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We'll definitely get an AoS tie-in. Sure, there's been a lot about Inhumans on the show, but they are interested in "enhanced" or "gifted" people in general. And when the Sokovia Accords become an issue, they will most assuredly have implications for SHIELD. It's too bad that AoS will react to or even set up the movies but the Agents themselves never show up in the movies. I understand the practical reasons that this is nearly impossible, but they would definitely have a dog in that fight.

I think that Bavadin doesn't necessarily care all that much about other people's autonomy--just his own. I think the Shard's Intent is such that it won't totally warp his personality. Unlike Ruin, which turned a kind man bad, Autonomy is probably a little easier to Hold without changing one's personality, as that seems in line with its Intent. Therefore, a selfish Holder might be perfectly willing to violate others' autonomy in the pursuit of maintaining his own.

Well, it's more like this: So, you're an evil Shard, and you want to gain a foothold on another Shardworld. But you don't feel comfortable Investing there and drawing the other Shardholder's attention, especially because this Shardworld is Scadrial, and the Shardholder there is a lot more powerful than any other. Now, you want to directly influence events, not just send some agents in (particularly because the Shard you hold is Autonomy). Well, fortunately, there's a magic system on this planet that might let you whisper into people's minds. The problem is, people who hear voices whispering in their minds are generally just insane. Unless, of course, they're hearing the voice of God. Fortunately, you are a god, so you just need to set up your own religion. Why not just infiltrate an existing one? And what do you know? A former denizen of your own world was there at some point and founded a religion that is pretty clearly mocking you, just like several others you've heard about from around the Cosmere. Well, wouldn't it be nice to corrupt that little ingrate's religion? Definitely rather petty, but not necessarily middle school girl petty.

Actually, The Unholy Consult is no longer the next book. You see, his publisher was giving him problems over the length of the manuscript, so he finally just split it in two. The Great Ordeal is coming out next year (maybe in July; it's not clear yet), and The Unholy Consult comes out the year after. Amazon is already listing the release date as 7/5, but Bakker is still saying that nothing is firm just yet. Assuming that the page count Amazon lists is correct, it's only 496 pages, so chances are that if he just had a different publisher, none of this would be a problem.

Yeah, I read the first 400 pages of Gardens of the Moon, and I gave up. I hated all of the characters, wasn't much interested in the magic or settings, etc. I still plan to give it another try eventually. It may have been timing more than anything else that kept me from enjoying it. I think I started right after the first time I read The Wheel of TIme, which is full of likable characters (even if you disagree, you have to at least admit that they're supposed to be likable, while the Malazan characters are not). Otherwise, I really don't know why I was so turned off by it. It's not just because it's dark. I love R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books, and they are as dark as can be. I just really didn't like what I read. But, like I said, I'll give it another chance one of these days.

ZOMG!!!111! Sooooooooo excited for movie. I have to say, with all of the characters that they're bringing in (seriously, there are going to be more superheroes in this one than in Age of Ultron), I was tending to agree with people calling it Avengers 2.5, but the tone of the trailer is not Avengers-ish at all. Sure, it's just the first one, but I think that Civil War is going to accomplish something major that the MCU really needs. Now that they've developed all of these characters over the course of about a dozen films, they need a movie that focuses on a couple of them enough to give us a nice, cohesive story, while featuring effective appearances from their increasingly large supporting cast, just like they so often do in the comics. I believe that the most successful cameo yet--insofar as it seemed like something straight out of the comics--was Falcon in Ant-Man. It showcased the character while still serving the plot. It reminded us of the greater MCU and set up future plotlines without seeming contrived. They really need to find a way to bring that same feel to a movie with more characters in it, to let each shine, fulfill their role in the plot, and move the whole MCU narrative forward, without becoming a distraction and muddling up the plot. I liked AoU well enough, but it definitely didn't accomplish that. I think Civil War will, and it's going to be so cool. So. Cool.

My personal hypothesis is that Trell himself--not a god but a worldhopper--seeded the religions on various planets and included elements that were intended to be a thumbing of the nose at Bavadin. I'm assuming, here, that Bavadin is involved in recent events on Scadrial, and he corrupted Trelagism into Trellism as a small revenge against Trell.

Well, technically, Shallan progressed slowest of all, since all development halted when she was in denial. However, as soon as Pattern showed back up, she started to progress very quickly. As for Kaladin, he was years away from his first encounter with Syl when Jasnah started to bind Ivory. I know that we don't have a lot of information to go on right now, but it really does seem to me that Jasnah's progress has been fairly slow. If this is so, then the only thing standing in her way must be her own issues.

