AquaRegia

Fountain pen question: is there any reason not to mix inks? I'm thinking about custom-mixing a blue and a green ink from the same manufacturer.

Let's say Alice and Bob shake hands on Scadrial. "May the fastest traveler win!" Bob climbs aboard his starship and engages his hyperwarp drive; Alice enters the Cognitive Realm and starts walking. Bob's instrument panel says Warp 15 or whatever, Alice's legs say "we're walking". If Bob lands on Roshar six months later and finds Alice already waiting for him, who went faster? What difference does it make who "felt like" they were traveling faster? What I see is that Bob has an FTL ship... and Alice won the race. We know Hoid was on Scadrial during MBe1; we know he's on Roshar during SAe1; we know he's on Scadrial again during MBe2. If it looks like FTL, and it acts like FTL... My point is that all you need is a way to move from PR to CR anywhere at will (which Elsecallers, among others, supposedly can). Thus you already have all the "technology" needed to go from anywhere to anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, apparently much faster than anyone could in the PR alone. Now, it's possible that while Worldhopping through the CR, time passes much more quickly in the PR. Maybe after visiting another world, Khriss arrives back home at Silverlight to find that 400 years have passed. I don't know whether that's true, but it's not the impression I've got. It would make for unsatisfying stories, I think.

We may just be having a difference in definitions. By the definitions that make sense to me, Einstein says there is no way to travel faster than light in 4-dimensional spacetime (a.k.a. the Physical Realm, in Cosmere-speak). A real-world ship can accelerate from rest to .999c, but relativity forbids then accelerating more and going FTL. Therefore ANY real-world FTL (if such a thing turns out to be possible) must invoke more than four dimensions. If you enter the Cognitive Realm on one planet, travel for a while, and exit on another planet (which we know for a fact multiple characters have done), then by my definitions, you have traveled faster than light. I don't see how that "does not count". My definition of speed is distance divided by time, so If those two planets are 20 light years apart, and you make that trip in one year, you were going 20x faster than light.

I love it. I don't think it's going to happen... but I still love it! If it DOES happen, you will have earned the title "The Oracle of the Cosmere".

There is also the fact that Roshar's moons are in MUCH closer orbits than Earth's moon is. Our moon takes 28 days to orbit once; Roshar's moons orbit once per day. They must also be in highly elliptical orbits to behave the way they are described to in the books, which means at their closest approach to Roshar they may only be a few HUNDRED miles above the surface (although travelling VERY fast). As with real-life space travel, it's not really about how FAR, but rather how FAST you can go. Not taking credit; people smarter than I am have already worked all this out: But don't they ALREADY have FTL travel? The presence of known Worldhoppers demonstrates that the simplest mechanism for interstellar travel - through the Cognitive Realm - has already been in use for quite a while.

I'm having a hard time understanding why anybody needs to, say, "control the highstorm". You don't have to fight every Radiant and conquer all of Roshar to charge your spheres; the highstorm happens EVERYWHERE. All you need is a way to move the Investiture from Roshar to not-Roshar (the HARD part), and a secret base somewhere remote and uninhabited (easy - Roshar is big and sparsely populated). It's clear the Cosmere is moving towards space travel and interactions between cultures... but why does that insure conflict? It would be like the US invading and conquering Mexico because we want to put up some solar panels there. Why a war when what we really want is a DEAL? Seems to me that the future of the Cosmere should be interstellar TRADE, not interstellar WAR.

Amethyst is purple, or perhaps violet, depending on how you define your color words. There are pink topazes, however.

The stronghold of the Sorceress is said to be in the "Midnight Sea, most dangerous of them all."

One meaning of the word "verdant" is "green". The "Emerald Sea" of the title is the Verdant Ocean, which originates from the Verdant Lunagree - the point where those spores drop from the moon. I think it's clear that each of the twelve moons drops spores of a different type, resulting in seas of twelve different colors.

Anybody else notice the Cytonic nod? "Dominating your view, like if you had a wart on your eyeball." Please tell me I'm not the only one who noticed this...

Finally got a pic to share. The Serenity Blue is not a light blue - I included some pencil and black ballpoint for comparison. I think my next bottle will be the Waterman Mysterious Blue. Less indigo and more aqua.

I, for one, have reached the point where I don't feel like it makes much sense to continue trying to explain this system using actual physical laws, at least, not until we get more information. Those moons (and the seas of spores, for that matter) are just flat-out magic. And I thought the Rosharan moons were a problem! pffff (protip: they are)

Having just seen the first 3 episodes of Arcane, I can see why people are so excited. While CGI certainly exists now for Hollywood to pull off a decent live action MB film series, both the cost and risk would be immense. I agree the animation style demonstrated by Fortiche would suit Mistborn very well, with the additional benefit of lending authenticity to the French inspiration for Scadrian character and place names.

That's good to hear. Does anyone here know the numbers of self-published novellas they have produced, and over what time frame? Edit to add: I was very pleased to hear Brandon and Isaac on the livestream of March 8, 2022 reporting preorders at over 200,000 hardcovers... and neither seemed to be concerned in any way.

Why would I judge someone for doing something I do too? ;-) I agree with you, and even more, Brandon actually alludes to this in his most recent KS update: We may have fundamentally shifted the paradigm for publishing. Oh, how I wish... I remain old school, and prefer a physical book in my hands.

I see what you did there. ;-)

I'm interested in discussing the real-life aspects of Brandon's Secret Project novels and the Kickstarter campaign. I'll start with two thoughts: The biggest Kickstarter campaign (until now) was Pebble's 2nd smart watch, at $20,339,000 in 2015. As of 4:30 a.m. March 4th, 2022 (fewer than four days since it started), the "Four Secret Novels" project is at $20,341,000 - and counting. Brandon now owns the record for highest-funded Kickstarter campaign of all time. This strikes me as both faintly ridiculous and mighty cool. The plan is for the physical copies of the novels to be published in-house by Dragonsteel, which means they have just agreed to print, by my count, at least 173,000 premium hardcover novels. Does anyone know if they have the capacity to accomplish this?

