Argent

Honestly, I don't think about it. I don't wait for it, I don't get hyped up, I don't build up anticipation. KKC3 occupies the same area of my brain as flying cars and AI - probably within reach in my lifetime, but pointless to speculate about.

Finished David Hair's The Scarlet Tides. It's not a bad book - and neither is the series - but the worldbuilding is so heavily inspired by our world (the entire series is practically the Crusades + magic), it can't really grab me. Still, I've moved on to the next book in the series, Unholy War.

Scott Lynch (author of The Gentleman Bastard) wrote a really wonderful post on Tumblr. I felt it captured who Terry was very well.

Huh. Weiry got him to tell us that the Unmade are Splinters of Odium. Which, by itself, is not terribly surprising, but I am curious whether they are more like spren or more like the Returned.

Should it be okay? Yes, nobody is going to delete your post or ban you from Reddit for asking several questions. Brandon might decide not to answer, or not to answer all of them, but there is nothing inherently bad about asking more than a few questions and/or including your friend's.

They are all like this. He could make readers laugh and cry genuinely, his insight into the human condition was incredible, and so was his ability to write in a way that touched people.

I am setting a really bad precedent with my last couple of posts in this forum, but another one of the brightest stars of popular entertainment has winked out. Terry Pratchett, one of the best fantasy authors, has - in his words - left early to avoid the traffic. The man was one of the best things to happen to not only the fantasy genre, but to literature in general - so passionate, so entertaining, yet poignant and real. It is a sad world which has lost sir Terry Pratchett, but not as sad as a world which has never had him.

/r/books has several spoiler tags. The following all do the same thing: ["Spoiler text goes here"](/s) ["Spoiler text goes here"](#s) ["Spoiler text goes here"](/spoiler) ["Spoiler text goes here"](#spoiler)

Slontze in particular always jarred me a little. It's only one letter (or sound) away from several Slavic languages' words for "sun" - sluntze (слънце) in Bulgarian (and, as I just found out, Czech), and solntze (солнце) in Russian (and it's almost the same in Polish). I can kind of maybe justify it - Calamity is a little bit like a second sun out there, so it's plausible that a curse would evolve around that idea, but it's always been a weird one for me. As an aside, I have the same issue with David Hair's Scarlet Tides - there is tribe there, the Clan of the Wolf, who call themselves the Vlk (yes, V, L, and K). Which, since it's unpronounceable without a vowel, requires the reader to insert one somewhere, and depending on where the vowel goes (and what the vowel is), you get the word for "wolf" in half a dozen Slavic languages.

You can use the New Content link until this gets resolved. It's pretty much the only way I browse the forums these days.

While I agree with you completely, do you really care whether a post was made an hour or thirteen hours ago?

Honestly, I'd probably feel the same way if the scenes were the other way around. At the end of the day, Brandon knows where the story - and its characters - are going, and I don't. If he feels that Kaladin should not kill Szeth because it would make for a stronger and more consistent Kaladin in the future, I trust him. He is the one who knows where Kaladin needs to end up 20 years down the road. If he had felt that Szeth should die by Kaladin's hand, I would've said the same thing probably - maybe there is a reason for it, maybe Kaladin needs to learn to kill again, maybe the Ideals are a little more flexible than we thought, things like that. Bottom line, I am willing to sacrifice a retcon in a book or two if it makes the entire story better. And I can't tell whether this change will accomplish this - I've only got Brandon's word that it will, and so that's what I go for.

That's the big one. Brandon talked about it during the Chicago Firefight signing, and both the scene and the map will be updated to reflect the proper places of things. I also think Raoden's teleportation at the end is off (something about how if you actually calculate the distance he encodes in his Aon, he would end up in outer space... maybe because of the curvature of Sel?), and that will also get fixed (if I am correct in it being wrong). As for the quirks, they should be mostly small things - unnecessary commas, too much "(s)he said"s, and things like that. So not big enough to mask Brandon's development and progress since Elantris. But that's my guess. EDIT: Peter

I am sorry, but what you are saying makes no sense in this context. Brandon didn't change the fight because he simply wanted to make a change to it - the "dragonball-esque" style of it is not something he has a problem with; the problem was with a very specific action Kaladin took during said fight - the killing of Szeth. Killing the Assassin in White, while practical and prudent in an objective kind of way, is not something that fits Kaladin's character. His entire character arc for these past two books has been about protecting others without reservation. For him to kill Szeth, he would have to back off from that in a major way. So no, the change makes perfect sense in the narrative of the story. The question is whether it makes (enough) sense in the world of publishing, and in this I trust Brandon more than I trust myself. Also, that "WoR just came out" argument you have - you must be able to see that it's better to make this change now rather than three books down the line, when Kaladin is already written in as somebody who bends around his beliefs when it's convenient. This whole thing might be a little confusing for book #3, but in the long run, it will make for a better Kaladin. And maybe better Szeth.

