Sixth of the Dusk Spoiler Thread

[Chaos]

You can get the ebook of Shadows Beneath right now: http://www.17thshard.com/news/brandon-news/shadows-beneath-and-sixth-of-the-dusk-available-r193

So I thought, hey, we probably need a spoiler thread for Sixth of the Dusk. What did you think?

[Tempus]

Just finished my first readthrough of Sixth. Interesting. Gonna do a second readthrough and take notes on visible Realmatics, but I've already got a number of cool things going through my head.

 

And of course... Spaceships.

 

*edit*

 

Realmatics Notable in Dusk

 

• Cognitive detection/lifesense: Giant Shadow Fish, Shadowmaw, deathants
• Aviars
  • Bestow powers to people indiscriminately and quickly
  • Limited Telepathy? Receiving only?
  • Kokerlii - Coppercloud for Cognitive lifesense
  • Sak - External short term future visions, Electrum-like in some ways, limited to death scenes of people
  • multiple, unspecified talents
  • parasite worms grant power... unclear how. Very location limited, possibly due to flora, possibly due to island, possibly due to strange pool, unclear why parasites don't spread
  • Each bird type has different power, despite parasite being the same
  • Many other talents apparently exist (or could exist!)
• Spacetravel
  • High likelihood of FTL
  • Mapping device for Investitures (shows Aviars only)
  • Linguistic universal translator
• Meekers - Telepathy, projecting and receiving
• Patji's Finger - general mindsense projection
• Strange emerald pool - splinter pool of some kind? All minds invisible in the area

 

 

Critiques:

 

The bigger plot, and the big reveal ending, is like a Matryoshka doll mixed with the classic 'Industry exploits natives' theme. I think it wasn't done well. The whole basis hinges on Sixth, who has both a fierce love and a fierce hate for his lifestyle. So he secretly sets out, holding the dissonance of being both a person who wants to improve and overcome his difficult lifestyle but at the same time defines himself by it. That's fine - in fact, I think that should be brought out more.

 

Then there are all the minor plot points with Vathi - and they are minor, she's basically just there to tell him there were more people than he thought, and to bring up all the stuff about the outworlders. Which is where the Matryoshka doll shows up - local industrials exploit native low tech trappers to get magic birds, non-local super techs exploit low tech industrials to get birds. Neither seems an immediate kind of threat, and neither seems exactly like something that someone can oppose. That was the whole metaphor juxtaposition with the bird wing injury, after all.

 

Yet... that's how the ending goes. Everything will be good and fine because the natives have copped onto the scheme, and are determined to win the battle against being exploited. There isn't anything clever or good, and it wasn't satisfying at all. And the method of introducing the bigger doll exploit thing was hamhanded - no subtlety at all. And the piles of bodies when the mapping gear was going to be used? Unexplained, unsupported, unimportant. What? And it upset all the Aviar, but we learn that no device was ever activated. What upset them? The future sight seems to be very short range in time, so it needs to be immediate...

 

For the ending, I wanted it to be different. I wanted the machine to be activated, to the exploitation to begin, and for the horrible realization that this is what what happen to the industrials to occur as well, probably to Vathi, not Dusk. And I wanted Dusk to come to terms with himself, reconcile his need for improvement and his hatred and love for the island, and determine to use his unique knowledge not to resist the change, but to embrace it, to beat the exploiters at their own game by outpacing them - industrial and spacefarer both. Instead, I'm left with the sour taste of a character who didn't grow past his conflict, didn't come up with a satisfactory resolution to the larger conflict, and in general didn't sit right.

 

I also wanted more things to be brought full circle. I wanted the shadow fish to be symbolic of the exploitation Matryoshka doll situation. I wanted the Meekers to teach a lesson about how greater knowledge peoples might look down on Dusk, instead of being neat creature porn. I wanted the injured bird wing to be a tied into how Dusk has to learn to accept painful change in order to be able to 'fly'. I wanted the Patji's Finger plants to give the idea of how to lure and trap a predator into an untenable situation, and thrive off them. I wanted the parasite magics to mirror the possibilities for relations between the three factions Dusk is a worm, Industrials are birds, spacefarers humans. I wanted the dead trapper to tie into this directly.

