king of nowhere

I haven't seen the show, but the way you describe it she was killed exactly for that reason. this is risky: a genre-savy sppectator may recognize the ploy and lose attachment. On the other hand, sanderson rarely kills characters at the beginning. I can't think of a single example (no, doesn't count because it was already book 2). So the book convinces you the characters will make it alive to the end. and then they don't. I think that increases the emotional impact.

for the purpose of awakening, color is the capability to absorb light. white is no light absorbed. black is all light absorbed. other colors are some specific wavelenghts absorbed

is there any news about it? in a form that is comprehensible to soomeone not familiar with law?

David shoot calamity in the face, ending the treath of the epics forever David threw away the gun. then he slapped himself. the he started slamming his head against the wall. He then wrote one hundred times "I will never go against an epic" on the blackboard. Then he went home, and he kept his pledge. Main power: the ability to trash a draft and rewrite the chapter again. Weakness: in the real world, he's just another guy.

Something that is nice to read about is not something that is nice to live through. In fact, I noticed a significant inverse correlation between the two. There's a reason "may you live through interesting times" is an agathean curse, not a well-wish.

No such risk. If those people started to consider the presented theory with one tenth of the skepticism they consider everything else, they wouldn't believe in conspiracy theories in the first place.

Can I be your friend?

I'd rather think he's ta'veren, the way everything that happens in the place is always about him.

I think his mother has little space in the story because she wasn't needed in the backstory. In fact, David's backstory is better without his mother, because then losing his father is more traumatic. He doesn't have another parent to shelter him, cue him growing up as an orphan. Of course, her mother could have been killed that day at the bank too, but it would have worked less well. The emotional impact of david's father would have been mixed with the impact of his mother dieing too. It would have made a more confusing scene, emotion-wise. That scene is stronger is only david's father dies there, and david has no mother. so david has no mother. But since children need two parents, then his mother was killed. Brandon shoot her in the back after telling her "sorry madam, it's nothing personal, but your presence would negatively impact the backstory of my protagonist". Yes, he does that all the time. He bring those characters to live, he gives them personalities and wishes, and then he kills them casually. Brandon is some sort of literary mass murder

even if he used a bead of lerasium, the well had more. so the option that he used another bead (or a few others) as spikes is quite possible. Also, the self-spiking and then healingcould be a nice trick. not sure if it works - maybe healing the damage to the spiritweb removes the charge from the spike - but it could. while hemalurgy is end-negative, allomancy is end-positive, so a combination of them can be made end-positive

