Pagerunner

I don't think I'm going to be a big fan of this book, stylistically. The storytelling style is a little drawn-out and obtuse for me, and the body-swapping premise (which Brandon elaborates on at the end) doesn't really intrigue me, either. But these previews have a good bit of cosmere lore in them that will be making up for it. Let's start with the target audience. The first clue immediately points straight to Roshar, describing Rosharan nationalities. But things quickly fall apart; Hoid is referencing apartment buildings and power poles and firefighters and other anachronisms to current Roshar. So did that mean that Hoid is talking to future Rosharans? But then it starts to get even more difficult to reconcile: eating "marbles" instead of eating "spheres," and a straight-up reference to Scadrial. But why would Hoid use the Rosharan opening if the listener was Scadrian? To solve it, I had to go back to the marble line: "we're all going to laugh at you." Hoid isn't just talking to a single person; he's got a group, a cosmopolitan mixture of worldhoppers all gathered around. Apprentices? Friends? Hoid's Twelve Disciples? Who knows; but I think he's directing some of these comments to different individuals in the group, so I'll go out on a limb and predict that we'll get some allusions to Nalthis and Taldain as the story continues. (We've got a potential one to Sel in the "seon" reference.) The magics on both worlds feel very much like what we see on Roshar, in terms of Cognitive entities influenced by perception and Intent. I'm going to fine-tune my question for the livestream, but it's going to be something about the extent Yumi would be able to manipulate spren in imitation of fabrials on Roshar. The splitting the spirits in two, while that's what first turned me on to the fabrial comparisons, actually has much bigger thematic component, I think, in foreshadowing. Spirits are splitting into two opposite halves: the light sphere and the dark sphere, the up pusher statue and the down pusher statue. I'm seeing that dichotomy in the two worlds, as well: light and bright for Yumi, dark and cold for Painter. (Hate that name, by the way.) An inbuilt dichotomy in the hion lines, blue and pink, on the other planet, too. Obviously, since the two planets are in the same solar system, they're going to be pretty tightly connected in worldbuilding, and I expect them being opposites will come up more in the worldbuilding. (And, hey, I've got a half-written fanfic about a cosmere dual-planet star system which was each impacted in opposite ways by the local Shard. Good job on not writing that, me.) Speaking of the local Shard... obviously, we got a new one, Virtuosity, and learned that she already Splintered herself. Which prompts questions in its own right: is Virtuosity the Wisdom Shard (using Wisdom as King Solomon does throughout the book of Proverbs)? Is her self-Splintering related to her Intent, or was it the Vessel acting in opposition to her Intent? But I'm focusing more on the Shard's impact on this system and the worldbuilding. Why are the two planets like this? Is Virtuosity the "dying god" from the histories? (A phrase which, oddly enough, I want to say is very similar to how Khriss described Ambition in her Threnodite essay.) I don't think that's consistent with the tone of Hoid's throwaway line; he'll know that the shroud is due to Virtuosity's Splintering, he won't have to speculate about how it lets light from the neighbor planet break through. It almost seems like Virtuosity's Splintering is a completely separate phenomenon than whatever came upon Painter's world. Oh, and let's talk timeline. Design's there, obviously, without Hoid. So it's at least after Stormlight Five, potentially after Stormlight Ten (since I assume Hoid and Design will be hanging out throughout the series). (More parentheses; this satisfies a lot of worries about Design due to her lack of appearance in Era 2 Mistborn alongside Hoid, since it looks like they figure out a way to split up just fine.) But the catastrophe on Painter's world happened seventeen hundred years ago, which puts it suspiciously close to the time of the Recreance on Roshar, if I'm remembering it right. Which raises some more questions about Virtuosity's Splintering; did she last this long? Or was it an event that had occurred long before the body of the dying god started raining down? Oh, and one more to ride out on "fay, seon, or spirit." Why not use "spren" here? And also, who the heck calls them "fay"? (Notably not "fey," which is how I'm used to seeing fairies referred to.)

