king of nowhere

It's very simple: figure out some astrophysics, then move the planet back where it was. What? rashek modified plant dna to make them ash-tolerant. that's incredibly complicated. Right now, with our modern science we would have no idea how to do it. And the smallest mistake will result in a plant that won't live. on the other hand, they already figured out the laws of radiated heat one century ago. they are not that difficult. By making some gross simplifications on the albedo, I myself could calculate more or less the right distance from the sun - and I'm not even a physicist. getting a more complete climate model would be harder, but still much easier than making widespread dna modifications. Another way to calculate scadrial's supposed orbit would be to look at its near asteroids. any planetary body has a bunch of minor bodies trapped around its lagrangian points, or in quasi-stable horseshoe orbits, or in orbital resonances. You can figure out your orbit from that. No, wait, even easier. Rashek knew how long the year was supposed to last on scadrial. All you need then is kepler's laws, which we figured early in the 16th century, and you can calculate your orbital radius. even better, with moving the planet you don't need to be accurate. with dna you have to alter hundreds of genes, and getting just one mistake will result in death. with moving a planet, you can easily afford a 10% margin of error. Sure, the tropical lines are going to move a bit. Perhaps the ice caps will melt and cause flooding in coastal areas. or perhaps they will grow some more. but none of that will be a disaster, not even close to what the ash did. life will go on. you need to miss your target by a lot to get something like snowball earth. when vin removed the ash, people got instant sunburn. this is something i would expect on mercury. rashek did a real crap job of moving the planet around. P.S. Instead of coming up with the vague deepness stuff, I'd tell everyone about ruin, about how i trapped him. I may leave out some details, like the exact workings of the well of ascension, to avoid others trying to steal my power. But I certainly do want that, in case a hero defeats me, they will know to not give up the power. And I absolutely would not use hemalurgic creations as servants - regular humans may be less effective, but who cares, I'm invincible anyway, if my armies are defeated I'll just have to deal with that personally. I'm not so lazy as to give ruin powerful tools just because I can't be bothered to destroy an army by myself.

funny, because stormlight archive is even slower. perhaps your tastes are changing, or perhaps you simply accepted to go through the slow parts as necessary preparation for the grand finale. I would like so much to comment on any of this, but I really can't think of anything to say that would not be spoiler.

yeah, thids book changed my perspective on lift. when she appeared in the interlude, i saw her as an irresponsible brat whom i had no reason to care for. edgedancer matured her a bit and gave her depth, now she's pretty high in the "fictional character I'd like to have as little sister" ranking. when she reappears in oathbringer, her character development would be confusing without edgedancer too.

that's actually a good point. Still, I don't think it would be particularly safe. I'd really like to ask brandon how ulaam was thinking to survive under the spores, and how safe it is

all well and good - though in some points a bit of a stretch - but none of that would help him if a wall of grown spores fall over him because it's raining above, pinning him and his spikes under thousands of tons of weight

well, I was going by the classic layman definition of salt. the chemical definition opens up other issues. for example, dolomite is a carbonate of calcium and magnesium, so it's a salt. but it's also a rock. do we count it as salt, or as rock? many rocks are technically salts, and if those had any effect on spores, they'd have found out. there is also the issue of abundance. as I said, sodium chloride is abundant because its elements are abundant on a universal level. most other elements are more rare, but some are similarly abundant. iron is very commonplace, do iron salts work on spores? how about calcium? magnesium? potassium? all in all, on lumar they are advanced enough to distinguish those salts. if they worked on the spores, they would have found out. possibly some rare element would also work and they never discovered it, but it's unlikely.

salt is relatively common in the universe, because both sodium and chlorine are relatively common elements. we have it in the ocean in our world because, salt being soluble, whatever rock salt we had was melted by the rain and carried to the ocean (some rare exceptions for salt that was trapped under watertight stone, hence the salt mines). Since on lumar there are locations where it never rains, it would be perfectly natural to find rocks made of salt in those locations. besides its use on the spores, salt is also useful for food preservation, and it is a necessary nutrient - every living cell contains some of it. So, salt mines have an economic value in any case. narratively, I think it was salt because we can accept an island made of saltstone, especially after we're told that it never rains over it. An island made of silver? not so much. on a cosmic scale, it's over 1000 times more rare. And on a planetary crust, it's even more rare, because it's dense and it tends to sink to the bottom, while sodium and chlorine are light and float. and those abundances are related to cosmic constant on how difficult each nuclide is to make, so they would hold true for the cosmere as well. some individual variations, yes, depending on the individual supernovas that seeded each protoplanetary nebula. But silver is always going to be a lot more rare than sodium chloride.

