king of nowhere

yes. I am not a man of faith, and I would tend to see harmony as a being with supernatural power and expanded knowledge, but not as a god or anything holy or mystic; I would not consider him the ultimate moral autority, I would not believe he has a right to do what he wants, and I would not pray to him, any more than I would pray to superman. But I always trusted people who are smarter or more experienced than I am. Unless I have reasons to believe they have bad intentions, of course. So, given that what harmony has done so far gives me zero reasons to doubt his good intentions, if harmony asked me something not too unreasonable, I'd trust him and do it. On the other hand, if harmony tried to subtly manipulating me into doing something, I'd suspect he'd have bad intentions, because hey, why hide your goal from me otherwise? In that case, I'd resist him. At your job, your boss will tell you to do stuff, and you do it because he's your boss. Your boss does not hire people to pretend they're your friends and try to get you interested in your project. It's less effective. P.S. And I don't hate harmony.

precognition just seems an easy way out. i find it hard to believe that wax would have taken the revelation any worse than he ended up taking it in the book. if nothing else, it was an incredible risk: assume that lessie dropped that line about "mr cravat" before wax shot her, rather than after. result: wax is locked with shock. lessie has an easy time incapacitating him and finishing her plan. i assume that whatever would keep harmony from locating her would also keep his premonition from seeing the details of what she may or may not have done. Maybe harmony is right, maybe wax would have refused to cooperate in hunting his ex-wife. I still have a very hard time seeing that; it goes against everything we know about him that he would stand aside when innocents are threatened. But even accepting that, it only reinforces my point, which is that harmony should have revealed that lessie was a kandra way before the events of the book. trying to subtly manipulate people is a foolish risk when kindly asking would get them to act exactly as you want anyway. We are talking about a universe where there is an incarnation of hatred going around trying to kill gods and hurt their followers; and there can be some shard we haven't heard about that is almost as bad. What is good for harmony is what is good for scadrial, for the simple reason that what is not good for harmony would lead to scadrial being destroyed by the voidbringers or whatever local equivalent there can be. From that point of view, I fully accept that harmony has the right to play with the lives of men to protect the planet. He is like a general sending his soldiers to battle. my criticism stems solely from a "he could have done it better" argument. This general fought a battle with a strategy that cost him many soldiers and could have easily failed if the enemy had acted slightly different; he could have adopted a different battle strategy that would have resulted in less casualties on his side and less chances of failure.

yes, and the solution to that was to expose him to a revelation that distracted him even more, and in the middle fo a chase scene/gunfight, no less. that's exactly the very worst time at which he could have learned it. unless harmony hoped that wax would never learn of it, and would take bleeder's attempts to identify herself as lessie as just lies to distract him. which could have happened, or not. Personally, I'd have told wax and trusted him to get over it, rather than risking him finding out and getting distracted at the wrong moment. not to mention permanently weakening wax's trust of harmony: the next time god will ask wax to do something, wax may as well tell him to get bent. in the long run, mistreating your underlings rarely work. Anyway, harmony himself admits to not being infallible. shardic power expanded his intelligence, but he's by no mean omniscient or perfect. He can make mistakes, and I believe he made several. his shardic intent probably didn't help, either.

we don't know how socially accepted homosexuality is in alloy-era scadrial. maybe she don't tell because it's considered shameful. or maybe because she think wayne won't stop for that. I mean, she actually did shoot him at times. if wayne can't take that as a hint that his attentions are unwecomed, then i have no idea what will work.

yeah, that's what i meant. even an aircraft carrier doesn't have enough bombs to really hurt a city of five millions. unless they have nukes, at least. and with the cost of shipping ammunition and fuel on the other side of the ocean, it's likely those bombs would cost more than the damage they deal. Also, north scadrial may not have an army, but they have a good industrial base, and apparently plennty of weapons aroound, so they can raise one relatively fast if needed. as for mechanical allomancy, wehave no idea how that works. if it means that they have devices like those described, that may as well make a big enough difference.