 

All those elements are there, just waiting to be brought in, just waiting to come together.... but they don't. The ending just... doesn't do it. The original ending from before the edits doesn't either, though in some ways it's a little closer (and in some further). And in the end, I in turn find this to be one of Brandon's least satisfying published works, despite all the good stuff going on earlier.

Edited June 29, 2014 by firstRainbowRose
Please use the edit button instead of double posting.

[Oudeis]

I find myself agreeing whole-heartedly with Tempus.

 

This book was fine, but that's it. It wasn't amazing. Almost I feel like he tried to do too many things for a short story. We get a tiny taste of Investiture, and then it's over. We get a glimpse of this Splinterworld, and then it's done. We get a hint of worldhopping, but no more. It was so short, he could maybe have developed one or two of these themes to some sort of satisfaction, but instead he did a whole lot of things, very simply.

 

I don't think it's a bad twist, but not one of his better ones. I mostly saw it coming, but I have to admit it felt more like a guess on my part; I turned out to be right, but I wasn't sure until the reveal.

 

The newest thing he did was show two shardcultures interact on a massive scale, and it makes me REALLY want to know when this happens relative to all the other books out there. Is this happening while the Stormlight Archive is happening? Third Mistborn trilogy?

 

I normally dislike wishy-washy villains, but I liked the idea he planted that the Ones Above aren't necessarily bad guys. They plan to use humans the way humans use Aviar... yet, Dusk and Kokerlii have a good relationship, and he's got genuine affection for Sak. ... despite naming her Sak. In addition, we get the tease that the Ones Above are worried about other Ones, Ones who will not be as kind. Perhaps this is the lesser of two evils? We can either sit back and obey our own rules, and watch while our rivals show up and enslave your people, or we can cheat a bit, cause irreparable harm to your culture and way of life, but ultimately save at least some of it. Perhaps I don't mind the ambivalence because he's pointing the finger to other, FAR WORSE villains.

 

And yeah, the "Father is hard on us to make us stronger and smarter" trick at the end was... groan-inducing.

 

It was worth reading. I mean, it's Sanderson. If he wrote my eulogy, I'd applaud from the casket (and ask a question about hemalurgy). But if it was going to be a short, mostly-pointless story that's a filler episode, I sure wish he'd at least dropped a few interesting Realmatics tidbits in. (If we got anything concrete out of this, I didn't see it.)

[Chaos]

I will generally agree with your sentiments. I felt the beginning took... a very long time, and the ending was very abrupt. Compared with Shadows for Silence or Emperor's Soul, this is a much weaker work. I feel there needed to be a good thousand more words to wrap things up. It's such a... I don't know. I need to read it again. Tempus, I feel similarly about all the corpses around. I don't think that was explained well, and certainly didn't foreshadow "the end of the island."

Seeing more cosmere relations were awesome and makes me want more stories of them interacting right freaking now. Who do you think these Ones Above are? Seventeenth Sharders? Scadrians? I feel Scadrians, personally.

[Oudeis]

I feel Scadrians, personally.

 

Scadrians is the first place my mind went, but that's based entirely on the fact that they're the only culture we've ever been told, "they will explicitly have space travel one day" (as far as I know).

 

As for the corpses... I mean, I have one random theory, which is that Dusk made an entirely faulty assumption, which happened to lead him to the correct conclusion. It seems reasonable to assume that the Machine had something to do with Investiture. Perhaps when it was opened, some energy contained inside was released for a brief period of time, and it simply made every Aviar's power go haywire. He was only using two at a time, and he wouldn't have noticed if Kokerlii suddenly made his brain SUPER hidden, so all he saw was Sak's power making him look SUPER destined to die. Dusk saw the visions, and assumed it meant "something that happened has made me universally guaranteed to die" when actually it was just "this is what an Aviar on duralumin looks like". Ironically, the event happened to be universally dangerous in an abstract sort of way, but that's just coincidence.

