Yados

I usually like UK covers better. This is not one of those times.

We still don't know that Shallan's Soulcasting is related to the KR like Jasnah's (presumably) is. Lightweaving seems linked to the KR, which requires a character journey Shallan hasn't really been on. Maybe she gets one power from Cultivation and one from Honor.

I could get used to it. Is it an in-world book or has that concept been dropped? It was unclear in the article.

"Stones Unhallowed" is a pretty cool title for book 3, though. I hope it sticks. Jasnah is book 4, right?

What with all the disclaimers, I'm prepared for Dalinar to bite it in book 4, only for his flashbacks serve as a epilogue in book 5.

Daniel Abraham is great.

His The Dagger and the Coin series is one of my current favorite epic fantasies running. There are two out and the third one comes out in May. He's fast, too. The first book came out less than two years ago and he's had several other series running concurrently.

First book is called The Dragon's Path and is very good. The world is semi-medieval, but it's one where humans and the other sentient races were all created by Dragons, who are now dead/gone/sleeping (i forget). There's a lot of character and politics and war and, more uniquely, medieval banking. Which, as it turns out, is very important.

you can also buy the uk omnibus for about $20 on amazon if you find a good seller. that's what I did and it came this evening.

There's no order except within series.

Elantis

Warbreaker

The Final Empire

Well of Ascension

Hero of Ages

Alloy of Law

Way of Kings

The Emperor's Soul

Read any grouping in any order.

At some point, Kaladin will return to Hearthstone, and we'll find out what happened to his parents, Roshone, and Laral. And I'm hoping he'll be able to take his revenge on Roshone, and in that vengeance, he'll show his KR abilities, and make Laral wish that she hadn't been such a jerk to him with Rillir. I'm hoping she'll faun over him, and then he'll push her aside and be like "Pft. You think I'm still interested in you? Ha. Move aside, woman. You mean nothing to me."

I doubt that will happen because if Kaladin did that it would be a dick move. A really big one.

Not only did Laral not owe him anything, but she had no agency whatsoever in how things went down in Hearthstone. That was a bad end for Laral that she did nothing to earn. I'd say what you describe would be "slut-shaming" but then Laral was more-or-less not-on-page almost assuredly raped. So double the dickishness to Kaladin if he does that.

Re: The Unnamed Herald PoV-

Technically, we've had a Gaz PoV. If you blinked, you might have missed it, but it's there and, unlike the brief Teft PoV when Kaladin survived the storm, there was no story architecture that demanded it.

Take that for what you will, but I take it as fodder for my "Gaz is Jezrien" insistence.

Which is why I'm so baffled at the relative lack of fandom surrounding this couple. When I finished the books, I went online and eagerly searched for fandoms, fan clubs, forums where I could find similar fans who share my passion. To my surprise, there is very little out there. Even for the trilogy itself, there seems to be a smaller fanbase than I expected.

There's a growing Tumblr fandom if you look hard enough. This place is mostly for turbo-nerds who want to talk magic shop and cosmere theories.

If I had to guess, I'd say that part of this is is because a sizable portion of Mr. Sanderson's readership comes from his finishing of Wheel of Time, the author of which was *very* against fan fic, the basis of most fandoms. But that's probably only a part of it.

As is the best response to these sorts of things, if it doesn't exist you should make some!

I know there's some little initiative to write cosmere fanfic on tumblr. Join in! Or at least encourage it.

I think the closest thing you're going to see to that is the TPB format books with the E-Book cover. They're up to Lord of Chaos now.

They actually did have birth control, hence how Vin managed to remain slender for the entire trilogy.

Was that mentioned overtly? I don't recall it.

It must not have been very effective. Probably no small miracle that Vin wasn't pregnant by the end.

... what would have happened if she had been carrying a child when she took up Preservation? Would the child have just dropped out of her uterus as she ascended to the spiritual realm or would it have sort of tagged along? We still don't know what happens to the physical body.

I'm between books right now.

I tried Cold Magic for the sixteenth time because my gf loves it, but couldn't get past the prose.

Then I tried Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn and, while the prose was fine, the characters (and the narrative's treatment of the characters) just irked me thoroughly. Why is everyone so in awe of the main character? He hasn't done anything.

I think I'm going to try Shades of Milk and Honey since I bought it the other day and got Mary Robinette Kowal to sign it (though I accidentally made an chull of myself in the process) since that seems relatively unlike either.

Man, I hate not having a book. This has gone on too long. And now Memory of Light is going to come out and I won't be able to read it because I finished Wheel of Time too long ago to remember it all, but too recently to justify a whole reread. Maybe I'll try doing Storm and Towers and hope it comes back to me.

Bah.

Wait, do the fish actually work? Blunt thinks they do, but the black dude always dies first.

Dunno. I asked BS about it in the Q&A thread and he was all "who doesn't like magic fish?"

And Blunt made it through all of Elantris, meaning that in that case the black dude died last.

Could be. We have very little to extrapolate from.

We're still in the training garden when it comes to magic on Roshar. It seems to be way more complicated than anything on Scadrial so it makes sense that we're only seeing a piece of it now before we eventually pull back and see the whole.

But as it is, a lot of what you're saying is baseless. Possible. Interesting sounding. Logical. Could be neat. But baseless. We just don't know enough.

If there are only ten magic systems (each with overlapping abilities) that are just accessed three ways, this magic system is actually less complicated than Mistborn's... which doesn't feel right.

Also: this theory does nothing to explain the magic fish. I'm pretty sure any unified theory of magic on Roshar needs to explain what's up with those magic fish.

Yeah, Mostly Harmless ended on a huge downer because, like Conan Doyle before him, Adams had grown to loathe his characters and wanted to wash his hands of them.