this is what ulaam tells tress for why he's unconcerned of the ship sinking. but is it true? As a kandra, I suppose he could seal his body cavities, be perfectly dry so the spores don't set off. Ok. Then he has to walk through the bottom of the ocean. I'm not sure how difficult it would be, how much resistance the spores would exhert. heck, the pressure alone may crush him. But ok. he still has to breathe. As far as I know, kandras suffocate like anyone else without air, though they can get creative with their breathing apparatus. the spore oceans have air that keep them fluid, yes. Although how he can breathe that without also taking in a lot of spores is beyond me. And in any creature I know, the gas exchange requires some humid surface. But assume that he can breathe the air through the spores what about the seethe? the air flow will stop at random times, and the spores become solid. ulaam will be encased in solid sand. maybe even for a day. how does he plant to breathe? finally, there is the rain. Suppose it rains above him - which, since he will walk slowly and will take a lot of time to get out of the crimson, will be a near certainty - the spores will grow, then sink. Ulaam would get crushed by a solid wall of interlocked spikes. That would completely shatter his bones, immobilizing him. It may even mangle his body in many parts, separating his spikes from him. there is also the life support issue. as far as I know, kandras need to eat and drink like everyone else. they may be able to survive longer by slowing their methabolism, maybe become smaller and eat some of their excreted biomass to sustain themselves, but for how long? we're talking weeks and weeks without any drop of water. kandras have all manner of nifty shapeshifting abilities. But they do still need to breathe, eat, and drink. crushing them under a great pressure immobilizes them, making them more susceptible to the aforementioned life support issue. physical damage may even make them lose their spikes, disabling them. They are not immortal. How does ulaam plan to survive walking on the bottom of the ocean for a prolonged time? unless he's also invested, but we have no evidence for it.

does the harmonium/water explosion work like a chemical reaction? it seems so, even though it's more energetic than any actual chemical reaction by a couple orders of magnitude. the various descriptions are consistent with a behavior similar to alkali metals. if the analogy holds, then wayne could have survived the explosion. the thing is, the explosion needs two components: harmonium and water. there was plenty of harmonium, but as long as you put little water in it, the explosion will be small. so wayne could have put a few drops of water in the barrels - enough to make a small explosion that would ruin the mechanism, but that would not blow him up. unless harmonium explodes by itself, and water is just the catalyst that unleashes its explosion. but then, the smallest drop of humidity would set it off.

The one feature of Tress that is eminently described is how she keeps her hair in a tress and braid. Yet all the artwork features her with freely blowing hair. Why?

Does it make much difference? Shallan killed her mother, her father, and her second mentor (tyn). all three of them for legitimate self-defence. her first love interest was an assassin, willing to kill her as collateral in another assassination attempt. poor girl, what a life she had.

it will be explained before the epilogue. not important anyway, and not a spoiler. wasn't it explained, or at least made clear, already? parshmen are parshendi. the parshmen are just another form, one with little intellect. and the voidbringers are also parshendi, in different forms. as for a desolation... it will be clarified in book 3. you'll see in book 4. with a strong hint already in book 3 you will hear about them, but it will take a while they are his squires. they get some power from him. it will be explained soon enough, but it's not really a spoiler. magical healing in the cosmere resets you to your cognitive identity; roughly speaking, the way you think of yourself. so it's very much a case of "your mind - with a generous helping of investiture - makes it real" lopen lost an arm, but he never really accepted the loss; his idea of himself healty includes having two arms, and so his missing arm is regrowing. on the other hand, kaladin feels the scars as part of himself, so they stay. it really depends a lot on an individual, whether an old wound gets magically healed or not. it can get even more strange; a transsexual character (a very minor one, only appears in a couple chapters) changes sex by tapping healing - without meaning to, completely by accident - because deep down she always felt her original body was wrong, and it should have been different.

there are four on the planet. the number increases if we consider others from off-world

Point taken. this could bring lumar to a more normal size

not necessarily. perhaps he did interrogate the 17 witnesses before that, after kaladin came to him the first time, and since all witnesses dismissed kaladin's accusations, dalinar filed it away. when kaladin issued the challenge, dalinar decided to give it another go

don't insult poor elokhar. he is useless. his wife is plain malicious.