 

This is, let me re-state, just a huge speculation on my part. It's just something that I think would explain all the "huh?" moments. Even why as morning dawned, all the extra death-visions went away; the side-effects of the pulse finally wore off.

 

Another thought I had; to correct my earlier impression, I guess the lesson of Patji wasn't, "I'm tough to make you stronger," it's "anything that looks too easy is a trap." Which... is an odd lesson, since nothing on Patji was ever "too easy" unless it was a trap set by a human Hunter, so it really wasn't a lesson of Patji itself.

 

Does anyone know, do we have any promises of future books set on First of the Sun? Or could this be all we ever get?

[Kurkistan]

As for the corpses... I mean, I have one random theory, which is that Dusk made an entirely faulty assumption, which happened to lead him to the correct conclusion. It seems reasonable to assume that the Machine had something to do with Investiture. Perhaps when it was opened, some energy contained inside was released for a brief period of time, and it simply made every Aviar's power go haywire. He was only using two at a time, and he wouldn't have noticed if Kokerlii suddenly made his brain SUPER hidden, so all he saw was Sak's power making him look SUPER destined to die. Dusk saw the visions, and assumed it meant "something that happened has made me universally guaranteed to die" when actually it was just "this is what an Aviar on duralumin looks like". Ironically, the event happened to be universally dangerous in an abstract sort of way, but that's just coincidence.

This is, let me re-state, just a huge speculation on my part. It's just something that I think would explain all the "huh?" moments. Even why as morning dawned, all the extra death-visions went away; the side-effects of the pulse finally wore off.

A plausible explanation, I think. Perhaps, though, Sak's talent wasn't so much haywire as super far-reaching? So "here's all the ways you could die for the next month" or the like.

EDIT:

And I agree with Tempus that the pool is likely a "splinter-pool" or the like. Has directly magical effects (blocking mind-sense)? Bestows magical effects onto surroundings? Changes the temperature of the water that flows from it? Sounds pretty magical there.

I guess that the surrounding environment/ocean gets magicified by fruit/worms being swept down the river, then.

EDIT 2:

The personification of the islands (and the super-Australian way everything is trying to kill you, and is in fact very good at trying to kill you) could very well also be attributed to investiture. Perhaps the Shard that the presumably-Splinter-based magic is derived from had an appropriate Intent--or the Splinter itself had its own more focused intent.

Wild guess: it's a Splinter of Chaos' "Survival Shard".

So Father is not just "tough, but fair". In this case, he's just craven and is perhaps ruthlessly shaping the surrounding population to better protect him.

Edited June 30, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Tempus]

Talking about Splinters, it could be the Survival Shard, but I don't know if it would be a Survival Splinter. We know there are worlds out there that just have a Splinter on them, and no major Shard. I was certainly under the impression that First of the Sun was a minor Shardworld. I'm not sure about Splintering, though - we never see a Shard splinter itself outside of a planet they've Invested in. My thoughts on those minor Splinters are...

 

1. The Splinters are of Adonalsium, pre-shattering, and thus relatively Intent balanced.
2. The Shattering was not a clean, perfect division of Adonalsium into sixteen, and a number of Splinters were made as well.