I don't think that assumption is suppported by the story. Wax still found out bleeder was his wife, and he still shoot her. he would have done the right thing. especially since the plan was to spare her life anyway. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that if wax had known her motivations, he may have been able to talk her out of it. while i can agree with the argument in principle, accepting it would make all the discussion moot. ok, so harmony did the best he could because he has future vision and saw that anything else would have been worse, or maybe he did not take the many better options because his constrains forced him to take exactly the path he took. and we have no way of knowing that. we can't make a debate over those premises.

morallly, I accept that he is doing right in interfering. I trust his judgment, knowing that on the southern continent there are other, possibly hostile people, and that there are other shards around, many of whom unfriendly, that harmony has to take steps to protect himself and his planet; and that the common people are like soldiers in a war, and can become casualties. But I strongly disagree with how he did it from a pragmatic point of view. You want wax to go fight evil in elendel? Well, how about asking nicely? wax is a good person and wants to protect others; if lessie had revealed herself as a kandra and asked wax to go to elendel, wax would have. If harmony had told wax that his wife was a kandra and has gone crazy and was killing people, wax would have been the first to try to stop her. The path he took maximized the suffering of wax and minimized his chances of success: not knowing that bleeder was his wife, wax was mightily shocked at the reveal. He could easily have lost the fight for that. A risk that would not have been there if wax had been warned beforehand. This is not the first time harmony took a bad decision; his first bad decision was to hide knowledge of hemalurgy. Notice that paalm knew hemalurgy from the lord ruler. So, if spook hadn't written about it against harmony's wish, and marsh hadn't given the book to wax - again against harmonys wishes - wax would have had no idea what a victim with a gaping hole in the chest meant, or what powers the assassin would have. So, I see a pattern there. Twice harmony made a bad call in withdrawing informations from his people. That's really important: withdrawing information. So, first harmony claims that he want the people to be self-sufficient and to have free will, and then he hides from them the information that would allow them to be self-sufficient and that would let them excercise their free will at best? doesn't seem very consistent. It's like having a democracy because you want people to choose, but then suppressing free media because you want them to choose a certain way. May as well be honest and call it a dictatorship. To go back with the "son" metaphor, yes, we all agree that if you do everything for your son, he'll never grow. But what harmony did basically accounted to paying a girl to be his girlfriend and manipulate him, then arrange for her to apparently die just to get him to leave the town; arrange matters so that he had apparently casual meetings with people you want him to be friend with, while pushing and pulling at his emotions - the real world equivalent would be to drug him - to make him more receptive to your suggestions. All the while without telling him what you want from him, despite the fact that he'd be likely to trust you if you just asked him. No, that's not the way to raise a son. Also his principle of non-intervention is highly debatable. So, he cannot have a kandra assassin to do the job for him, but he can riot on the emotion of a guy, plant a kandra as his girlfriend, then later send another kandra to help him kill people. How is that different? You may also notice he's not "letting mankid learn to solve its problems". No, he's letting wax solve those problems. Again with the son analogy, you don't do your son's homework, because that way he'd never learn. Instead, you ask one of your son's friends to do his homework for him. Cause, yeah, that's totally different! To sum it up, I agree with harmony's intentions, but I believe he's going all wrong about it.

don't forget logistics. the southern scadrians are literally on the other side of the planet. they can't wage a large-scale war if they have to transport all the equipment for tens of thousand of kilometers. not unless they are a lot more advanced anyway. even with the tech level oof the current world, waging war at that range is incredibly expensive and inefficent - it can be done, but you need to be extremely more powerful than the defender. then there is also the matter of how much the southern scadrians are willing to suffer to kill the northern guys. the northern guys will fight to the last, since it's a matter of survival (or at least of freedom) for them. the southerners? how many of their youths will they send to die before deciding they don't really want to conquer those faraway lands and thoose people who never did anything wrong to them? in war, commitment counts nearly as much as power; vietnam was much less powerful than america, and took many more casualties, yet it won the war simply because america gave up first. By the way, waging a large war on the other side of an ocean against a people most of your citizens have never heard before is going to cause a lot of dissension among the population. So, I don't know hoow much a war is in the best interest of southern scadrial.

by the way, i am surprised that ranette apparently found a lover. I mean, she lives like a recluse and she doesn't bother with basic hygiene. she really doesn't seem the kind of person who would go out and look for friends, much less a partner.

something else that i realized only in retrospect, there is a nice inversion of a common genre trope. In many stories, the villain will talk to the hero in an attempt to shake his resolve or make him mistrust his companions. The hero should realize the villain only want to manipulate him, and refuse to listen; in truth, generally the villain is weaving lies with just enough truth to make them believable, or he's speaking truths, but using flawed logic to draw wrong cconclusions. Either way, the hero should ignore him, but he generally does not, and will often trust the villain over his own friends. See for example the three ta'veren in the wheel of time believing ishamael speaking in their dreams to the point of not seeking help with the aes sedai who had saved their lives before. It's very rare for the hero to not be affected by the villain's words. probably a case of checkov's gun; if those words won't have an effect on the story, you don't include them. Well, in this case wax did absolutely the right thing, i.e. disbelieving and ignoring, and yet it turned out the villain was absolutely right. Not that wax should have acted any different anyway, paalm/bleeder/lessie was crazy and needed to be stopped, but still.