I don't think so. nothing we saw about the wode would imply they are not benevolent or they would not value the life of people. Simply, the body is extremely complex, and the brain is its most complex part. and while you can fix it while it breaks down, there are some small things that you cannot fix. hence why that advanced society can expand lifespan to hundreds of years, but not yet to immortality. IIt's like a car engine, really. It will degrade after a while. You can fix it, but it willl never come out as new. You can get a more skilled mechanic to keep it going longer, but still small flaws in the metal will accumulate that you cannot fix. eventually you have to melt down the engine, or to change every part until nothing of the old engine remains. which, on a real brain, would mean killing it. A possibility, of course, would be to get all your thinking process into a computer, then go on as an AI. But, while the metalborn characters seems fully sentient, if that option is never considered by anyone probably it means that they aren't fully real and the tech level is just not enough to fully transfer a human consciousness into a computer, even if you can make a simulation that will egregiously pass a turing test. - although I agree with Kai on that aspect, that they are still people, if not as important as the liveborn. I have to say, the book raises a lot of interesting phylosophical points, although it wasn't that mind-blowing to me because I myself faced all those points long ago - I have a sci-fi setting in my mind, it kept progressing until it reached a far future where they learned to find ways around the laws of thermodinamics and create energy out of nowhere, and they can condense it into matter and then use ultrarapid precision teleport to teleport every single atom in its place and make everything they want, and they have so much energy that they can use that process to create simple consumer goods (yes, I know fully well that telesynthesizing a kilogram of matter would require more energy than was released by the biggest atomic bomb; the fact that that kind of energy is available to the common household on a daily basis only shows how ludicrous is the tech level reached), and the world is so boring because the machines provide for everything and the robots are much smarter than humans anyway and many people feel like their life has no meaning. And many choose to live in virtual simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, (by teleporting photons or ions in specific places to stimulate the neurons they can do anything. Heck, even real couples will have virtual sex more often than real one, because the virtual one is actually better, and again that shows how ludicrous is the tech level). They can even choose to forget that it is a simulation, the mind-interfacing machines can read the brain perfectly and they can stop a thought at any time. You know, like when you dream, and it seems real, and then you wake up and realize it was ridiculous but it seemed rreal because you never thought about it. In fact, the only fear of the main characters was that they would wake up and discover that all their world, and possibly their loved ones too, was a simulation. There are practically no stimuli for people in that world. No need to learn or practice anything, because you can have anything imprinted in your brain. no need to do any sport, because in virtual reality you can do it and it will feel better anyway. pointless to get invoolved in politics; what do you need the government for when people can think something they want and a machine will read their mind, interpret that request, and create that something out of thin air? very difficult to make friends among real people, because how would you meet them? you don't go to school, don't go to work, don't have hobbies that cannot be done better with an informatic interface. The computer can anyway make you a simulated friend that will be totally undistinguishable from a real one and will be tailored to best fit with you. Even love is rare. Most people are too lazy to look up for a compatible partner among real people, when they can just ask the computer to read their mind and generate the perfect partner for them, and then hole up in a virtual reality and forget it's virtual and be happy ever after. Many people do just that. Others commit suicide, and then their spirit suicide too (long story short, there is a known afterlife, and spirits cannot be killed there, but if one stops thinking and wanting to live, he will gradually vanish and be no more). Others decide to live in communities with little technology. Others take pleasure in raising children, since that's mostly the only thing that cannot simulated better - you can simulate a perfect child, but that would spoil the effect. And they regularly telesynthesize new star systems to accomodate the new population, so they're not gonna run out of space to accomodate new people. Others yet find some hobby that they like, maybe some real friends and a family, and manage with it. Others turn to crime and bullying, just as an attempt to break the monotony: despite all the education programs, and a police that can read your mind to see if you're guilty, they have a crime rate that is strikingly high. I stopped advancing the setting at that point because I could not conceive any realistic way that it could require a hero. Especially a supersoldier-like band of heroes, with superpowers (I also incorporated a magic-like power with virtually no limitations, except that you are limited in the amount of energy you can access, you cannot modify the laws of physics - something that the technology of the setting can actually do - you cannot resurrect more than one person every few years, you cannot kill a soul in the afterlife, and there are shields that can completely negagte the use of that power in large areas, so it is totally useless in war.) I know it is very over-the-top, but at the time I was, like, 15; I started the setting in a nearer future when I was 8, and gradually advanced the technology. I think I did a pretty cool stuff for my age. I thought about writing something in it a few times, but while I think there is a good setting, I completely lack a meaningful story or good characters. If I ever will, I will go back at the beginning of the setting, a few hundreds years in the future, with technology that we can still relate. Except, as I said, I lack a good story and good characters. Anyway, the point is that I already came up with a civilization so advanced that it could put itself into a virtual reality, and would be motivated by it because the real world had no challenges anymore and had become boring, so I already had considered all the questions they posed in some depth. I also believe that sophie and melhi have much in common, and melhi is doing what she's doing mostly to disobey the wode. and who knows, maybe it was exactly kai's comment 30 years earlier to spur her to want to change her life. so she swept kai's fundations from under his feet, just like he unwittingly did with her. very karmic, and I can see an actual romance between them.

ten years ago sanderson's book did not exist. Some eight years ago I started reading him. What did I do with my life before that?

It is certainly possible, but I doubt hemalurgy is so easy. if it was that easy to charge a spike, then plenty of soldiers in battlefields that are struck by arrows (arrows recovered from previous battlefields) or run through with swords (wielded by veteran soldiers who already saw battles) should find themselves with superpowers instead of dieing. Or, heck, even someone stinging himself with a needle that was made from recycled metal from a battlefield. and there would be enough "accidental hemalurgists" that someone would have noticed.