Kingmaker is a story of his he worked on a little bit and abandoned. There's an excerpt available; he read it at his con late last year. The Kingkiller Chronicle is an unfinished series of books by another author; Brandon brought it up as a point of comparison to his plans for Dragonsteel, since he's intending a similar style where it's written as if narrated by the main character. I'm betting it's the line where he says "I am working quite a bit on this planet [the core aether planet] for future projects." There were three Untitled Aether Books listed in State of the Sanderson 2019, which reads to me like a trilogy, which I would count as a single project. I wonder what other projects aethers would be relevant for? Personally, I think aethers from Aether of Night are much better suited for a video game than most other Cosmere magics; they're not hyperspecific, like Allomancy or Surgebinding, but they're also not infinitely broad like AonDor or Awakening. So it'd be cool if he was tooling around with an Aether Video Game as a way to sneak them in to canon outside of his writing schedule, the same way White Sand snuck in as a graphic novel.

Good question about Xisis; is it Lumar or is it the core Aether world? The particular phrasing of the WoB about him "currently hanging out on a planet quite near to where you can find a lot of the aethers" certainly could match Lumar; he's on the planet itself, the moons are where you can find a lot of the Aethers. But he may be on the Aether homeworld, too. The other character who may be on Lumar is Foil, from the RoW Ars Arcanum. He's "deep within his ocean," and his stated goal is "to achieve control over the aethers," and he's got conflicting theories with Khriss over Intent and anti-Investiture. Which Aethers (yes, I'm gonna keep mixing and matching my capitalization; even Brandon did it on his site, where he uses the word twice, once capital and once lower-case) is Foil trying to control? The core Aethers? Or the Lumar Aethers? Which gets a little bit into timelines. Foil hasn't achieved control of Aethers, Lumar or otherwise, by the time of Rhythm of War. Now, I'm kind of expecting that somebody will learn a form of "Aether Mastery" in this book, which I'm guessing would place it chronologically after RoW (assuming Foil is on Lumar trying to learn how to Aether master). And, since the core Aether world (which is the important one for the cosmere and for Era 4) is something else entirely, there's no real problem with Lumar being a "backwater" (Brandon's words) low-tech planet with a weird Aether manfiestation, even this (relatively) late into the in-universe cosmere's development. What that has to do with Intent and anti-Investiture... Not sure, yet. I don't want to go too far down this path yet, in case my theory of Aetherized lichen isn't even right to begin with.

A lot of fun stuff in tonight's livestream. I'm going to be working on the Arcanum event over the course of the night, but I had to get some of these thoughts out of my head in advance. First up, the WoB I got: So we've got two worlds with Aethers: the original Aether world, and now Lumar with a different strain of Aethers. A few other WoBs from the livestream that are relevant to exactly how Lumar's Aethers relate to "true" Aethers: So, what exactly is the nature Lumar strain? I think it's a hybridization of Aethers and Taldain's White Sand. The lichen that grows on Taldain has been cross-bred, you may think, with the manifestations of the twelve Aethers, combined in a way that the release of Investiture from the microorganism now manifests the same way an Aetherbound would manifest it, not the traditional Sand Mastery way.

Brandon has been very particular in his phrasing several times to describe the non-Cosmere project as "something completely different." I think the title of the book will, in fact, be: Something Completely Different, and indeed have to do with multiverse shenanigans as implied by the cover.

Roshar is in the middle of their Industrial Revolution; it's just fabrial-based instead of traditional technology. Aethers will be important for space age Cosmere, seemingly in the same technology level, and I don't see indications of Aether-based technology yet in this story. Roshar and Scadrial are both hitting their technological advances at around the same time, so if this is the Aether world at minimum 301 years after Stormlight (assuming the Iriali pick up and haul out in the middle of SA5 and spend a year on the Aether planet), it's at quite the disadvantage. I suspect we'll find out on Tuesday during the livestream; Iriali chronology is gonna be a pretty popular question. I don't see anything disqualifying either option, before or after, but aside from the salt mine, it very much feels like a "once upon a time" story to me.