Of course, it could just be a Splinter of the Survival Shard, just cause we haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

[Moogle]

A number of things:

• The Machine: hello there, Allomantic bronze mechanical mistfabrial.
• Ones Above: hello there, Scadrians. Your "do not intervene in local cultures" has a nice Star Trek feel to it (and probably inspired by Harmony?), tempered by pragmatism.
• Why can't humans get infested by these neato worms? Parasites granting powers make me think of Silence Divine...
• I'm a fan of whatever Splinter is/was on this planet being of Conflict, but this is perhaps a subject for a different thread.
• Language translation machine: pretty much confirmation that the Heralds/Wit have some sort of magical language ability, since it can be replicated via machine. I sincerely doubt the Ones Above have managed to create a hand-held natural language processing device.
• Since the "dead" One Above was not in fact dead, I'm curious as to what method was used. Feruchemy could very easily make someone cold (by storing heat), atium to look older, pewter to look weak... but I don't know on this one.
• Once again, we find that Investiture finds its way into infusing the 'distinctive' parts of the landscape (in this case, a neat waterfall at the center of the biggest baddest island). More fuel for the theories on how Investiture supercharges identity.

Overall, I enjoyed the story. Not Brandon's nicest work, but the glimpse into the future of the space-faring civilizations makes me want Mistborn 3 all the more.

Edited June 30, 2014 by Moogle

[Oudeis]

A plausible explanation, I think. Perhaps, though, Sak's talent wasn't so much haywire as super far-reaching? So "here's all the ways you could die for the next month" or the like.

 

I perhaps had not explained what I initially meant here. I didn't meant haywire as in, "simply went wrong." Rather than "looking farther into the future" (partially cuz I doubt it's actual precognition, more on that below), I think it just expanded the definition of "plausible" to the point of uselessness. Like, rather than "here's how you could reasonably die if you're incautious," for a second there were thousands of bodies as "plausible" expanded to "here's one body for every point on your body where you might randomly choose to stab yourself right at this moment," and slowly narrowed the scope of "plausibility" as fewer and fewer random bodies appeared.

 

Why I don't think it's precognition, and be aware this is rampant speculation and "how it feels" to me, so I make no claim that it's actually correct.

 

I think it's far more likely to be I Ching. If I understand the art correctly, I Ching never claims to see the future. The sticks presumably reveal to you enough of the world as-is that it can reasonably be deduced what is likely to happen next. I get the sense that this is how Sak works. She has a sense of the world around her, perhaps a spiritual or cognitive sense, and it lets her see things that are potential threats. Her method of revealing this threat is rather visceral. How do her perceptions differentiate "likely death" from "unlikely"? Who knows. Perhaps the same mechanism that decides whether a Forgery is Plausible enough or not.

 

Just my two cents. I'm coming up with the alternate theory based mostly on what is insinuated in Mistborn, that true future-sight (of anyone other than yourself) is a thing Of the Gods. I'm not sure I'd believe a Splinter could (or would) grant futuresight willy-nilly, but the general impression I get is that it's not something bandied about at random. I could be wrong, maybe it was just how they see it on Scadrial and it has nothing to do with actual Realmatics. There were inconsistencies, after all, like the fact that Preservation could see the future better than Ruin, yet it was Ruin's metal that allowed allomancers to see any but their own future.

 

Final conjecture: I wonder if the dead One Above was a Kandra. They could prolly fake dead better than most.

[Kurkistan]

@Moogle

How do we know the dead emissary isn't dead? The Ones could just be cold/ruthless: kill a pawn to win the game.

@Outis

Ah, that makes sense too. Sorry for misinterpreting you.

So far as future sight goes, I don't think we need be too worried and resort to calling Sak's talent other than it, by all appearances, is in this case: future sight. Though the story itself is rather sparse on examples, I seem to recall Brandon saying in the initial brainstorming that bonding with the birds gives _you_ the ability as well: so Sixth is in fact seeing his own future directly, rather than Sak seeing his future and then passing it along. This allows us to apply the "electrum exemption" and conclude that seeing your own future isn't particularly "of the gods". Even if it's the case that the power is all fully vested in the birds, the nature of the bond could also allow such wiggling away from the need to have the power directly allow you to see the future of others on general.

[Moogle]

@Moogle

How do we know the dead emissary isn't dead? The Ones could just be cold/ruthless: kill a pawn to win the game.