And Another Thing is a continuation, but as I've never read it, I have no idea how it deals with the downer ending. I believe it comes from Adams' notes for a continuation shortly before its death. The ironic thing, though, is that Adams went back and forth about whether the notes in question were for a new Hitchhiker's book or for a Dirk Gently book. According to the Salmon of Doubt, he had decided on Gently.

At least I believe that was what happened. It's possible I could be merging two separate stories about Adams.

I don't if anyone has read the Dirk Gently books here, but they're quite good.

Yeah, there Molly didn't have a big visible role but neither did anyone else. This is Harry's story, Harry's dilemma, and everyone else is support staff. Besides, the events concerning Molly's training in Ghost Story plus Molly's page in the 2013 literary pin up calendar foreshadowed the ending of Cold Days. He didn't need to do a lot with her in this book because he'd already set it up.

On a related note, if I remember right there is supposed to be at least one short story about Molly that's supposed to go into her training a bit more, but circumstances out of Jim's control *cough-GRRM-cough* have postponed the release date.

Well it's not really about set up. The event was abrupt. That was the point.

It's about how it's handled with regards to that character. The thing happens to Molly and then she's gone. *That's* what annoyed me. It makes it seem cheap because we only get Harry's side/feelings on something that effects Molly (and by extension, the Carpenters) much more.

And, true, it is Harry's story, but similar sorts of things have been handled very differently in past books. When Murphy got kicked off the force or demoted for helping Harry, it was a part of her own story. We saw how it affected her in those books as well as how it affected Harry (and those feeling Harry had were less guilt and more a growing ability to let others make sacrifices... which made it seem less exploitative). We even got an epilogue for Thomas' stuff in Small Favor after all those bad things happened to him.

Here we just get the event, Harry's stoic mainpain, and then the book ends. Not my favorite handling of this sort of character change. Though it is sort of similar to what happened with Molly's dad.

I'm not sure it beats Changes, but it sure as heck equals it. So awesome.

I don't know. While I'm interested in the implications, the execution really bothered me. We didn't get enough of Molly in the book and especially in the events leading up to that climax. Thus, to me, it came off as just something bad happening to Harry by proxy when really this, of all things, *should* really be about Molly.

Maybe that's a failure of the 1st person narrative, but it really read like a Women in Refrigerators moment to me.

Crazy, totally unfounded speculation: We still don't know what the chasmfiends become after they pupate. As I understand it, Brandon has also said there will be an ecological price to pay for what is being done to the chasmfiends. I don't think they become thunderclasts. Could the chasmfiends pupate to become the Parshendi gods?

On another note: I have watched a reading on Youtube and read the Toronto transcript on this site. I don't remember any Gavilar information. Is there some more complete information somewhere else? Where? Please.

I think it was the comment about how they killed Gavilar in a desperate bid to keep their gods from returning, which had since failed.

My thought on the parshendi gods were the people from the prelude.

But the Heralds are already running around, aren't they?

Or did you mean the Thunderclasts?

He will send out White Sand and Aether of Night though but you have to wait a few months for a reply.

I think I also heard tell of him sending out the original Mistborn and/or Final Empire.

Fun fact about White Sand: If you convert it into an epub, it self-titles "Dragonsteel". I have no idea what that's about.

How not? Storage caverns, kandra, weakness in the Inquisitors is all back up in case he was killed by Ruin.

Yeah, but he was killed by Ruin and Luthad never showed up.

Oh wait. I didn't put this together after reading the review, but are there no Dragons? I thought this was the one with Dragons.

Did the review just give hem a wide berth?

Yes to your first question. "A" is a word. So are "the" and "rotunda" and "rectangle" and "America". "The rectangle" counts as two words.

To your other questions, I have no idea. It probably depends on the publisher. I know that manuscripts are all submitted in Courier, a font where each character takes up the exact same amount of space. This way, agents/editors can guesstimate rather accurately the word count from the page count/character count. I don't know the specific number though.

One thing, in particular is that the Shattered Plains was very much lifted from Dragonsteel, and plays a fairly important role in the book. This has been mentioned in interviews, so despite the tag, no real spoilers there.

The mechanics are different, though, so it will likely reappear in some form or another in neu-Dragonsteel.(Though it does raise some interesting questions about gemhearts, now that I think about it), but it will definitely require a rewrite unless some awesome world hopping is going on with the landscape.

Per fRR's direction, anything else can be done in PM's, I guess.

That said, good luck getting the book, because I cannot help but feel that the BYU library is not being a competent steward of the book.

For instance, I had it last May. Knowing that they had lost the book frequently in the past, I returned it directly to a library aide, explained the recurring situation, and gave it directly back to them. I wish I had babysat that (likely bored student) employee until they scanned it back in, because I eventually got an overdue notice, which I ignored, and eventually in late summer got a billing statement, at which point I called in and climbed through the phone tree until I found some salaried person incompetent enough that I didn't feel bad about jumping down their throat. It then quickly and "magically" reappeared on their catalog system, and I believe was soon checked out by someone else.

I imagine, that the year-long, on&off "missing" status before I got it was a similar case. Often the book will be listed as present on the catalog, only to be missing from the shelf, and laughably this fall I noticed the reverse case was true when I was on campus and checked.

So odds are, it will be a beast to get a hold of, especially out of area. I'm local, and it still was. I cannot imagine the headache an interlibrary loan will take.

I tried an inter-library loan about two years ago.

... did not work. I got an frank email a year later from the library loan people to that affect, I believe. Long after I'd forgotten about the request.

Honestly, that's a working theory.

The used bookstore actually exists a few years in the future, offering used versions of books not out yet. In SoHo everyone either dresses in high-fashion (read: weird) or like its the mid-90s so there's really no way to tell that I'm actually browsing for books in the year 2016.