Yeah, but they won't have names, so it won't have such an emotional impact. Unless he's writing all the interludes just to set up named character to kill randomly so we will care about them? Nah, that's what he wants you to believe. yes, the deaths serve a purpose, but that's because he writes the story so the deaths are needed. he could write a different story if he wanted (like the aforementioned fluffly bunnies (and yes, it comes from alcatraz)). in truth he sadistically deciide how he's gonna make all his characters suffer, and then he finds a good way to fit that into a story, so that you will read it anyway. Ok, more seriously: yes, ddeath in his books serve a purpose. so, even if kaladin or dalinar will die, I'm sure they'll get a totally badass death accomplishing something great.

Yes, sanderson enjoys killing off his characters. He invested all the money he's getting from his books to secretly install hidden cameras in our home, and while we read he can watch us and laugh maniacally at our squirming. MUAHAHAHA!!! But then, have you seen that most operas that are considered great end with all the main characters dead? Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, the Iliad... that's how you can recognize that sanderson is a great writer and he writes meaningful books: he kills off all his characters. I bet he has had made actions figures for his characters, and he likes to line them up on a shelf and make a count to decide who to kill, gloating while they writhe in terror (yes, even if they are plastic action figures, they are terrified anyway. He awakens them with the command "feel terror". And then he stamps them with a stamp that makees them really want to live and really aware that they are powerless to stop fate). And then he picks up the unfortunate loser and announces how he's going to have a bridge dropped on him during the final battle, while the others are relieved to have been spared... and then he casually announced that he was just kidding and he's gonna kill them all anyway. Remember, if he was a good guy, he'd only write about fluffy bunnies throwing birthday parties. And now it's better I quit before I get carried away even more than that.

from what I understand of the definition, sanderson definitely qualifies as magical realism. So I suggest you read him

well, the separation between "taking inspiration" and "copying" is a very fine line to walk, and often the answer is subjective.

Yeah. there's plenty of potential for telling interesting stories here. Which is the reason I'm quite bitter in expecting they will squander that potential to add some more special effects. There were a few superheroes movies worth seeing, but most of them started with good promise and then went on poorly, never really exploring the potential. However, one thing I'm finding quite interesting is how the superheroes relate to our own world. When they were first created, those characters developed superpowers in some way, then they decided to use them for good, the people trusted them. little explanation was generally given, most of the times the backstories were only created later. The readers did not expect anything else. Now, we live in a much lighter world than then. The cold was is over (ok, in the last year it seems like it may restart, but I don't think it is realistic now to have the world divided in two blocks again), civil rights vastly improved in the west, internet granted unprecedented freedom of press, the environmental laws are starting to show some result. And yet as people we are much more pessimistic. If someone develops superpowers, we expect him to abuse of them. If he's not a villain to start with, he will gradually become one at the first slip. Once, those comic books handwaved the backstory of the protagonist, while they showed in detail how the antagonist became evil. Now it is the opposite, and the hero being good need justification.regardless of whether the voices speaking against superman in the trailer were real or only a point of view, I am sure that if he existed in the real world the very same things would be said about him, regardless of how he actually behaved. It is true that the stories we tell are mirrors of ourselves. (notice that I'm not advocating one world view over another: if today's take seems overly dark and pessimistic without particular reasons, the old view was definitely naive; as much as he was a hero, I don't know how safe I'd rest if I knew there was a guy who could do whatever he pleased and was only stoped by his conscience)

Well, the way they are written they are not hystorical documents, but they ccan be used as autobiographic reference material. They won't be hystorical books, but they will be cited by them.

But if he had, he couldn't have added batman in it. I really don't like how the movie industry works. Some movie has success, and suddenly everyone is making movies of that kind. those years, superheroes are in fashion, and a dark tone is in fashion, so they make a lot of movies about superheroes revisited in a darker light. Also, I don't like how plot is bent in the name of coolness. In many action movies and books I get the feeling that the story is just an excuse to introduce the fight or other "cool" scenes. I hate coolness for the sake of it, and I am very strict on it - on the other hand, because of that I like justified cool even more. Anyway I am fairly sure that, no matter what plot they picked, the whole movie concept started with "superheroes are selling well, so we should make another movie about them. And we already did everything we could with supervillains opposing them. What about we put some superheroes against each other? That would make for a cool fighting scene. Ok, we'll make superman fight against batman. Now we only need to figure out a plot for it". I may be wrong, but mass entertainment is one of the few things that can bring out my cinic side.