Yeah, but I can't find it. I do remember reading one, though. He didn't say that Stormlight can't be used to Awaken; he just said that Vasher hadn't figured out how to do it yet. That suggests to me that it is very hard to do. I think that it's because Investiture is generally something that would be measured in volume--for lack of a better word--rather than in single units. But a Breath is a unit. It probably has a sort of Cognitive sense of being a cohesive whole; whereas, the same amount of Stormlight wouldn't have that. Therefore, using it in other systems is easy, but trying to get other forms of Investiture to conform to its standards is next to impossible.

EDIT: Added spoiler tags, since I commented on an excerpt that hasn't been published yet.

Are you sure he isn't sucking up his victims' Investiture too? I'm assuming that Hoid is pretty full of Investiture, so I don't think that he'd poof into smoke quite as easily as your average person, but I suppose that I could be wrong.

Well, most of the description concerns embroidery (which Google tells me is "ricamo" in Italian). Also, I think bodices (corpetto) are mentioned a great deal. Any of the other words I can think of probably have too many other ways of being used for me to accurately look up their translations. If I try, I'll probably end up telling you that most of the dresses in the book have wagon wheels on them or something ridiculous like that.

See, I think you have Jasnah's character wrong. You see the face that she shows to the world as her triumph over adversity, but I really don't think that is so. She is using her public persona as a shield to hide her insecurity from the world. I think that she is quite some way from achieving the kind of success in the face of opposition that you believe she already has. I don't necessarily think that she was raped, (I too would prefer that it is not that) but I do believe that something bad happened to her in her past. and her self-imposed role as a celibate scholar is a shield she uses against the world, in reaction to her past. Now, I'm not saying that she needs a man to be happy. However, I don't think that she is necessarily asexual (for one thing, that is exceedingly rare; for another, Brandon has already said that the Parshendi are his way to explore asexuality, and I find it unlikely that he would double up something that unusual in one story). I think that she has very good reasons to not be interested in the opposite sex because of the ridiculous gender roles in their society, but she has shown before that she is willing to buck social expectations. She could probably find a man willing to do the same. The reason she won't consider romance is that she refuses to be vulnerable, not because it is a self-empowered choice. That doesn't mean that I want to see her in a romantic entanglement, but her character needs to be able to entertain the possibility, or at least to be willing to get close to others in a non-romantic way. I really think you should take a closer look at how slowly she has progressed as a Radiant. I somehow missed the Oathbringer excerpt, when it was released about a year ago, that depicts Jasnah in Shadesmar, immediately after escaping from the ship where the Ghostbloods had stabbed her (http://www.tor.com/2014/08/06/stormlight-archive-scene-after-words-of-radiance/), but I just read it today. I don't want to talk too much about something that is not yet published, especially just a first draft, but the interaction between her and Ivory made me think that their bond is nowhere near as tight as it should be.

I'm halfheartedly rereading The Name of the Wind. I recently reread The Wheel of Time, then read Robin Hobb's new book, then reread all the Cosmere books. I'm having a lot of trouble finding something I want to read after spending so much time on books that I unabashedly love.

I think he was saying that it's easy to use Breaths in another system, not vice versa. Vasher has a ton of Stormlight at his disposal, and he hasn't figured out how to use it to Awaken.

Probably. If Nightblood sucked all of his Investiture out as he killed him, he wouldn't be able to heal. Then again, not really knowing how his powers work, it is conceivable that he has a means of unconsciously recharging his Investiture stores. As long as you left his body laying around some source of it, he'd eventually recharge and regenerate.

If you cut Hoid's head off, it will grow back. If you sliced him through with a Shardblade, once his eyes stopped smoking, they'd heal up, and color would be restored to his grey, Sharddead skin. He is just about impossible to kill.

I think that Kaladin's scars not healing are the deviation from the norm, not vice versa. His depression is significantly warping the way that he sees himself. For Stormlight to not heal a Radiant back to the ideal of health, there has to be a strong psychological reason that they feel themselves unworthy of, or fundamentally alienated from, that ideal.

Final Empire era? Distract them by having a squad of guys drop their weapons, cower, and beg for their lives. Then have someone jump in behind them and pull out their key spike.

True, it's not totally pointless. I was actually going to mention what you did, but I didn't want to ramble on forever. What I'm saying is that they should have found a way to accomplish that without having the character move around in circles. I can think of a couple of ways that they could have done that. Not perfect ways, necessarily, but I don't know where the story is going yet.

