king of nowhere

there's little doubt that a single modern person waking up in the past wwould be pretty underwhelming. all of our knowledge, but no one of us, alone, can recreate any of our moder technology. it just takes way too many people working in different fields. so, while we know of cars, planes, telephones, we would not be able to do any of that. however, I realized there is actually one thing that every layman knows, and that would actually - if he could get the people to listen - save millions of lives with a bit of modern knowledge. And that's germs and hygiene. in a time when almost half of the children died of sickness before becoming adult, some simple higienic tips could make a huge difference. when the plague first struck, it killed one third of the european population. later epidemics were more limited, because people had learned - by trial and error - to quarantine the affected areas. someone who could tell from start that the plague is spread through the bites of fleas, avoid all traveling to affected areas, stay away from the clothes of the infected and all that stuff, they could have turned the black death to a regional outbreak. how about telling the doctors that illness are caused by tiny creatures, too small to see, but putting their instruments over a fire for a few seconds kill those creatures so they can operate more safely? how many lives would that save? during the golden age of sailing, sailors were struck by scurvy. it took a century before they - again, by trial and error - figured out that they could prevent it with citrus juice. more millions would be saved by giving the answer. and while very few people would be able to use penicillin, most of us know that there's a kind of mold that can kill most germs, and with this information and some experimentation the scientists of the time could have figured out antibiotics centuries in advance. so, while none of us would be able to make any of our modern technological devices, any of us would totally be able to make a huge difference - if we could get ourselves heard, at least.

well, the kid was waving a weapon at him. a weapon that was plenty lethal even in the hands of a kid. the problem is not much the kid, but dalinar being there in the first place. as for where it's going, you see how dalinar became what he is. you'll notice that young dalinar was a lot different from present dalinar. so much that it was a shock for me reading his first flashback. and you also already know that dainar got his memory wiped in some places. well, you're going to see all that led there. which will also answer a few questions that will be raised later in the book. the last chapter of dalinar's flashbacks ends with him having become what he is at the beginning of way of kings. finally recognizable. dalinar's flashbacks are very compelling. they are the only ones I do not skip on rereads.

1) not by any official recognition, though some of his most devoted fans treat him as such. so he can be considered a sect. 2) technically you don't, but if you never read anything before in your whole life, you are unlikely to be proficient enough to read mistborn 3) there is only one brandon sanderson, so the answer is clear. what is not clear is how you intend to try and read a person in the first place. 4) yes. the metal has been released and it didn't come back, that's why it's lost.

I liked that the "bavarian fire drill" only worked so far. by being commanding and assertive you can sometimes impress people, but there are limits. i also liked laral. not only because she turned out a competent leader, but because she's probably a better representation of ancient noblewomen. we tend to think of political marriages as a terrible violence, especially for a girl who had to marry someone thrice her age, and it certainly would be for one of us. but back then, it was just a part of life - and an important social obligation necessary for society to function. a bit like working - you'd rather not do it, but society needs someone to, and you've got to earn a living anyway.

well, there are plenty of books that are considered masterpieces, but they would bore most people. so "it's a good book, read it" is not a good argument. you yourself provided the best argument there: you started it, went as far as book 4, got bored, dropped it. now, what makes you think you may like it now? did you change? did you realize you are liking things you didn't? if the answer is no, then it's very clear you should not read wot. if, on the other hand, you noticed that you like longer stories than you did in the past, then you could give wot another try. as for wot itself, i read the whole saga at least 4 times, and still I'm not sure what is good about it. I mean, it clearly is good, because i keep reading this 10000 pages behemot and I keep enjoying it; and yet, when it comes to individual plotlines, a lot of them are mediocre at best. A lot of the main characters are unlikable. A lot of fans agree on it, too. perhaps it's the sheer scope of the size of the series. perhaps the worldbuilding. maybe the amount of attention to details. perhaps something else ineffable. whatever the reason, yes, wot has a lot of serious flaws, but it's still a great read regardless. however, it's not for everyone. i can't help you any more than that. by the way, book 4 is by many considered the best of the original books (I'm leaving aside the last 3 - those written by sanderson - because they are divisive. some dislike them because they liked jordan's style better, some like them because they never liked jordan's style, and some like them because they finally solve more plots than they introduce). books 6 to 10 are considered of lower quality, as the huge number of characters swamp the action and everyone gets stuck into minor plots. so, if you didn't like book 4, chances are you won't like the rest either.

not to mention SA5 prologue...

well... everyone was trying to use the listeners for something. gavilar was. somebody else did it first. you'll learn more secrets in the final two prologues in book 4 and 5. at least now you know why they assassinated gavilar. fun stuff, they could have feigned ignorance and claimed innocence and would have likely gotten away with it - who would really believe the primitives can send a shin assassin with a blade? but they didn't because.... in stormlight 4