Of course. I was just explaining that I have deep-seated issues with string theory (mind you, it could turn out to be true nonetheless; what I like has nothing to do with what is real, and at the moment we lack enough data one way or the other) and I cannot like your theory because of it. That's quite ridiculous when considered that way: I cannot like a theory about some fantasy books because I heard a few theoretical physicist with a bad attitude. I got carried a bit offtopic with that expalantion, but I think it's curious enough to be worth writing.

when I read "L-theory" I assumed it was connected to the L-space of discworld. Now I expect nut shells to turn up in the palaneum. Anyway, I think there's certainly probably truth about your theory. We know that all magic systems in the cosmere are just different manifestation of a single magic system, and that the unification of the surges is indeed possible. As for the "hard science" part, my scientist self think that's way too easy, and real science would never be like that. Science popularization is necessary, but it has the drawback that it makes science seems much more simpliffied than it actually is, and turns it into a sort of fairy tale. Science is extremely rigorous, with every piece having to fit with each other piece just exactly, and explanations always involve complex mathematics and complex interactions with other things. So, I would say that long discussion did not look like real science and is unlikely to be truth. On the other hand, we are discussing the cosmere, not the real science, and I totally expect brandon to have done something like that theory. I really doubt he wrote a full mathematic for his magic theory. Even then, my main reason for not liking that is that I don't like string theory. The physical community is divided over it, with people loving it and people hating it. I myself am a chemist, but my best friend is a physicist, and he hates it, for reasons I can agree with. I mean, there are 11 dimmensions, but we don't see them except on the strings? II am sure they can make the mathematics fit in that way. You always get a better fitting of the data if you add more degrees of freedom to a system, but that does not mean the degrees of freedom you added represent a real physical property. And you should be extremely wary especially when you don't have a good explanation for what they are and you are not seeing them anywhere else. There is also a long hystory of theoretical physicist looking down their noses at chemists because they think the schroedinger's equation already explains all chemistry (theoretically true, but the calculations involved are so complex that you cannot use that equation to predict anything from any meaningful chemical system, so you have to get your hands dirty in a chemical lab - metaphoricallly, cause you use gloves - if you want some results), and string theory proponents are particularly bad in that aspect, probably because string theory is so detached from experimental results and so deeply shrouded in mathematics (there is also a long hystory of mathematicians lookind down on scientists for using things like experimental errors and approximations. There is a well-known correlation in the scientific community between level of mathematics used and snobbishness. I've never seen a biologist look down at anyone). So, I just cannot like anything based on string theory.

I heard that Asimov did something similar, but I don't know much about his books. Anyway, I don't think the connectiions were that many, so at least some of it should be new.

that's a good question. the first thing an epic does is killing those close to him to stop them from figuring out his weakness, and a wife would be pretty high on the list. So, the fact that his wife was still alive when he had powers, and he killled her by accident, means that his rending was much more controlled than usual. He's also the only epic, aside megan and prof, who had real commitment for someone else. So, there is something strange about him. being a gifter does not explain it, not when he had the power to also do things for himself. yes, maybe he was the first good epic, and he was overlooked because he was kept prisoner all the time.

I bought the cheapest tablet available with the sole purpose of reading in the bath - I take much more baths since then - but a shower is an entirely different matter. you can't bring electronics in them, unless it's very expensive waterproof electronics. I suppose you could wrap your ebook reader in a plastic bag, but it will mess up with the touchscreen. It reminds me, there was a girl in my college that had her lesson notes pronted on plasticized paper so that she could study under the shower. Personally, I think it didn't save her the time it took to have them printed that way in the first place, but who knows, maybe her showers were really long. Note: the amount of huidity in a bath will eventually damage a piece of electronic even if it doesn't fall in the tub, so be wary of doing it. I took the cheapest thing available also so that it won't be a problem when it eventually breaks.