king of nowhere

they are people from the middle age - sort of middle age-like. they have prejudices like that.

Cecil G. Bagsworth III an incredibly familiar name. I swear I've seen it in some other sanderson work. but a search in the coppermind has given no results. where did I read that name?

sanderson couldn't travel anymore, and he writes five novels in the time he saved. Shows he's getting old. When he was in his prime, he'd travel, and he'd write five novels while sitting in a plane.

that is certainly true, but you can use that reasoning to prove anything you want. you dismiss my reasoning on cannons on this basis, then you argue that the reference to moons may indicate a selish spectator, but one can just as easily claim that the reference to a moon could be an alien analogy. furthermore, I'd argue that hoid on roshar using alien analogies was intentional from brandon to showcase how "wit" is from outside. remember, most readers are not cosmere aware, they do not know who hoid is, and those alien references are a way from brandon to say "this guy is more than he looks like" that said, anyone in scadrial era 2 with the slightest bit of astronomical common knowledge will know what a moon is. most inhabited cosmere planets have a moon anyway. I also would not rule out taldain because of water oceans. Taldain has big water oceans, and many people live along the coast. even deep desert dweller know that there is a coast and an ocean somewhere far away, though they probably never saw it

true, but they do have gas giants in the system, each one with several moons, and they surely do have telescopes. so someone from scadrial with a bit of learning would at least know what a moon is.

Hoid describes Tess as going to the docks "like a soldier facing cannon fire"; this is a methapor to explain stuff to the listener, so the listener knows what cannons are. this suggests scadrial as the most likely location, as the only place in the cosmere with cannons so far. I don't know, maybe taldain darkside is also possible? but they have different plants

actually, it's not specified that they do have cannons in this world. cannons are mentioned in " she marched, like a soldier on the front lines facing cannon fire ". but this is Hoid talking, and talking to someone. so what we know from this is that hoid is talking to someone who knows cannons. at present, it implies a scadrian, but it may very well be told in the near future.

Brandon brought us to believe he was about to announce he was suffering from depression, or some other mental illness. I wonder if his urge to write could count as some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, though

Incidentally, brandon also hasn't updated reddit in 2 months.he must have quite some news

I would assume that arsenic would be effective. i don't see many chances of someone trying poisons on kandra. As for reparing damage to dna, regular humans can do it too, indeed it's estimated that we receive half a million damages per day per every single cell in our body, and it all gets repaired or we'd die soon. In this case, I'd think kandras would still be resistant to arsenic, because they can do stuff to help excrete or neutralize it. But a bigger dose should work. Actually, if you want to be reasonably sure to kill a human, you need one gram of arsenic. For a kandra I'd venture in the 10 grams or more, which make it an unpractically large dose to poison someone. Which makes me think, acute radiation poisoning should also work on kandras, at higher doses than would be needed for humans.

from a biological point of view, kandras can differentiate quickly their cells. Normal creatures have muscle cells, liver cells, brain cells and so on, and they stay that way, while a kandra can will his liver cells to become muscles, and viceversa. In that perspective it makes sense that they'd be resistant to poisons, because they can compensate for the damage. cyanide is blocking your red blood cells from carrying oxygen, and the kandra can make more of those cells. Or, a nerve agent is paralyzing their nerves, the kandra can turn their brain tissue into something else to protect it from damage while the liver neutralizes the poison; in the meanwhile, they are stunned, and perhaps that was what was in those syringes. However, there must be some similarities in their kandra cells - some fundamental biological mechanism that works in each and every cell, no matter how it differentiates. and kandras would still be vulnerable to that. So, to sum it up: I'd have kandras be more resistant to poison in general, but not immune. and i would consider the possibility of poisons working specifically on them - though they may not be known, there aren't many kandras available for experimentation

Consider that obliteration was freed from the influence of calamity already, and he was the worst of the bunch. so no, it does not take away from the "complex, believable characters". in fact, it's all epics being evil that would have been antithetical to that - people are people, they are neither particularly good nor evil, they fall everywhere in the spectrum. a normal, healty world has enough good epics to protect from the bad epics. on earth, an external influence broke the balance and made all epics evil - except maybe a very few with exceptional willpower or exceptional motivation

but it would require a lot of terraforming, for little gain. if they have that kind of technology, even just in the solar system, mercury would be a much better candidate for detritus; moon-like, but significantly bigger. Also, while they can manipulate gravity, doing it continuously on a planetary scale must be super duper expensive. The galaxy is full of rocky planets and planetoids that would make better candidates.

wait! if the whole planet can be moved, why didn't they use this to escape the delver attack in the past?