I doubt it's the latter - I feel like I've read about Shardbearers summoning their Blade with either hand. It would be weird if it bonded to the hand only anyway. No, the way I interpret the whole thing is that as a Surgebinder, your ability to heal comes from your spren - who is also your Shardblade, once you progress far enough. So if you have a living Shardblade, you are "Radiant enough" to be able to heal yourself from Blade-inflicted wounds, you can heal your soul. Szeth couldn't do that - the Honorblade he wielded gave him the ability to Surgebind, and also allowed him some basic healing, but something as advanced as restoring his Spiritweb, it couldn't do.

Yeah, it's a little weird. I trust him enough to believe this will work better in the long run.

But I want one...

Fair enough. Feist is not an author I would push for.

I wouldn't call it quite a waste of time. Past the first four, I would rate most of the books 3/5, with the occasional 2/5 or 4/5. The very last book in the series was worth reading. The second quadrology, The Serpentwar Saga, is probably still good enough though - it's just been so very long since I read it, I don't remember much...

Uh. After Darkness at Sethanon both Pug and Tomas* become secondary, if not tertiary characters. Thomas especially - he plays an important role in maybe a couple of books, but that's all. Pug is featured a little more, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you which books he shows up more in. The next series, The Serpentwar Saga, still has him doing things actively, but he starts disappearing in The Conclave of Shadows. This is all just a general feeling, however, his presence is very sporadic and hard to pinpoint. All this being said, I think you are likely going to be disappointed in the remainder of the Riftwar Cycle. Most of the books, in my and many others' opinion, are nowhere near the level of the first four. In part because of the repetitive plot (there is a certain villain that essentially comes back to life a few times, and don't even get me started on Macros and his returns...), but in part because pretty much none of the future characters are as interesting as Arutha, Pug, and Tomas. To offer you an example - Jimmy's descendents (who are all named James, Jim, Jimmy, or some variation thereof) play roles of varying significance through the entire remainder of the series, and while some of them share his general character, none are as interesting; so you end up reading about 30 books with characters who are obviously meant to take after Jimmy, but are also obviously not as good. It gets very annoying very quickly.

Finished The Shadow Throne, #2 in The Shadow Campaigns by Django Wexler. Definitely better than the first one, though by how much will depend on the reader. This one was less militaristic - though there were some battles and altercations - and more urban (as in, all of it took place in a city). I liked the removed militarism (and the other things it did well, such as the new viewpoint character) more than I disliked the added urban environment, so overall I liked it better than The Thousand Names. I am going through Messenger's Legacy quickly just so I am done with Peter V. Brett until The Skull Throne comes out. Which I just saw at the end of the month, so not much room there. Next one my list... probably The Scarlet Tides by David Hair. I read the first book in the series, and it was alright - alright enough to give the second one a shot.

Storms, having no Internet is a terrible thing. Here. First, my review. It's not a long one, but to make it even shorter - it's a good book. A little too much military stuff for my taste (e.g. actual battle descriptions), but that doesn't make it bad. I would definitely recommend it. I am halfway through the second one, and it's even better - but in a different way. If the first one is about military campaigns, the second one is about urban heists. As for Wexler's style, it's much more similar to Brandon's. Subtle. Transparent, rather - it doesn't distract from the plot.

As I recall it, it wasn't so much about the right external conditions being present as it was about the vast amounts of energy present. It was a tricky answer, we'll need the verbatim transcript.

It's amazing how, when reading this, it started off as nonsensical gibberish in my head and turned into Scottish right about "ah tend". I can recognize written accents now. Fear me.

We know virtually nothing about the Seventeenth Shard. I doubt we'll find anything out for another decade. As for the number of Shards... I suspect that there is either no limit, or it depends on the Shards involved. Investiture interferes with other Investiture, so it's possible that some Shards are completely incompatible.