Exactly. If one were to isolate the storylines that people complain about and bind up little novellas of them, everyone would be forced to admit that they're pretty slim volumes. And interesting stuff does happen throughout. If you're reading through the lens of one anxious to have major plotlines resolved, sure, it seems like important events have been abandoned for tedious and irrelevant ones. But if you read with the awareness that everything is going to be wrapped up, and these side quests are important for each character's development, it's all great stuff. Along those lines, the infamous over-description of clothing... Uh, one sentence about what someone is wearing is not overkill, folks. So what if we get that for almost every character? It's a fantasy world that little resembles our own. We need some description to understand what it's like.

Okay, technically a double post, here, but it's been about a week since the last one, and I've seen the second episode since then. So, I was apparently wrong about how long it's been since the barons took over. It's possible that the baron system has existed for quite a while, so the whole "no guns" thing makes a little more sense. It is conceivable that they could be totally wiped out after an extended campaign against them. Actually being able to eradicate firearms seems a less likely outcome to that campaign than a number of others that I think of, but sure--whatever. The martial arts scenes remain great, but I'm worried about story and character development. The world that they've created is full of possibilities, and the characters have a lot of potential, but it seems to me that there's a real danger of the show serving neither characters nor plot and making everything a setup for a sweet kung fu scene. Trying to make everything in a show serve one element that the writers think is cool generally sinks the show (I would argue, for example, that Lost--a show that I initially loved--suffered from the writing only serving a sense of mystery). Right now, the story seems to be spinning its wheels a bit. One of the leads escapes one baron, ends up in the clutches of another, and then ends up right back with the first baron at the end of the episode. That introduced him to a couple of other characters, of course, but it made everything he did in that episode seem almost pointless. He's right back where he started. On the other hand, a character played by Steven Lang was introduced, and he's cool (the actor, that is; the single scene he was in didn't establish how cool his character is or is not), so that's good news.

I was always scared to read WoT when I was younger. When I was kid, the books seemed so unapproachably long, and when I was older and getting into fantasy again, online griping about the books getting really slow towards the end scared me away. Finally, I picked up The Eye of the World in January of 2014. I finished A Memory of Light 40 days later and have reread the whole series twice since then. So I really love it. But should you read it? I can't tell you for absolutely certain. There may be things about it that turn you off, and although the series is without a doubt the #1 influence for Sanderson's career, that doesn't mean that it will resonate with you as it did with him. The magic is reasonably well-explained. It isn't like any of the Cosmere magic systems, but once you're a few books in, you begin to get the sense of how the magic users are doing what they do. It's certainly much better defined than what you get in The Lord of the Rings or the Belgariad, for example. Without giving anything away, the story is basically the cliche of the prophesied hero coming from lowly origins and rising to save the world from the ultimate evil, but it's done very well. To me, it's kind of like if a band tried to release music that is exactly like the Beatles' stuff today, you would think it sounded derivative and cliched, but you can still can still listen to and enjoy the Beatles' original classics. As for the parts where the story supposedly starts to drag, I honestly never noticed. I have several friends who read the whole series and agree with me. I think that people thought it was dragging because they'd been following the series for 15-20 years and had all this time to speculate about what was coming and daydream about what plots would be resolved and such. Then, after waiting for a couple of years, the next volume comes out, and it doesn't address any of the burning questions you've been thinking about all that time. It didn't bother me because I had all the books and could just move on to the next volume, knowing that everything would be resolved just as soon as I reached the end of the series. I do remember, though, that something major happens at the end of the 9th book, and I expected all of the other characters to go crazy over it in book 10. Instead, because the characters are spread all over the continent by that point in the story, no one else really knew what even happened. I can see how that would annoy me, if I had been waiting for 3 years to see my favorite characters react to this game-changing thing. But, of course, I instead just finished book 10 and started book 11. Anyway, I say you should give it a try. If you don't like TEotW, don't give up right away. I think it really starts to get good at the end of the 3rd book (and the 4th book is awesome). A lot of people have the opposite opinion and love the first book (or even the first 3) but think it goes downhill after that. I don't think those people are the type who like mega-epics, though. They're just mad that the story wasn't something simpler that could be resolved in 3 books.

I've said this before, but I the most popular theories about copper compounding--HD memories, imprinting a permanent memory, etc--don't make much sense. I think that it creates a sort of magical AI. See, when one stores memories, I think that it's storing the brain activity associated with the memory. It's not like writing down information at all. When one compounds a memory, it just makes a huge number of copies of the same information, but all of those recorded brain waves will create their own neural net after a while. The copper compounder then acquires a smart coppermind that can maintain itself (no need to re-record memories and such) and is much easier to work with. No poring through indexes, etc--you just tell the coppermind what you need, and it supplies it. When you're done, you don't have to worry about putting the memory back because it already will have self-replicated it. And if it gets smart enough, you probably wouldn't even have to tell it what you want to know, as it would anticipate your needs.