Mason Wheeler

OK, I found and removed the offending spoiler, cleaned up the audio quality a bit (it's still pretty noisy but it's better than what I started with!) and uploaded it to Arcanum. Again, I won't be able to provide a recorder today. Hopefully there are fans in the area who can drop one off!

OK, just got home. My wife and I are both very tired, so I'll get the audio put up tomorrow morning. There was one thing Brandon asked me to scrub from the audio before posting because it's a big spoiler for an unpublished work, and after he said what it is, yeah, I definitely agree! So if you find your question in the transcription but the last few words of the answer are missing, please keep it to yourself. I did manage to get one question out of him, which was after the recorder was turned off, so I'll report it here. Q: Before the Shattering, the original 16 Vessels, how Cosmere-aware were they and were any of them worldhoppers? A: In the current continuity, they were not worldhoppers. Well... the dragons were the most Cosmere-aware. They might have been off-world. Might have. [Emphasizing the uncertainty here. He clearly has not 100% made up his mind on that last point. Also, dragons. Plural.] Also: Q: You've said that in the "back 5," there will be at least one book with Heralds as viewpoint characters, with flashbacks? A: Two. Q: Well, you've gotta have a scene at one point like this. Jezrien and Shallash are flying somewhere, but along the way, they get accosted by the Heavenly Ones. Big chaotic fight ensues. They get separated. Eventually her Stormlight runs out... ... ...and Ash falls from the sky. A: *gro~oan* Q: *cackling at his reaction*

Just dropped it off. Hopefully the sound will be good. Just for the record, I will not be able to do this tomorrow. Can anyone take care of it?

Sorry to hear we didn't have a recorder available yesterday! I'll bring one by after work today. It'll definitely be ready before 6.

If anyone's registration stalls out at a step marked "Checkout" after hitting the Add To Cart button, there's a glitch in the site's coding. It's attempting to send you on to https://minicon.dragonsteelbooks.com/cart and failing. Go to there after the Add To Cart step and you'll be able to check out.

Suddenly I'm thinking back to a year ago, when the Kickstarter for The Way of Kings went live and the page was all but entirely unusable for the first half hour or so as it got swamped with so much traffic. Registration goes live in approximately 1 hour. Anyone care to speculate on how well the server will hold up? EDIT: Yup. The site is slowed to a crawl, with page loads taking over a minute when they don't fail entirely with nginx errors.

Sounds fun! I'll definitely be there!

Umm?

The obvious problem with the Chana theory is that the Stormfather's visions have shown our heroes accurate depictions of what the Heralds look like. If Shallan had seen her mom there, she would have mentioned it!

@robardin On one hand, this explanation fits in so well with the existing themes. But on the other hand, screw Moash. No one wants him to get a redemption story! So I really hope this isn't what ends up happening.

By far the worst sin against physical realism in firearms I've seen in Mistborn comes from the Wax flashback scene, when he fires a bullet out of a naked cartridge to kill the bad guy. Bullets do not work that way. Without a barrel to channel the powder explosion, the bullet won't accelerate up to any serious velocity. To put it simply, you can't get a gunshot without a gun.

On the other hand, they appear to have a massive unfair advantage in said development, as they're implied to be in possession of the only source of Harmony's god-metal.

Wow, I've missed Wayne! It's good to see more of him, even if it's only a bit...

The thing that really bugged me was just that the plot didn't work. We start off with making it really obvious -- and I mean really, painfully obvious even if you hadn't figured it out already from the last book -- how the cytonic hyperdrive works, and then spending the rest of the book treating that whole subject as a huge mystery complete with a Big Reveal at the end. Then we go to the alien place and start doing spying stuff, and we get yet another retread of the "band of misfits underdog sports team" plot we've all seen a zillion times, including in the previous book. We try to create a bunch of tension with the character with the provisional existence, but did anyone believe for a second that they wouldn't make it in the end? And meanwhile, the characters we've actually come to know and love from Skyward are nowhere to be seen. A bunch of shenanigans happen and Spensa confronts the Delver... and I've seen this ending before. From Brandon! It's basically just the climax of Calamity all over again. Gasp! The cytonic hyperdrive is exactly what the entire book has been making it abundantly clear it is, which fact was covered up by those in power for exactly the reason you'd suspect it would be! What a tweeeeest! And then it ends on a cliffhanger, which wouldn't be so bad except that so did Bands of Mourning, and this book held up the resolution of it for an extra two years!

And yet we've gotten two Skyward books (and two Stormlight books!) since Bands of Mourning came out. I just have to wonder, just how broken was Apocalypse Guard that *this* was considered good enough to replace it? Because let's face it. Skyward was pretty good but Starsight... wasn't.

Wait, what? There were three of them? I saw the first one because the premise looked interesting, but it turned out to be an abysmal, audience-insulting piece of garbage, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. How did that ever do well enough to merit a sequel, let alone two?!? I'm serious. How in the world does a movie that literally insults its target audience and calls them evil by 1) stereotyping everyone into a specific personality trait and then 2) taking the ones whose trait is "intelligence" (ie. the real-world demographic most likely to actually read the book or go watch a sci-fi movie in the first place) and turning them into the evil Slytherins? If that premise somehow failed to utterly bomb, I don't want to live in this world anymore.

I'll start it off. For me, the obvious choice is Pug, from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar books. The Riftwar saga was quite long, comprising multiple series in an epic overarching narrative that spanned multiple generations. Pug was one of the main characters in the first book, a kitchen boy who was discovered to have some talent in magic and ended up apprenticing with the local wizard. Through a series of plot events, various things happen to him and over time he becomes one of the most powerful wizards ever known. The books change viewpoint characters as time progresses on Midkemia and the other worlds of Riftwar, but Pug remains more or less in focus throughout. At one point he And that seems to objectively be a feat of magical power far beyond anything we've ever seen Rand, or any other Channeler, be capable of. (Warning: the above is marked as a spoiler for a reason! If you haven't read the Riftwar books, go read them!)

The question came up in today's livestream about fantasy protagonists more powerful than Rand al'Thor. Brandon mentioned that he couldn't think of any at the moment. A few ideas were put forth, and others shared in the chat that never got read out loud on the stream, but none he could really unequivocally agree on. The rule is, viewpoint main protagonists only, no side characters, gods, etc. Can anyone think of a good example?

Sadeas was a traitor and an unrepentant murderer, boasting to Adolin about his plans to commit further treason. Given the way Sadeas's high social status insulated him from consequences, what other morally justifiable course of action was available to him? Adolin did the right thing, and as near as I can tell the only right thing he was capable of doing.

It got exactly the reaction it deserved: virtually everyone who is not Dalinar either not caring or pointing out that Adolin did the right thing. What more needed to be said?

Characters in the Cosmere do behave pretty realistically, given the reality they're in. There's nothing actually realistic about a grimdark civilization full of backstabbing sociopaths; in fact it's difficult to envision such a society realistically ever giving rise to civilization in the first place!

You don't like Elantris, or Stormlight, or Wax & Wayne, or Brandon's interactions with his fans, or the most popular character in the Cosmere, and think the Cosmere overall doesn't measure up to some obscure series a lot of us have never heard of... taken together, the larger picture painted by those details is "this person does not like Brandon's work."

Wow! Why are you even on this site when you don't appear to actually be a Brandon Sanderson fan at all?

Wait... what? Moash murdered Wayne?!?

I hope Brandon doesn't do it! That was easily the worst part of the original trilogy. A brutal mass-murderer is not redeemed by simply refusing to let an even more evil mass-murderer murder his son.