Good point on the salt mines; I'd skimmed over the line about how "the equipment that worked the salt mines belched a constant stream of black smoke into the air." None of the rest of it seems too advanced, though; drilling wells isn't anything new, and there are plenty of battles in antiquity with tens of thousands of casualties. Since it's a Princess Bride-inspired story, I've been envisioning it set in a similar time period, which is apparently a big can of worms to nail down, but no matter how you slice it is pre-Industrial Revolution.

All right, looks like I was right about the Aethers. When the Reddit thread goes up for Thursday's Q&A, I'm gonna have to hit it up pretty quick and give Brandon some flak about lying to my face. "I can't canonize the name until I write it," oh sure, and you haven't already written it. I wonder if the planet's name is still Lor or if this incarnation is sufficiently different from the last one that he's got a new name for it. Twelve moons, twelve-centric Aether planet, colored spores coming from each; I wonder if the moons themselves are the core Aethers that Brandon briefly mentioned at the Mini-Con. The colors of the spores and the effects are definitely reminiscent of Aether of Night; green spores that turn into plants in the Verdant Sea, a Midnight Sea (for Night). I don't know what the Crimson sea is, though. The mechanism seems pretty different, with spores, instead of the symbiotic element we saw in both Aether of Night and the Liar of Partinel chapters. I'm not sure if I'll stick to my guns on SP4 being Hoid, since this story is his narration. I don't have any better theories, though, so I guess I'll keep my money on it for now. My first impression was that it was far in the past; Aethers are important for space-age cosmere, but this seems like a really low-tech world. I have a feeling, from the way fabrial tech is advancing in Stormlight and medallion tech is advancing in Mistborn, that we're hitting a "Moore's Law" sort of technological advancement where planets are accelerating really quickly, and it's only going to be a few hundred more in-world years before we're in the space age.

Are you mixing up Lost Metal with the secret projects? In the only piece I've managed to transcribe so far from yesterday's videos, he didn't give any info on what exactly the SP4 connections were, but he said that one of the AU novellas was relevant to TLM. There was an awful lot of new info yesterday, and unfortunately about fifteen minutes of the livestream are missing due to an odd YouTube glitch. (The first hour had been missing, for a while, too, but it's back now, so I'm sure the rest will be getting fixed soon.) A good chunk of it is up for transcription: https://wob.coppermind.net/todo/. It will be nice to have exact wording on a lot of these, to help narrow down our speculation, as long as the community can keep up with the rapid pace of releases over the next month.