- what makes you think we saw the feruchemist in the prologue? I was under the impression that it had always been bleeder who killed the governor's brother, after having already killed the feruchemist. that chapter happens the evening before the events of the book, so there would have been no way to store enough speed in one day. - yes, but she had changed a body right then. that she had a coinshot spike is no proof that she compounded or not. - well, we know for sure that by burning a metalmind you can get more power than you'd get by tapping it. and that's everything we need, once you can do that you can effectively multiply your power. But only if you can store and burn at the same time. yes, there are certainly limitations, but that's not what I meant. My point is that if you can burn a metal and store a metalmind at the same time, then you can start with a very small amount of power and get a huge amount of power, depending only on how much metal you can burn. While if you can burn a metal or fill a metalmind, but not do the same at once, then you can get a greater return that you'd get as a normal feruchemist, but you still need to charge your metalminds often. regardless of the specific of how much extra power you can get by compounding.

seems wax and steris is working out. I still don't feel like it fits. i have much more respect for steris after this book, but still i wouldn't propose her for romance. I still think he'd fit much better with marasi, even though he'd fit much less than he did in the first book. Wayne and Melaan were really cute. I hope wayne figures out ranette is lesbian and leaves her alone, if nothing else because he's quite embarassing.

yes, but you can't modulate much with the power you get from burning metals. everyone we saw using iron or steel remarked that doing a small push is extremely hard, and most people just do a strong push for a short time. it takes years of practice, which paalm didn't have. So she could burn the metal for speed, but she could not have modulated how much speed she got from it. either a lot, or none at all. Heck, for all we know, she could have been compounding. According to sazed speed is very difficult to store, and we know that the more of an attribute you tap, the more it costs, in a more-than-linear way. She killed the feruchemust woman one or two weeks before. she had been busy impersonating the governor most of the time. I am surprised she had enough speed for several minutes of speed so fast as to movve in a blur. maybe she didn't store it all; maybe she did burn her metalmind allomantically, getting those few minutes. we've never seen her using her speed subtly. The only problem with this theory is that in that case she would have had an allomantic steel spike, and she didn't display coinshot powers. Anyway, the real fast storing with compounding - burn the metalmind, store the power in a bigger metalmind, burn it immediately afterwards - was barred to her. Paalm could not burn the metalmind to fill a bigger metalmind. That's the trick of compounding, and that's how one can multiply his stock in a short time (limited by availability of metal and how fast it burns). She couldn't fill a metalmind while burning one, so compounding was of limited use to her.

I would disagree with this. kaladin has depression, kelsier was borderline sociopath, vasher is rough with people, lightsong was good at juggling... even in sanderson's books, most times people have strange quirks or unusual abilities, they are just part of them, what makes them people instead of just characters in a story. Otherwise, hiding secrets in those quirks would be nowhere near as effective. Also, i wouldn't say wayne's skills are better than those of breeze or allrianne, if a little different. they are good at understanding people, he is good at imitating them.

he already had that thing of thinking the appropriate thoughts already in alloy of law. it could be a spike, but i doubt it is because there is no hint of it whatsoever. i mean, wax's earring being a spike was hinted in several ways. vin's earring became fairly obvious once you were halfway through hero of ages. but there is no mention whatsoever that wayne may be spiked. i don't think that's the kind of thing that would set up a big reveal - I mean, there was no indication of lassie being a kandra, but that was because readers should absolutely not figure it out in advance; i can't see something similar done for a spike on wayne. so, i'll just go with "insanely skilled". After all, most heroes in fantasy books are insanely skilled at something. we don't get surprised at it. it's just what heroes are supposed to be. P.S. with alll his understanding of people, I wonder why he hasn't figured out ranette.