NaNoWriMo has a goal of writing 50k words in a month. Brandon just wrote 13k words in one day

possibly so. but I wonder if sanderson had already planned the 4-book saga before deciding to remove the story from the cosmere and create the cytoverse, or if he had planned only the first book, and then removed it from cosmere, and then he went on and planned the next three but he kept using cosmere concepts because he's used to think that way. i know brandon plans ahead, but having already the full tetralogy before even getting clear on the first book is a lot for a relatively small novel. he did that with mistborn, but at least for stormlight he only has a very general outline and he has to plan details with every new novel. then again, the similarities are striking enough that maybe he did exactly that with spensa, before removing her from the cosmere. he certainly had planned an outline for the full 4 books before releasing the first

delvers started just as crazy AIs... but how did they got powerful enough to destroy planets? is that something that any AI could potentially learn? any cytonic? the book does explain how they grew their "personality", but not their power

i doubt detritus can be our moon. first, just like they said it wasn't old earth because they had maps, so they'd have maps of the moon. second, the moon has such low gravity, people can't walk on it, they bounce around and jump like kangaroos. brandon has more scientific consistency than that. unless they completely terraformed the surface, increased the size, and installed higher artificial gravity. which would be a huge stretch, for a reveal that wouldn't be worth much.

seems a lot like the physical-cognitive-spiritual realms to me. the inner nowhere has no time, and connection is mentioned a lot. brandon is using cosmere-like patterns even for non-cosmere stories.

I just bought the cytonics ebook from kobo, and i can't download it. i press download, and instead of downloading an ebook, i am given a file named "urllink.acsm", which is 1.4 kB in size and only contains (apparently) some metadata. any info on how to deal with this? alternatively, can i get a refund? EDIT: actually, i no longer need that. i got a pirated copy [hey, i did pay for the ebook] and i deleted my kobo account. mods can delete

i was teaching when i heard one of my students call another a cretin. "but teacher, he deserved it. he was talking and disturbing" "well, i could never insult one of you students" pause while i realize the implication "did any of you guys ever read the stormlight archive?" [none of them has. not many people know sanderson in italy] "well, it's this fantasy book where there is a king who keeps a wit to insult the other nobles. because the king could not afford to insult the nobles, it would be inappropriate for his role. so he has the wit to do it for him. perhaps you could be my wit"

you know, you are probably right. still, gran-gran suddenly manifesting skills she didn't have didn't feel good. too much like a deus ex machina; the saving grace of that scene is that they could have used one of the known cytonics to extract her and cobb anyway and yet, killing jorgen's parents, now the story has less Weight [ducks] I could practically feel the plot itself uttering "you have outlived your usefulness" in that scene

i appreciated this book much less than the previous one. please stop having human-alien romance. Just because you end up liking and respecting your alien buddy, it doesn't mean you want to shtup them. especially considering the whole race of alanik seems aromantic. and I know too much about astrophysics and astrobiology to accept redawn ecosystem. sorry and gran-gran suddenly being able to teleport felt contrary to established fact. she's a weak cytonic, and her main cytonic ability is to perceive her surrounding to make up for being blind. if she could teleport, she had plenty of times when she could have done it aside from that, i enjoied the book. one thing, with all the stuff about the battle station being still kept functioning with fresh food and beds and everything, I was expecting for there to actually be humans on it. A second group, who managed to hide on redawn all this time. It would have been hilarious.

possibly so. And we know under cobb's leadership the ddf is already tackling most of its internal problems. but I'm missing old FM with her bombastic political commentaries anyway.

i enjoyed the books, but i have to say, FM feels a bit off. not on the big parts; she still is a pacifist who has to fight against aliens who won't accept diplomacy, and some of her shifting there came from having seen the issue from the military perspective. but FM always had a distinctive way of speaking. she used big words. like "“Constantly amazed by the toxic aggression omnipresent in Defiant culture”. And she was impeccably dressed. those parts of her are never mentioned in sunreach. she missed a bit of her unique voice.