This is phenomenal news. I cannot overstate my excitement. So much of the teases coming from Brandon are things that, as a fan of just his Cosmere books, I don't particularly care about; Mainframe and co-authoring Reckoners/Skyward stories and the secret video game and even the Mistborn movie script he's been working on. I have legitimately thought to myself, "Man, it's a shame that we're not getting any new standalone Cosmere stories on new planets, like more novellas like Sixth of the Dusk or Shadows for Silence." But here, we're getting three stories on new planets, not part of existing series, that have already been written and aren't delaying the mainline books. Just... incredible. If a genie had popped out of a lamp last week and given me a wish under the condition it had to relate to Brandon Sanderson, I would have absolutely wished for one such story. To get three is unreal. We're going to have four new Cosmere stories in less than twelve months (with Lost Metal kicking us off at the end of this year), not even counting Stormlight Five (if/when it gets out in late 2023). This may be the greatest time to be a Cosmere fan. So, let me get some specific predictions out there before the reveals start coming in on Thursdays. First of all, I think one of these books will be an Aether book. There have been a few hints about the Aether worldbuilding being under active development during 2020, which was while Brandon had been secretly working on these earlier projects. I'll post a few of them below. I'm waffling between SP1 and SP3 as the Aether project; based on the cover, SP1 looks to tie in more with a physical, elemental theme. But SP3's cover, which seems to imply some romance, has the whole yin/yang thing going on to make me think of a Romeo/Juliet story, which would tie in well with the Aether dichotomy we saw in Aether of Night. I think I'm gonna lean towards SP1, but in his reveal livestream, he did say that there were significant worldbuilding similarities between SP1 and SP3, and technically the Kickstarter blurb doesn't specify three new planets ("Each also takes you to someplace new, original, and vibrant. Three of these are Cosmere books taking place on new worlds, and the other one is something completely different."), so maybe both SP1 and SP3 are on the Aether planet. Let's get crazy with it. That brings me to SP4. I've been wracking my mind, trying to think of a male worldhopper side character who could feature in this book. (Based on comments from Brandon's reveal livestream, where he said it's the most cosmere-focused, that it features a known character who's a side character, and that it's a story he's wanted to write since the early days of planning the Cosmere. Oh, and that it's written in first-person viewpoint.) It doesn't need to be the worldhopper's planet of origin; I think we can rule that out, since I don't think we have any known worldhoppers where we don't know where they're from. So it's an existing character, important long-term to the Cosmere overall story arc, that Brandon has long had plans for. But let's not take things at face value. Brandon has been so incredibly deceptive throughout this process, and I have no doubt he's maintaining more secrets for the next four reveals where we get details. So, let's expand our definition of "side character" to include those who will be main characters one day, but thus far have only featured in side appearances with perhaps the occasional viewpoint. I think SP4 has to be a Hoid story. Stylistically, the first person narration is something Brandon has planned to use for Dragonsteel when he gets to its rewrite. What if he's using this opportunity of secret projects to do some experimentation in an environment where there was literally no harm in failing. If it didn't work, he could pull the book, and nobody would be the wiser; can't do that with Dragonsteel. And in terms of being a story he wanted to tell for a long time and might not get; oh, that screams Hoid to me, one of these adventures that he'll be able to toss references to like all the other mysteries. So, we'll find out over the next month whether I got any of that right. But no matter how it falls out, I think we're going to need an updated star chart; perhaps the August "Cosmere Themed Swag Box"? Perhaps you'll all be finally catching up to my star chart with the Aether planet on it, and I'll need to track Brandon down to get me a new one. To summarize, my speculation on the three Cosmere secret projects: SP1: Aethers SP3: Cosmere Romeo and Juliet SP4: Hoid Side Story EDIT: And another thing. I forgot to even mention that the banner for the Kickstarter and the livestream announcement and all that is literally Hoid smirking at us. More weight to him being the star of SP4.

It's up now. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/458/#e15168 If you have a more precise date for when you got it, let me know, and I can move it to the a different year's event.

Looks like the Mini-Con schedule is live, folks, on the con homepage. I don't see any signing lines scheduled, which I guess makes sense, since literally everybody there would want to go to it. Not like this is FanX or JordanCon, where people foolishly go to see people other than Brandon. I've collected the panel list and bolded anywhere that we might be receiving WoBs from. (And I'm not going to get more specific than that with my acronyms; now's an excellent time to establish WoB as the generic term, regardless of which other author or Dragonsteel team member it comes from.) I don't know if they will be officially recording any of these beyond the actual release event, but even if they are, it's a good idea to get a recording from the audience, anyways. It will let it get up on Arcanum and transcribed quicker. So, if you're going to any of those I bolded, please whip out your phone and get it on record for the panel. When the day comes, upload audio you get here: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/479-mini-con-2021/.

