be.

* Despite the Basin being some 350 miles across, with something like 40 notable cities, everyone calls Elendel "The City," and it seems to be the center of commerce and social interaction - Wax and Marasi might just be prejudiced, but Ranette doing the same seems telling.

* Terris seems to be isolationist, still experts in Feruchemy, and still training elite personal servants (since Tillaume is described as being trained in the Terris style). We do not hear about any particular stigma against Terrismen, or Koloss-blooded for that matter, but since they are the only ethnic groups we know, I have been assuming there is some among those less enlightened than Wax.

* Electricity is new, steam power is somewhat accepted. The canals are still used extensively.

* Gold and Aluminum are among the most valuable metals. I did not find a reference to what the coinage is called (presumably, not "Boxings," but I may have missed something.

Please, contribute anything I missed, and your own speculation!

-- Deus Ex Biotica

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I would have liked if we got a little more information about the non-roughs parts of the Basin. I am kind of skeptical that you could have a 19th century city of two million people as a quasi-stand-alone entity without corresponding supply/manufacturing/resource chains, smaller cities, and trading partners. I guess that Sazed could have played around with things to make it work.

My understanding is that Sazed provided what they needed in the Basin. Once Sazed reshaped the world he brought all of TLR's cashes together. If I remember correctly, all of those cashes were centered around metal deposits as to block them from Ruin's eye. (I'll flip through HoA to try and find where this is mentioned, and feel free to correct me if you know I'm wrong). So there's your metal off the bat, including the large reservoir in one of the caverns.

I believe AoL also mentions in passing how easily plants grow inside the Basin, and how they need little work to flourish.

I'm not sure of all the types of resources they'd need, but it seems as though Sazed provided them with at least most.

Did Spook have a house? Obviously people trace their lineage to him, but it doesn't sound like there is a house with his name.

I think if he did have a House it would have been mentioned. He's such an important figure that his house would be like the Royal Family in England today. Also, if he did have a house, Wax wouldn't have had to trace people's lineage back to see if they were his decedents or not. The robbers would just kidnap from Spook's house, and being that Wax never brought up that possibility, my guess is that Spook has no house. I guess you could look at it like the whole of Elendel being his house.

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I am kind of skeptical that you could have a 19th century city of two million people as a quasi-stand-alone entity without corresponding supply/manufacturing/resource chains, smaller cities, and trading partners.

To be fair, there's a ton of other cities in the Basin, which presumably have some manufacturing or trade that fold in to Elendel's economy.

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If there's a good bit of intermarriage between the Houses, as is common in noble lines but not exclusively true as it was in the Final Empire, you might have to trace ancestry of all of them to find all descendents of a given person.

Is anyone else wondering how there is a House Tekiel when they got wiped out by House Hasting in Mistborn and were not mentioned at all in Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages?

Also, we might add Harms to the list of Houses, though they aren't a big one.

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I think that part of the difficulty we have with all this is that the society is relatively artificial. This isn't a criticism at all; given the events of HoA, it makes perfect sense. However, it does produce some oddities, such as the nature of the religions (any religion which doesn't deal with the fact that the world went from "barely livable" to "terrible" to "twitching corpse" to "burned" in about two years, and then went to "Garden of Eden" in about five minutes, would be rather unlikely).

I get the feeling that their society is in an expansionist phase, fueled by Sazed's restoration of all of humanities prior knowledge and the relative peace and prosperity brought on by the new-found richness of the world. However, given the richness of the Elendel basin, most of this expansion has been focused inward rather than outward, with the Roughs being a place where people go for social rather than economic reasons. This inward focus has produced relatively large amounts of technology and a higher population density within the Elendel basin, along with the supporting infrastructure. This would would include other cities, which would be much like our modern metropolises; there is no modern city that doesn't have a dozen smaller incorporated regions around them which are technically independent but which are economically and socially dominated by the major city. In fact, when people say where they are from, they typically identify by the nearest major city unless more detail is needed.

That they form a single society is really not surprising. The events of HoA would have required an enormous amount of cooperation between the different groups, and so a certain uniformity is to be expected. That the Terris stayed somewhat aloof is also not as surprising as you may think; they were the only remaining sizable group in the caverns that retained any kind of "ethnic" identity after 1024 years of the final empire. The remaining groups can be attributed to the so-called Founder effect, where influential people in a relatively small population become dominant by sheer chance. That there haven't been any wars is also not that surprising; there is no need. They conceive of themselves as a single nation and they have absolutely no rivals that we know of for resources.