I like your reasoning here

I didn't like lift either when she first appeared. i reacted a lot like you, why should i care about her. i got turned around in her own novella i think you already have the tools to figure it out by now. szeth is truthless, some kind of awful criminal for his kind, and he's been sentenced to obey anyone holding his oathstone - even though he'd rather not to. that much is clear as of book 1. then when kaladin surgebinds in front of him, he's very perturbed. if that's not clear enough, i think another piece of the puzzle will be dropped in the next interlude

oh, yes. it's actually kinda fun to look in retrospect at what was really happening in that nameless battlefield. there were big stakes in play. kaladin stumbled and interfered on a secret war between clandestine organizations.

the best way to have unequivocally good publicity - i dare say, the only way - is to have an unequivocally evil foe to oppose. heroes become such because they act in the face of disaster and tragedy. with no disaster or tragedy, there can be no heroes. getting killed in the process also helps. can't speak ill of the dead, and absolutely can't speak ill of those who sacrificed themselves to save others. so, ruin wanted to destroy the world. literally. blow it up in a cloud of cosmic dust. preservation was the only thing standing against that fate. with this premise, it doesn't matter anything else preservation does. he may have been kicking puppies every day before breakfast while turning at the camera and stating "don't mistake me guys, I'm totally not a good guy". wouldn't matter. the people of scadrial would still hail preservation as their savior who sacrificed everything to save them from ruin. Same thing on roshar. Honor is dangerously close to fundamentalism. but odium is trying to destroy humanity (ok, he only wants to enslave them to use as cannon fodder in his next war, not much difference). Cultivation is hiding. honor died fighting odium. therefore, honor is the hero and don't you ever try telling a rosharan otherwise.

I may be wrong, but I recall that xisis lived very close to the lunagree. in any case, to get to the midnight sea tress had to cross all of the crimson

oh, right. more than enough, actually. we only have to figure out where that air comes from...

"in the middle" in this case means "close enough that we can approximate"

yes, but all that correlates to the impossible orbits. ok, the orbits are impossible and require magic, we all agree with it. given that the moons are entirely taken over by heavily invested entities, it is possible. it is certainly intended; brandon knows it's physically impossible and decided to make it that way and make it work with magic. the planet looking way too small bothers me more at this point

this one looks like a justified case, actually. in that tress story was selected specifically because it had hoid in it. I mean, it's clear that lumar has a lot of different people who interacted with the dragon or with the sorceress. those stories usually ended up poorly, hoid went to lumar to get elantrian magic from riina. he spent years on the planet. then he crossed tress, who wanted to reach the sorceress, and helped her achieve her goal. while the story is nbarrated mostly from tress perspective, it's really only noteworthy in the grand scheme of things because it has hoid in it. otherwise tress would have at most figured out in an appendix as yet another victim of the sorceress. As for ulaam, i think he was looking for hoid specifically, and stuck to him. So no, this is not a classic star wars case of "guy lands on a new planet, which apparently has a single city on it, and there he stumbles upon this other main character. also, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale". no, this is a case of "hoid came to lumar for a specific reason, got cursed, then he wandered the planet for years, was eventually found by an old friend who was looking for him and stayed with him, and eventually stumbled on a girl whose quest aligned with hoid, and hoid helped her to succeed" in general, worldhoppers are not too common, and they are looking up for important stuff. marasi did not stumble on shai; shai was on scadrial doing ghostblood business, and she was specifically looking out for marasi. felt did not attach himself to dalinar's retinue by chance; felt has a mission on roshar, and whatever that mission is it involves being close to important events, and dalinar is the most important person on the planet. You do not stumble upon a worldhopper. the worldhopper was there waiting for someone like you to come along.