 

This is a good point, but it doesn't quite fit in with the whole Prime Directive thing they've got going on. I mean, it's possible there's factions within the Ones Above that might murder members in order to get the trade going, but we just have so little to go on that I think a faked death (since apparently the One Above died of natural causes?) is the more likely option.

[Kurkistan]

@Outis

 

Actually, I withdraw my "that sounds plausible too" comment. The various bodies Dusk sees are in different conditions, ranging from bloated to skeletal. There aren't very many ways in the near-future to bloatify or skeletalize a body, suggesting that Sak is reaching at least a bit farther into the future than usual.

 

@Moogle

 

I agree, I just thought I might have missed something. Looking over the original ending, actually, we see that the Ones Above claimed the body, and Dusk concludes that he wasn't really dead. So a fair enough option. To go with what others said, I'd think that a kandra or Feruchemist (stop breathing, stop eating/drinking, store all your heat and maybe even "slow down" enough to make your heartbeat nearly undetectable?) could carry it off.

[Windrunner]

Personally, I wanted to see more of the Aviar. We only got to see two powers in action, and one of them was extremely uncommon. It makes me wonder what the other Aviar can do. Hopefully not the last we see of them, even if it's just a nod in a later book.

[Tempus]

Personally, I wanted to see more of the Aviar. We only got to see two powers in action, and one of them was extremely uncommon. It makes me wonder what the other Aviar can do. Hopefully not the last we see of them, even if it's just a nod in a later book.

This and so much this. Could be a good interview question - what are the other Aviar abilities? Then again, they might not be all developed and laid out just yet.

[Argent]

Hmm. I don't have anything cohesive for now, just a few comments:

• The Ones Above instantly made me think of Scadrial as well. But we can't know, there could be plenty of space-faring races throughout the Cosmere.
• Emerald pool - Splinterpool is what came to mind as well. Probably not a Shardpool, not with First of the Sun being a secondary Shardworld, and not without an active magic system (the parasitic worms felt like residual magic, much like the shades from Shadows of Silence in the Forests of Hell). The Splinter itself? We have seen a shielding / hiding / protecting power from Kokrelii and warning / time-warping from Sak. If I were to guess, I would probably go with something along the lines of Protection Splinter; but that sounds too similar to Preservation, so I don't know.
• I remember, from the Writing Excuses brainstorming sessions (this may be included in the book, haven't read the supplementary materials yet), Brandon wanted to toy around with the idea of other species acquiring powers the same way Aviars do (e.g. what happens if an animal eats an Aviar that has already acquired its powers?). 
• In the light of this, the Shard whose Splinter(s) hypothetically gives the parasitic worms their mojo might be something like Symbiosis. Mind senses and telepathy both seem big themes in the magic system too, so maybe that too. I keep thinking Empathy, but I can't justify it.
• I like the names. First of the Sun probably implies that the planet is closest to its star - though the name could also be just a cultural thing, similar to the geocentric model of our own solar system.
• +1 for the Prime Directive.

[Iredomi]

I thought it was perfectly structured I really liked the ending. The banding together against unbeatable odds and the implication a lot more is to come. I love open endings like that. Though I doubt we'll ever learn the outcome directly I'm inclined to think it doesn't really matter it's all about finding hope and fighting for it. Though what are you going to do against space ships... Preferred the other two Novellas I think but only barely. Really loved Dusk hope we see him again sometime though I doubt it.

[Trae Cooper]

I enjoyed the story. The world as presented has some interesting bits as a setting. The wild islands, technology swallowing up the wilds, the spacefarers above.

 

Overall I liked it better than Shadows for Silence, but not nearly as much as Emperor's Soul. The narrative got a lot more engagement from me than Shadows for Silence, but some of the criticisms above definitely resonate with me.

 

I would definitely like to see a more expanded amount of info involving the powers aviar bestow, including the common powers that are well known.