Thanks for the quote. It makes things a little clearer; atium being usable by any allomancer would be a part of the alternate movie universe, not the canon book universe. But then why is Peter trying to reconcile the events of the book and this hypothetical divergence in the movie? I'm leaning more towards an off-the-cuff headcanon response with no deeper meaning for his first comment. How Peter would retcon atium being burnable by all allomancers without directly contradicting the books. But it still doesn't illuminate, in my mind, what Peter was saying about the canonical effect of pure atium. All this speculation is well and good and fun to read, but what exactly has been "revealed canonically"? Any kind of atium inversion, atium alloy effects, that's all just theorization. Back in my original post, I shared the canonical reveals surround pure atium (the allomancy and hemalurgy tables). The WoB that directly contradicts atium being usable by anyone was from February 2016, a few days before Secret History came out, and the only canonical information we've received since then about pure atium's effects was the hemalurgy table (nothing allomantic). So, if Brandon changed his mind between that WoB and the 2018 hemalurgy table, that would be the only source of new, canonical info on pure atium's effects. In which case, since the questioner didn't specify pure atium's allomantic effect, Peter technically did answer his question. (But then, in the 2020 TV WoB, Brandon says it'd be a change he "wished he'd made," implying that he hasn't made it in current continuity, so what would the pure atium be on the hemalurgy table? It just keeps sending me in circles...) And, I guess, it's all social media. He's not necessarily taking his time to craft a carefully worded answer for some of these things, so parsing his comments like this may lead to stuff he didn't intend. I was already gonna be watching for any pure atium references in The Lost Metal, so this gives me a little bit more expectation that they're coming.

Peter's been saying some very interesting things on Reddit about atium: There's a lot to unpack here. I don't recall Brandon saying that everyone ought to be able to burn atium. I know it's been RAFO'd, and I could find Brandon saying "not just anybody could use it." On the topic of hindsight, I've seen him talk about atium breaking rules, and I know fans have discussed the rules it breaks (including who can use it, and also why it can be affected by steelpushes), but I can't find Brandon himself commenting on it. Did I miss something? Or was the questioner mistaken? Peter's answer seems to assume the questioner is correct. Now, I'll be honest, I've proposed that framework over the years (among many others), especially since "refined atium" was revealed on the hemalurgy table. But does this confirm it's an actual, canon fact? Or is this an instance of Peter as a fan, speculating off the cuff, assuming that Brandon said what people actually say he said? (For what it's worth, my proposal was that pure atium could do what any of its alloys could do, but everybody only knew the one effect, so that's what kept happening; actual atium Mistings, but they only had the Intent to use atium to accomplish the atium-electrum effect.) Bonus eyebrow raise: Preservation controlling the manifestation of Ruin's godmetal at Ruin's shardpool? "That answer has already been revealed canonically. RAFO." So... there are a couple ways I could take this. The allomancy poster says "pure atium grants the Allomancer an expansive vision of the future and enhances the mind's ability to accept, process, and hold information. In alloy form, it produces various mental and temporal effects." This could be read in two ways: The effects we see in the books do, technically, satisfy the letter of the description. In this case, it would mean that pure atium does what we see this "impure" atium do, allomantically. It's possible that the "expansive vision" and "mental enhancements" from pure atium are bigger in scale and degree than what we saw from atium burners in the book. We've been reading it like 3.1.1 the whole time, but that's been a misinterpretation. The hemalurgy table says atium "Steals any power. Must be refined." So, technically, we do know what pure atium does. But we only know what it does hemalurgically, not allomantically or feruchemically, which does technically answer the questioner's followup of "what does pure atium do." Peter says "RAFO" instead of explaining it. Is it possible that this gets touched on in The Lost Metal? But that wouldn't be "revealed canonically" yet, in my mind, since the book's not published yet. He may have just been saying RAFO since the topic's OP (who was not the questioner in the comments) is partway through reading Bands of Mourning... but we don't learn anything new about atium after that or in Secret History (the Hemalurgy table is in the Hero of Ages leatherbound), so I'm not sure what he'd be avoiding. All in all, a very confusing thread for me to stumble upon. Have I missed any WoBs? Am I forgetting any passages from the books? Can anyone help me understand this exchange? This could either be Peter firing off the cuff as a fan, or a pretty substantial confirmation of a lot of Mistborn fundamentals that have been argued about for years, so I'm actually not sure if this should be going up on Arcanum or not.

Yeah green Arcanum.