I noticed the person who mostly failed at everything in life, then get tossed into the plot and has to try again and overcome his inadequacies - especially his past - is a very common brandon archetype. kaladin is pretty much its embodiment; pretty much anyone in bridge four has elements of it. siri also fits well this description. dalinar and navani both have shades of it. wayne already overcame this situation when we met him, but he was that when wax spared his life. elend was this, in regard to politics, when tindwyl started his training. alcatraz has a strong theme of overcoming his self-loathing. another common theme in sanderson is the brother swap: there are two brothers, one is the epitome of virtue and capacity, the other is a good for nothing. the good brother has a very important and difficult task, and he excels at it. but the good brother becomes unavailable, and the bad brother has to take his place. at first he's overwhelmed, but eventually it becomes clear the good brother was never all that good at the job, and the bad brother was actually better. examples are siri and vivenna, kelsier and marsh (marsh was the rebel leader and kelsier was very accomplished but selfish and edonistic, until kelsier had to take over the rebellion), gavilar and dalinar (the prologue of stormlight 5 makes clear that gavilar was never a good king in the first place, though everyone idolizes him). Well, Ryan is not John's brother, but they are very close friends, and they share the same dynamics there. Up to and including competing for the same woman. I'd say this is a very quintessential sanderson book

nah. first of all, the villains mention that they have a fusion reactor that also makes gold. so, there is no "rare materials" anymore - at least not raw resources. there hasn't been for a while. second, the government can't lie about something so big. people will find out. unless you have an orwellian dictatorship, which really does not seem the case. third, dimensional travel has much more than tourism applications. if dimensions are virtually infinite, and there are a lot of them technologically backwards, there must be some technologically advanced dimension too, where technology progressed faster than here. and while we can't bring it back to our dimension, we certainly can look, disassemble, take schematics, whatever. it's got enormous applications. people will tamper with dimensions.

late to the party as I haven't checked this thread in a long time, but yes, Adolin is one of my favourites. I have a thing for the quiet, dependable, baddass normal characters.

he does want to, but he's got some more immediate business. you don't exactly turn away from an herald (whom, let's keep remembering, is basically jesus for your culture) to pursue a personal mission. szeth still wants to return home. eventually. also, you may or may not have realized that his surgebinding powers came from his old sword. without it, he cannot surgebind. he's still a very capable fighter, and he's still got a very powerful weapon, but he's no longer the one man army he was before. right where you are reading, he's got passive stormlight use (that is, he can take in stormlight for increased physical capacity and healing) as a squire of nale, but he cannot use surges. so, if he wants to go to shinovar right now, he'd better be prepared to take a long, long walk. by being a squire of the skybreaker, he can eventually bond a spren and gain again radiant powers. then he can go to shinovar. you have no idea. welcome to the beginning of the climax

it was shown at the end of words of radiance, so no spoiler here: he just had the proper fabrial. Like they have soulcasters to make raw materials, there are also other ancient fabrials that emulate other kinds of radiant powers. those appear to have been lost in the present day, because while every army has a few soulcasters, nobody mentioned a healing apparatus. why not? to his culture (and most cultures on roshar), heralds are gods. if jesus (or other religious figure of your choice) appeared out of nowhere and resurrected you from death, I bet you'd follow him too. so szeth follows. for now. you can see he's starting to question the wisdom and divinity of his new mentor. the two will have some more direct arguments in book 3 - this is a teaser, not a spoiler. And I will say no more, else I will stray into spoiler material.

well, now that we have the actual book, we learn that it's not possible to bring stuff back. so the things about resource scarcity, or about some conqueror from an alternate dimension invading us, are no longer issues. on the other hand, we learn that they can make gold in their fusion reactors; if they can make gold, they can make other elements too, and it only costs energy - which they have in unlimited amount, thanks to fusion. so they are already post-scarcity as far as resources go. advanced technology can still cost a lot of money, though. also, the fact that they engineered and unleashed an actual zombie epidemics on real people as a game does not paint a bight light on that future. i am reasonably sure we wouldn't do something like that. and it would be nigh-impossible to prevent would-be tyrants to lock themselves in another dimension and set themselves as god emperors. the potential for tragedy to billions of people is incredible. though on the plus side, the potential benefit with a benevolent wizard is equally incredible.

I have't finished yet, but I just met Ryan, and before I go on I want to make a plea. Ryan is too competent, and he would overshadow the protagonist. So, the story is likely to kill him. please, please don't kill ryan! edit: oh, it was something different entirely. worked well enough.

Lift is a special case... I'm afraid saying more could be spoiler. there are a few other special cases. You may already be aware of them, or maybe not; I don't remember exactly if a casual reader was supposed to know it by the end of words of radiance. But by the end of oathbringer, you'll know the other special cases for sure.

you may notice that she gets her power from food, while she never did draw light from spheres like the other radiants. the exact mechanics of why she is different are a bit complicated. iirc they are better mentioned in the 4th book.

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.