 

It would be really good to get Brandon to answer when this story is set, during the Cosmere timeline. This would give us a better idea about the possibility of it being Scadrians. I doubt it is Iriali since it seems they were willing to visit any planet and possibly colonize. (if indeed they did space travel, rather than traversing the cognitive realm)

 

Overall, I enjoy seeing manifestations of realmatic theory even in short pieces such as this one.

 

Trae

[WeiryWriter]

I really liked it! The ending did feel rushed but I thought it made sense from Dusk's point of view. I would have like it to be longer, for many reasons though.

I'm not really getting a Scadrian-vibe from the Ones Above though, unlike most of you. Their methodologies are not something I can see Harmony endorsing. He definitely would not like taking advantage of an entire people/planet and he would probably take action or send someone to intervene (like he did with the Vanishers).

I like the pseudo-Prime Directive thing, though I don't like what Ones Above are doing in trying to skirt it. I'm pretty much against the invasion of the Pantheon, preserve the environment people!

I want to know how the mind-sense works, maybe its akin to life-sense? Or maybe there are some Cognitive Realm shenanigans going on?

I'm liking the Splinter of the Survival Shard theory and the idea that the emerald lake is a Splinterpool.

An FYI, the workshop episodes are going to start airing next week.

[masaru]

In general, I would agree with the ending being a bit anticlimactic. I enjoyed reading about the culture and world, and loved that this must be the most modern timeframe we've seen in the Cosmere. Spaceships! But the resolution just kind of happened without the "hero" doing anything particularly. I'll throw in a vote for it being related to the Survival shard. 

 

SPECULATION: the entire time I was wondering if Vathi is Khriss doing some Ars Arcanum research on another world. She is described as dark-skinned, and has a very similar personality to what is shown in White Sand. And that's probably all I should really say.

[ccstat]

I enjoyed it a lot. A few quibbles, but in general I want to see more of this world.

I agree that the ending was a bit abrupt. I was expecting Dusk's training of the meekers to come back and bite him (i.e. Vathi) and raise the stakes. The Brandon avalanche definitely missed at least one piece there. Symbolically, that would also have his trapper traditions get in his own way, making the external conflict a bit more immediately personal rather than just angsty.

 

I wanted the Patji's Finger plants to give the idea of how to lure and trap a predator into an untenable situation, and thrive off them. ... I wanted the dead trapper to tie into this directly.

Yes! Definitely agreed, though I also think that demands like this could actively hurt the story. One of my profound dislikes in books is when everything must be explicitly stated for the reader. If you bring everything up to the surface level, then you don't trust the reader to find any meaning on their own, and you destroy much of the talk-about-it-later value.

 

Dusk saw the visions, and assumed it meant "something that happened has made me universally guaranteed to die" when actually it was just "this is what an Aviar on duralumin looks like". Ironically, the event happened to be universally dangerous in an abstract sort of way, but that's just coincidence.

This makes a lot of sense to me. 

 

I really liked the ending. The banding together against unbeatable odds and the implication a lot more is to come. I love open endings like that. Though I doubt we'll ever learn the outcome directly I'm inclined to think it doesn't really matter it's all about finding hope and fighting for it. 

In particular, my reading was that the threat of exploitation by the Ones Above opened Vathi & company's eyes to the dangers of what they were doing, not just to the danger they were in. It also provides incentive to the trappers to cooperate not just with the corporations but with each other, which fixes the one piece of the "old ways" that Sixth had serious issues with.

[Oudeis]

Actually, I withdraw my "that sounds plausible too" comment. The various bodies Dusk sees are in different conditions, ranging from bloated to skeletal. There aren't very many ways in the near-future to bloatify or skeletalize a body, suggesting that Sak is reaching at least a bit farther into the future than usual.