I'm very happy to see that others noticing the difficulties with the description of this planetary system. Upon reading it I began trying to visualize this arrangement of moons, and it took about 30 seconds for me to realize "this doesn't make any sense at all." I mean, I struggled with Roshar's moons - and read some terrific analysis by other 17th Sharders - over a period of weeks before giving up (they also don't work without magic)... but this is a slam dunk. In addition to all the issues noted by @Ixthos and @Oltux72, there is also the Roche Limit: an orbiting moon can't be too close to its planet without getting torn apart by tidal forces. The Roche Limit for Earth-Moon system is around 10,000 km. At 120 km, these would be RINGS, not moons. In the real universe, there is no way an Earth-sized planet can have 12 objects big enough to block 1/3 of the sky in a synchronous orbit. Luckily, we have 1) magic, and 2) Hoid to smooth over our objections and allow us to suspend our disbelief.

LOL agreed - it's IMPOSSIBLE to read that book without missing some important foreshadowing. There is SO MUCH. And it would be equally impossible for any of us to point out everything that's foreshadowing without spoiling a bunch of stuff that will be DELICIOUS for you to figure out yourself. Most of us still regularly find MORE foreshadowing from tWoK every time we reread it, and then, when we read the other Stormlight novels, we say "oh, THAT'S what that paragraph from tWoK meant!"

Perhaps better title for your topic would be "awesome features of LIVING Shardplate", since that's what you are really talking about, not the fabrial versions we've mostly seen. And I don't think we're all guilty of "underestimating". I think it's also reasonable to assume that, being formed from spren, living Plate doesn't weigh as much as the "dead" fabrial versions. The scene where Kal briefly lends his Plate to Adin confirms, however, that it also enhances strength: I certainly agree that it should not consume Stormlight, just as a living Blade does not. I strongly disagree here - the text is very clear. The Plate is still there, NOT dismissed, faintly visible but not a solid barrier. The Plate is not noticed or mentioned by anyone in Kaladin's subsequent chapters, from which I infer that it CAN be truly dismissed. But chapter 110 definitely describes a previously unknown state that living Plate can be in: summoned, worn, but insubstantial. Presumably, like a living Blade, it can respond to the Radiant's mental commands, converting instantly between spren form, worn-yet-permeable, fully solid, or fully dismissed. I wonder if, like a living Blade, living Plate can assume different physical forms as imagined by the Radiant.

As a big science and science fiction nerd, I love speculation about things like this. Cosmere Ringworld? Yes, please! Unfortunately, I think Brandon's treatment of the Cognitive Realm has, so far, been just too fantastical to allow much reliable hypothesizing here. If you can enter the CR of one world, walk for a while, then exit the CR and be on a different world, I'm sure travel to and from space habitats will be similarly possible... but that's about as far as I'm willing to go. I decline to make any guesses regarding what that might look like. Given what we've seen of Shadesmar, the Sea of Mist, the Dor, Perpendicularities, etc., my guess is that it will look any way Brandon wants, and the explanation will simply be "magic". Honestly, I wish there was more of a rational underpinning for how the Cognitive Realm works. But as he's often said, he writes fantasy for a reason.

Thanks! I'm not sure very many people get the reference. I was a HS chem teacher for 26 years, and have some pretty vivid college flashbacks of Aqua Regia myself! I could definitely tell a few stories of things one should NOT do with it. I hate to contradict you... but I don't think Steris ever had any POV chapters. If she did I can't think of them now. I agree, I don't recall her ever explicitly denying having Allomancy. My feeling, though, is that she is nothing if not honest; to a fault, and even to her own detriment. After all the painful truth she's willing to confide to Wax - about her life, her past, how she relates to people and they to her - it doesn't feel true to her character for her to hide something like that, at least not from him. It's "catacendre", which, in keeping with the French language theme of Northern Scadrial, probably does more or less rhyme with "cassandra" when pronounced correctly. I'm also not real clear about how snapping works now, so I don't think we can rule out the idea that someone might develop latent Allomancy as an adult. The thought of Steris flying effortlessly through a cloud of hostile fighters, tassels on her mistcloak flapping, makes me chuckle... but I don't think it's in the cards. ;-) PS: Double-posting in a topic rubs some people the wrong way - feel free to edit a previous post to add new thoughts.

Just finished a reread of MB2 and nothing comes to mind that would disprove this. While I dislike the idea that every important character needs to end up with magic powers (I feel the same way about the Stormlight Archives), it certainly doesn't seem impossible. If Steris is an Allomancer and is aware of it, I feel like it would be out of character for her to lie directly to Wax about it, or even keep it a secret from him. However, if she DOESN'T know... it could be a tasty SanderTwist™ for her Allomantic ability to suddenly be revealed to all of us - readers and characters alike - in TLM.

Well, I'm recalling the arguments made here: Perhaps "debunked" is too strong a word, but the arguments against it are enough to convince me it's wishful thinking. Specifically, 1) Shallan's mother was involved with the Skybreakers and thus presumably known to Nale; 2) no 11-year-old child would credibly pose a deadly threat to a 4000-year-old Herald trained by centuries of combat, especially when said Herald already KNOWS the child is a Surgebinder; and 3) Brandon has admitted while Heralds can "procreate", it would NOT be "in the traditional way". Shallan had four brothers.. I think Lin Davar (and everyone in town) would know if those five children had been brought about in some "nontraditional" way.