Yes, @Steeldancer got three hours of the signing line and a half hour of public Q&A. Hasn't been processed in Arcanum, yet.

Turns out there was a recorder yesterday. @MangoMongo, you may wanna head over and take a listen to your audio; there was a bit of background noise, so you may be able to make out some parts that were difficult to hear. WoBs are going to be coming up here as they get transcribed: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/475-fanx-2021/ Anyone who wants to help transcribe, you can keep up to date with all new audio as it gets added here: https://wob.coppermind.net/todo/

Here's the Arcanum event for this year's FanX. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/475-fanx-2021/ Anyone who gets audio can upload it there, anyone who gets WoBs can add them directly to the event, and if anyone sees any reports on Reddit you can feel free to add them to the event as well (or tag me in the comments, u/Pagerunner17, and I'll make sure it gets in).

Oh, man, now to see if I can edit my original post's Wit-isms to actually work... EDIT: Through much trial, I think I got them both working. But not without some help from the good old internet: https://wordmaker.info/result.php This format works really well in Stormlight, with the symmetry. I'm gonna have to try to work it into a Livestream question or a book personalization question...

Brandon's latest YouTube update has his FanX schedule: Thursday 6:00 PM, "Writing a Successful Series in Science Fiction and Fantasy." Location: 250A 7:00 PM, Signing. Location: Booth 1518. Friday 1:00 PM, "Writers of the Future: Learn How to Engage Readers." Location: 355B. 3:00 PM, "Intentionally Blank; The Brandon and Dan Podcast." Location: 250A. 6:00 PM, Signing. Location: Booth 1518. Saturday 4:00 PM, "Brandon Sanderson Spotlight Panel." Location: 250A. 5:00 PM, Signing. Location: Booth 1518. Signing lines would be good to drop a recorder down, if anybody has them. I expect Brandon's team will be recording the Spotlight panel, but it wouldn't hurt to have that recorded as well off a phone in the room, since Dragonsteel usually takes a little bit to get their recordings up.

In Brandon's latest livestream, he clued us in that Wit's doing more than alliteration in his conversation with Jasnah: So I went and collected what he said in that passage: I didn't look up any other passages he may have used this in; I don't think it's a full-fledged form of poetry, just some awkward constraints he placed on himself. Anyone else can feel free to look for alliteration in his other Stormlight passages, which would be an obvious clue. But how else has he constrained himself? The word to look at will be "Indeedy," where he had to make up a new word to fit whatever pattern this was. At first, I thought it was that he had to fit a certain number of syllables. But I couldn't see a pattern; they go 2-1-2, 1-1-1, 2-1-2, 2-1-1-4-1 (for the one with five words, which I'll dig into more later), 6-2-3, and 1-1-3 (on poised, ploy, paranoid; which is the one he snuck past Jasnah). I looked for symmetry, addition, multiplication, and couldn't see any pattern to number of syllables. Which then pointed me at letters. The first and the last word of his triads also end with the same letter. Soulless/slumbers, rat/rust, seasons/stories, stress/sounds (I think "somehow" and "said" are just Wit intentionally muddling the water with extra s-words"), inappropriately/indeedy (which was why he needed to add the extra "y"), and poised/paranoid. EDIT: With the additional clarifications added below, I had to revise the post title, since it didn't actually. I'd definitely be derelict to be in denial of its difficulty.

Probably for the best. From the Code of Conduct:

Great job digging that up! Looks like only 150 people will be able to get in the traditional "signing line," selected randomly through a lottery. (Edit: 150 tickets, 2 people per ticket, so up to 300.) There were, like, 2000 people at the last release party, so those odds aren't too good. It might be better to book a last-minute trip to FanX, for those whose goal is to meet Brandon.

Signing line tickets available at Booth 1518.

In the past, he's done multiple signings over the course of the weekend, and you are allowed to bring your own books to get signed. Depending on the venue, there's often a limit on how many you can get signed at one time, but if you have a lot you can usually wait until the end of a line and get a bunch done after everyone else has gone through.