 

I think you're still missing my point. The extrapolation can see as far into the future as it likes; that part requires no more magic than a Highwarden guessing when the next storm will be. Sak could have detected: You carry a knife, which you might plunge into your own eyeball right now. There's a low pressure system out to sea that might turn into a storm, and bloat your body. Or maybe it'll damage part of the tree, exposing you to predators/the elements, in which case you'd skeletalize. Or maybe it'll blow over in which case your body would look like this, or a thousand other variables that produce a thousand other bodies in various states." The 'magic' comes from the fact that Sak can know all of this information about right now and magically deduce which are relevant to his bonded's death. Once the information is obtained, the various states it might leave his body in are easy to determine.

 

Next time I read it, I'm going to keep my eye on his various bodies, and see if we get any hints that support "this is clearly never once showing his body any farther ahead than twenty minutes," versus, "hey, that one clearly showed how he might look after being dead a week." Right now, I don't think we have a baseline to know, for sure, how long any of Dusk's corpses look like they might have been dead.

 

Personally, I wanted to see more of the Aviar. We only got to see two powers in action, and one of them was extremely uncommon. It makes me wonder what the other Aviar can do. Hopefully not the last we see of them, even if it's just a nod in a later book.

 

I KNOW, RIGHT? They tease us with, "there are dozens if not hundreds of Aviar powers!" Then we meet Vathi and "Oh look, a different breed of Aviar! With... THE EXACT SAME POWER!" Whiskey tango, Mr. Sanderson. Whiskey. Tango.

 

I'm not really getting a Scadrian-vibe from the Ones Above though, unlike most of you. Their methodologies are not something I can see Harmony endorsing. He definitely would not like taking advantage of an entire people/planet and he would probably take action or send someone to intervene (like he did with the Vanishers).

Sure, he stopped the Vanishers... but not before they had the chance to do anything wrong. And even then, all he did was give those opposing the Vanishers a chance in the form of Wax. As much as he'd be against exploiting a new culture (as in, a culture with laws like the Prime Directive), it's similarly against his own philosophy to directly intervene just because he disagrees with what's happening. Like he's said, he wants people to have as many choices as possible, and part of that means not just stepping in because people do something you don't like. He might aid someone like Wax who is opposing it, but first, that could easily be happening off-screen, since we don't get to see anything on the One Above ships, and second, that person could have tried and simply failed.

 

All this said, I actually am not sold on Scadrians being the Ones Above. I think it's one option, based on the fact that they're the only race we've ever heard confirmed, "they will have space travel," but that's pretty much the only reason to assume it's them. And since we know for sure that the Ones Above hint at other space-faring races, there has to be at least one other option, by default.

 

In particular, my reading was that the threat of exploitation by the Ones Above opened Vathi & company's eyes to the dangers of what they were doing, not just to the danger they were in. It also provides incentive to the trappers to cooperate not just with the corporations but with each other, which fixes the one piece of the "old ways" that Sixth had serious issues with.

 

An interesting quibble with this.. Vathi eventually got around to an interesting point that she should have made earlier. At one point, she makes it plain. Someone is going to exploit these islands; if it hadn't been inevitable before, the Ones Above would have made it so now. We can respect them as much as we want and leave them alone, but that just means those jerks over there will exploit them in our stead; tragedy of the commons.

 

At the time, she expresses genuine sympathy for Dusk and the fact that his way of life is simply becoming unsustainable. But earlier in the book, she was way too callous about it. "We're going to take over your island and shred everything that makes it interesting and unique! Why aren't you happy at this?" I'm all for tension, I realize she couldn't have been too sympathetic off the top, but first of all, the tension is generic and blase, and second of all, she finally reverses herself for no apparent reason. It felt like, "It's time for Vathi to look sympathetic now, so let's give her the new script." It felt orchestrated, fake, and practically cliche.

 

... wow I'm coming across as harsh. The rest of the book was great! Sixth of the Dusk drinking game: read this book, and take a shot every time some plant or animal is named "death-something".

