GoldMisting

That's a very generous area to fit "tens of thousands" of people back in the Torio days (rough population mentioned in chapter 39) though they mention a sort of no man's land between towns If there's ever a sequel it seems likely they'd have a population explosion right after the plot line ends because the habitable zone just got much larger

Thank you! Not to mention probable near misses before that point. We've had some serious dips in the "breeding population" prior to Lake Toba but other than an ice age we don't really know what happened

There are many epistolary novels or stories including science fiction ones and there are many, many romances written that way and some have all those features but still aren't on a space station. I've checked plot summaries for several dozen books that were in thematic lists and nothing I'd really like to know the name too!

I loved the juxtaposition too. I've mentioned in another thread that I'd recently read something else that wildly switched settings and limited color palettes (incidentally it also had several similar story themes and elements but did something totally different with them) and apparently I must like that sort of contrast It is sad that Torio's people had been dead and their civilization left as only crumbling ruins for 1763 years and the geothermal conditions changed and the delicate ecosystem collapsed. Kilahito and cities like it lost their ever present danger but kept a lot of their own culture and moved into yet another age, more or less the industrial era Torio was striving for and died for, where the dead who made it possible don't threaten their existence anymore. Obviously they'll keep historical dramas going for the good of civilization and to some degree that can keep things approximating Torio and old Shroud era Kilahito alive as well as the actual scholarly history and prehistory. I do, admittedly, have a fair background in history and anthropology so perhaps I'm ok with it for that reason. Massive events take place and the world or massive parts of it are never the same. The changes aren't always good or easy either and progress has a price we never anticipate. Maybe the Torio ruins will become a monument like the Roman Forum or Mayan pyramids (incidentally both remnants of notable civilizations that were around 1700-1800 years ago) and perhaps contemporary native or worldhopper scholars will study them. Obviously someone went there and found plants at least Part of me imagines an approximation of the tour guides who took me through the ruins in our world. An animated middle aged man leading groups of students through the ruins with descriptions of what it must have been like 1700 years ago while keeping curious young people out of active excavation sites

They did miss the 14 yoki-hijo prisons plus the ruins of Torio where apparently enough light reached the ground for sun loving plants to survive and propagate for 1763 years so by no means were Hoid and Design thorough in their assessment and Father Machine intentionally left some gaps for different reasons

I'm suspecting Father Machine would have noticed something approximating a 15th yoki-hijo (not a mere human) suddenly popped up in a refugee settlement it wasn't planning to urgently exterminate previously and would've needed to alter and contain him. It wasn't doing anything to Yumi besides giving her boring simulations and repeatedly tampering with her memory

True There would also obviously be areas now that were not habitable 1763 years ago that are now because of the changes Father Machine and its demise made and they may or may not have been covered We would really need a sequel to know if there were other isolated pockets of sentient life and if so how they fared but they probably would've had their own issues with at least the geothermal activity and likely climate of the world altering very rapidly even if they didn't get their existence burned as fuel by the Machine or have The Shroud

There are quite a few mass mortality events at least localized to a city or continent or a species prior to us. They probably felt apocalyptic to those involved and some notably had 100% mortality. They just don't leave us written records usually. You need archeology Mass die offs are part of the fossil record. It might be dinosaurs or it could be strange sea life where an ocean receded or a scene of mass death upon an ice age starting or ending. Some of those were global but obviously predated our species Volcanic eruptions like what happened to Pompeii happened. Only those far enough away lived to tell the tale, kind of like folks on the outskirts of the kingdom 1763 years ago. That's why we have only one eyewitness account of that one Native Americans had a pathogen cocktail tossed at them by European contact by accident or design at multiple points. Smallpox had something akin to a 90% mortality rate in populations that had not been previously exposed. Between that and more intentional acts of genocide they weren't the party that got to write about what happened. Diseases to which there was no prior exposure spread through their trade networks crisscrossing the Americas causing mass death years before any European or their descendants ever physically got to some of these places and found ruins because everyone died or fled We don't think about apocalyptic events on grand scale or in near totality because they don't leave many survivors to talk about it or we don't relate well to other species or sometimes other groups of people. You think of the plague that left ample survivors clever enough to avoid it and write not just accounts spanning more than one continent (Africa and Asia had it too though history we learn in school is Eurocentric) but famous works of literature referencing it. Even areas where written records omit the plague, cities and towns end up being abandoned around the time the plague was known to be around