As for the Koloss, I admit that's a bit of an oddity. It will be interesting to see what Sazed did to them, and why. They're something I can't quite place yet.

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Also, if he did have a house, Wax wouldn't have had to trace people's lineage back to see if they were his decedents or not. The robbers would just kidnap from Spook's house, and being that Wax never brought up that possibility, my guess is that Spook has no house. I guess you could look at it like the whole of Elendel being his house.

Not necessarily-there is a lot of evaluation by Wax to see who has the most lines going back to Spook (i.e. people whose ancestors are most heavily inbred by Spook-descendants). Spook's descendants in the paternal line wouldn't necessarily have the most-Spook DNA.

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I do find it interesting that Elendel does not appear to be ruled by the Lord Mistborn's descendants directly.

And sure, Happyman, I am not trying to critique this society of people with magical powers who came back from a nearly extinction-level event within the past 400 years as being unrealistic. We really do not have a frame of reference for that. I am just trying to figure out as much about the society as I can.

-- Deus Ex Biotica

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I do find it interesting that Elendel does not appear to be ruled by the Lord Mistborn's descendants directly.

And sure, Happyman, I am not trying to critique this society of people with magical powers who came back from a nearly extinction-level event within the past 400 years as being unrealistic. We really do not have a frame of reference for that. I am just trying to figure out as much about the society as I can.

-- Deus Ex Biotica

Sorry if I came across critical. That's pretty much what I am trying to do too.

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I don't know if I would classify Trellism as a "major" religion. It sounds rather fringe, actually, since it seems to have motivated Miles to implement his plan and ideology. It also, notably, appears to be nothing like the version discussed in the original trilogy (It was all about stars, and Sazed used their accurate charts to position Scadrial correctly in the Cosmere). It's a lot more violent sounding. And there's red involved, or something along those lines.

Bet we'll see more of it, if not in a direct sequel to Alloy, in future trilogies.

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Exactly what Trellism (Alloy of Law), Tregalism (related by Sazed during the original trilogy), and Miles' own beliefs (Trell-justified, but warped by personal hardships and The Set) have to do with each other is a mystery as yet unsolved.

Miles seems confident everyone will know what he means when he talks about Trell, but I guess that doesn't mean much. The only religions we know have a large "establishment" following are Survivorism and Sliverism.

-- Deus Ex Biotica

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Is anyone else wondering how there is a House Tekiel when they got wiped out by House Hasting in Mistborn and were not mentioned at all in Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages?

Never even crossed my mind, but nicely spotted!. Now that you mention it, didn't Hasting kill them off while they tried to flee the city or something similar? I suppose it's not too much of a stretch to say that a few may have escaped being slaughtered (though their likelihood of regaining noble status is slim, at best). Heck, none of the skaa had last names during the Final Empire, so maybe a lucky skaa family just picked a name that they liked and grew into a completely separate noble house.

Or maybe Brandon just messed up. But I doubt it - that's not really something he does.

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Speaking of last names, I spent some time wondering if they are universal of not. Miles has one, and he's not a noble, but they might still be considered optional among the lower classes - we never hear one for Wayne, Lessie, Tan.

Hundredlives? I assumed that was just a nickname he earned in the Roughs. Unless there was another name, casually mentioned, and I'm just suffering from memory failure. :P

Your guess is as good as mine. Don't know if we'll ever find out, it doesn't strike me as a vital plot point. lol

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I kind of assumed House Tekiel is comprised of descendants of all the members of the original who happened to not be in Luthandel. Maybe their home was located near one of the caches and they'd slowly pulled their Allomancers back before the final disastrous escape attempt. It would explain why an attack on an entire Great House at once didn't irreparably cripple House Hasting way back in the original.

Of course, given the ending, I'd have to say that the Cosmere hates them for some reason regardless.

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I kind of assumed House Tekiel is comprised of descendants of all the members of the original who happened to not be in Luthandel. Maybe their home was located near one of the caches and they'd slowly pulled their Allomancers back before the final disastrous escape attempt. It would explain why an attack on an entire Great House at once didn't irreparably cripple House Hasting way back in the original.

Of course, given the ending, I'd have to say that the Cosmere hates them for some reason regardless.

I'm pretty sure that at some point in HoA Elend notes that they had random noblemen that they had scooped up working as allomancers for their army. It's possible that some of those were Tekiels.

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