I am seriosuly disappointed with harmony for keeping this hidden. He should have told wax "look, lessie was a kandra all along, I planted her to influence you, but she actuallly loved you, so she didn't want to manipulate you, so she decided to bring me down and went crazy and started killing people". I'm sure wax would have agreed that lessie needed to be stopped. just as he would have shot wayne. just as he faced his former colleague miles, or his uncle. he wouldn't have left innocents be killed like that. And while he may have been mad at harmony for trying to plant a kandra as his lover (though the fact that she came to actually love him should at least offer serious mitigation; I mean, I wouldn't be so mad at someone planting an agent close to me if she turned out to be my genuine true love), wax would have certainly been less mad than he was by having it broke up to him that way. If nothing else, that reveal just threatened to make wax fail at the wrong time. Aside from that, I see a potential continuity error: at some point, MeLaan said that Paalm was a very good impersonator, and only tensoon was better. But wasn't it established that tensoon was actually a poor impersonator? On another line, I spot a potential romance between Wayne and MeLaan. By the way, I am surprised that wayne, that normally understand people so well, is still taken with ranette. hasn't he figured out she's lesbian by now?

I suppose, but unless there's a release vent in your area, you won't find a bookstore opened in the evening to get your copy and you'll have to wait tomorrow anyway. Myself, I have preordered the ebook with kobo, and I wonder if I'll get it at the release time (8 am in my timezone) or later.

in this map, kae seems the same size as elantris. I haven't reread elantris in a few years, but i was under the impression that kae was much smaller. is that particular map not on scale? or is my memory wrong?

I'm going to buy shadows of self ebook in a few hours, as soon as available. However, I have a concern. I have been told that (some) ebooks come in specific file formats that require specific readers to open. I don't have any dedicated program for ebooks, only adobe reader, and I am worried that I may get an ebook in a format I may not be able to open - unless I also buy expensive programs to read it. My only previous experience in ebooks comes from having bought perfect state, which gave me file in mobi and epub, at least one of whom I could open with adobe. I bought that from sanderson's store, but I cannot buy SoS from there. Can someone ease my doubts about ebook format? Is there some specific vendor I should use for an adobe-compatible file? Or am I worrying for nothing? Thanks. P.S. I am in the european union P.P.S. Since we're here, can you refresh me at what time exactly will the book be available? I can't seem to find the exact information

Welll, I'm sure you could get many prostitutes to accept that offer for a moderate pay, but prostitutes are unlikely to have goood allomantic bloodlines. those tend to be concentrated in the nobility, and noblewomen are already rich and pampered and therefore unlikely to sign up.

Oh, my. You two guys made me see Shallan with a selfie stick. The stick holds a mirror, she will take a memory of it. Maybe if I slam mmy head against the wall strong enough I may forget about it.

I checked that, and it's quite interesting. Now, my knowledge of space in general comes mostly from reading nasa/esa announcements, wikipedia, and other stuff like that. I am quite knowledgeable, but I am not a specialist in the field. And from what I know, those parts are correct. My knowledge of the chemistry of life instead comes from doing a PhD on it, therefore I think I am better qualified to judge that. Lenghtly chemical discussion ahead, read only if interested. Anyway, all that discussion made me forget the main thing i was wondering about that water: namely, where does it come from? Yes, I know there' plenty of ice underground on mars, but those rivulets are on the slopes of moutains, and the water is flowing downhill. So it stand to reason that after four billion years, whatever ice was present underground on the mountain should have run out. There is some process that is resupplying that underground ice. Mars is too dry for rain, but can the scant water in its atmosphere condense on the ground? is it some kind of distillation process, where the water evaporates from the plain, freezes in the colder mountains, then melts in the summer and flows to the plains where it evaporates again? I suppose that's the most likely explanation; ann underground water system would have beeen much cooler, but less likely with our present data.

I've been thinking that tineyes would have greater taste for food and music and visuals and basically everything. In particular, since they would be capable of noticing details that most people would miss, I think they'd appreciate different stuff, or appreciate stuff in a different way. There would probably be a market for those things dedicated specifically to the tineyes.

in common language, "istantaneously" or "immediately" does mean "in a short enough time compared to the context in which other stuff is happening". Even in science it is often used in that way. No physical phenomenon take place in no time at all. I wouldn't be so strict in interpreting "immediately" or "in a moment". Otherwise, you could take a character saying "I came immediately" as a statement that he teleported. Anyway, this would require a word of brandon. or better, a word of peter, he's the one who knows best the technical details. A direct statement, not an interpretation over the semantics of a statement on a similar topic.

I'd add that even duraluminium has speed limits - vin got a few seconds of burn from a vial + duraluminium, meaning duraluminium got you a speed boost between 100 and 1000 times, but not completely instantaneous burning. If you're uncertain about that, consider the scene where she tries to use pewter+duraluminium to resist the poison, and she stays conscious for a few seconds before the pewter runs out, ot the time she uses bronze+duraluminium to figure out which emotions breeze was soothing, and again she got a few seconds of listening.