Edited July 1, 2014 by Outis

[Kurkistan]

@Outis

 

I suppose I really just don't see any compelling reason to look to this kind of "extrapolate from the present" as the mechanism for how Sak's power works. I think it far more simple and far more likely, given what we know and applying some principle of parsimony, to look at Sak's power as simply a more focused version of Allomantic electrum. From that, it seems that seeing a skeleton requires that you look farther into the future than normal, which is going to take more power.

Edited July 1, 2014 by Kurkistan

[Oudeis]

@Outis

 

I suppose I really just don't see any compelling reason to look to this kind of "extrapolate from the present" as the mechanism for how Sak's power works. I think it far more simple and far more likely, given what we know and applying some principle of parsimony, to look at Sak's power as simply a more focused version of Allomantic electrum. From that, it seems that seeing a skeleton requires that you look farther into the future than normal, which is going to take more power.

 

Hrm... this makes me wonder about allomantic Electrum. There's some speculation on why electrum shows you a cloud, even when no one else is burning atium to provide the feedback loop. What if you, yourself are the feedback loop? Electrum, by default, shows you only a single future... however, seeing that future potentially changes it, splitting it ad infinitum. Since you cannot see the future without seeing the future, even though electrum technically shows you only a single vision, in practice it always works out to be an electrum cloud. Just a random thought.

 

I can get behind the idea of it working like allomantic electrum. I'm not giving up on my own idea as plausible, but yours is, too.

 

Another thought on the book as a whole: I was sorta disappointed to find out that the entire point of being a trapper on the island was nothing but an Aviar hatchery. There was literally no point in hunting for anything else, and barely a point in hunting for Aviar, once you built up your breeding pairs. No one wanted the pelt of a nightmaw or the succulent meat of whatever killed that guy at the first Patji's Finger. There was no call to bring back a colony of deathants for the parasitic power they possessed. It felt... I dunno. Incongruous. I'm all for tradition and competition, and you do need to find those additional wild Aviars, I guess, but it seems to me that "tradition" is the literal only reason trappers don't just set up all of their "safehouses" a quarter mile inland and die a lot less often. If the point is to keep your skills sharp, why not have your tradition be, "once a month, make a pilgrimage to the emerald pool at the peak, then return safely," rather than, "let's all try to kill each other all the time,"? It just strikes me that having a far larger group of only mostly trained Trappers, all working together, would make for a stronger society than a fraction of that population marginally better trained and constantly working at cross-purposes.

[Kurkistan]

Hrm... this makes me wonder about allomantic Electrum. There's some speculation on why electrum shows you a cloud, even when no one else is burning atium to provide the feedback loop. What if you, yourself are the feedback loop? Electrum, by default, shows you only a single future... however, seeing that future potentially changes it, splitting it ad infinitum. Since you cannot see the future without seeing the future, even though electrum technically shows you only a single vision, in practice it always works out to be an electrum cloud. Just a random thought.

 

I agree, though this isn't a new concept...

 

If I recall correctly, this model was my head-canon since back before I joined the forums.

[potatopicker]

Assuming the device does what it's said to do, I think that it's likely that the machine is a mistfabial that uses a combination of Allomantic bronze, to seek for Investiture, and Allomantic duralumin to increase the range of the device. That would explain why the Aviar were so affected when the device was opened.

 

To give credit where credit is due:

• The Machine: hello there, Allomantic bronze mechanical mistfabrial.

 

 

Perhaps when it was opened, some energy contained inside was released for a brief period of time, and it simply made every Aviar's power go haywire... "this is what an Aviar on duralumin looks like."

 

What I don't understand is how the specifications of a machine like that are supposed to help the locals develop more advanced technologies.  If the machine is any kind of fabrial, it would be impossible to duplicate on a different Shard/Splinter world.  Even the "concepts and ideas" explained (realmatic theory?) wouldn't be as applicable to the way Investiture works on the archipelago.  

 

The other problem I have is that the assumption (held by Sixth, so perhaps he is simply wrong) is that these instructions will somehow help the locals build machines that can fly or be space-worthy.