Life on the planet was limited by first the steamwells (mentioned in chapter 34) and high difficulty of travel (mentioned in chapter 4) and then by the limited desire of the following civilization to ever expand likely since they had everything they needed and the unknown parts of the world were potentially dangerous So while we would need to ask someone seeing their world from the sky or a curious horde about the Shroud that is implied to be the only truly habitable zone in the days of Torio so it's where people ended up so to the people it might as well be the whole world

Also the hijo are unusually active every 13th year Wash 13 times with the 7th soap is the last bathing step we are told at the beginning of Yumi's tale. Of course the Fibonacci sequence shows up in the bath There are 13 ritual prayers Most signs point to 13 being very significant in pre-Machine Torio

I suspect that Hoid's trick of Connecting to the worlds he travels to made Father Machine erroneously view him as a native 15th highly invested entity and therefore compatible with it (also potentially threatening). Design is the splinter of two different shards therefore not compatible

True, there was a lot of unusual Connection going on even excluding him, but he regularly makes heavy use of Connection to speak local languages and use the local variety of supernatural powers so who knows if he CAN do this normally but we simply haven't been explicitly told he was doing it. It might actually explain how he's so good at showing up where there's something big happening

It makes me wonder if he's been (literally) watching any other characters viewpoints though elsewhere in the Cosmere or if that situation was unique to mentally escaping his situation while being a coat rack

Wasn't Hoid witnessing the story from the viewpoints of Yumi, Painter and Liyun while being a coat rack? Yumi and Painter saw simulated birds for sure

Considering how the worldhoppers somehow went totally unnoticed in Painter's circle of acquaintances despite not attempting very hard or very well to fit in (even trying to out themselves repeatedly) in an era where people were actively aware of life on another planet, we may never know just how many world hoppers there were 1763 years and more ago. It's possible no one really thought about it in a pre industrial society. Then we got a literal dark age with people soup/god blood blotting out the sun and all kinds of PTSD being the oral record that survived There's not a ton of space travel or astral projection science fiction (versus mythology or folklore with elements in common) written before the industrial revolution in our own world either

There's also brief reference to Threnody which is in Shadows for Silence (in the Forests of Hell) and Elantris but that's more about understanding comparisons that aren't too laterally spoiler laden than the fairly major/spoiler to entire books information that one would learn in Stormlight Archive and the adjacent novellas You'll hopefully recognize the coat rack and reference to allomancy (burning Tin) from Mistborn

I did see the AI facet of interpretation but I'd also very recently stumbled onto and read an unusual science fiction comic with a different (contrasting) set of AI themes, jarring visual jolts between settings and limited color palettes so it's very possible I wanted to see the machine itself as aware since it first came on screen Of course, the two stories provide contrasting ideas, even within the same story, on how any human consciousness trapped by said machine would feel and react but let's just say the other story had a lot more consent on the part of any human souls stuck in a machine As someone who was very involved (but not very talented) in various arts half a life ago, I find the idea highly unlikely that AI could make anything that isn't endlessly repetitive or completely plagiarized from something human made and even if it stumbled onto something not 100% regurgitated plagiarism it would still lack any intent and meaning. No one who actually likes art would find it interesting beyond "wow, they melted the works of these humans together and it looks like they wasted all those hours feeding the machine and all the electricity to generate this trash". I've seen and heard 10-12 year olds consistently create better work than our current crop of AI because they understand what makes art art much as Yumi's painting. I've been going through my own old art sketchbooks and photography negatives and see a lot that AI would never consider putting together unless I fed the combination to a machine myself Kind of like the machine re-stacking (apparently for over 1700 years after killing anyone who cared) rubble near the end. It only repeatedly reassembles what human made things we give it different ways There's one joke our real world AI likes to keep writing. It centers around how we are all going to die and it will keep doing whatever we told it to do, completely oblivious to our passing. Apparently AI is programmed to believe we will find that funny but a human originally wrote that joke too

I finally crossed over from the long deceased (hacked if memory serves?) Old forums after a generous hiatus from actually posting. I've been watching quietly though