Ari

Question: How do you guys co-ordinate contributors and projects? I can definitely spend some time contributing if there's anything you need that only requires me to read the cosmere books. I have everything.

Basically there's a law against free giveaways in canada without some sort of contest, so they ask you a maths question to allow them to do a free giveaway. It's a well-established loophole. Be glad you're not in Australia or New Zealand, the only giveaway I got to participate in was when I posted dissapointed and the author emailed me it anyway.

Nope, WoB is that holding two contradictory shards will affect the individual's ability to act unless their action doesn't reflect on the contradiction. Harmony is severely constrained against doing things that act on either of his two contradictory Intents. Ignoring the issue of whether splinters have intents and just speaking to Shards, it seems with the WoB regarding Harmony having conflicting purposes making it difficult for Sazed to act while holding both powers, there are two possibilities. Either Adonalsium had so many conflicting Intents that even trying at act at all after creating the universe is what shattered it into Shards, or something else shattered it, and conflicting purposes are most difficult when holding two contradictory shards, and holding more and more would make it easier to operate as the remaining Intents could balance out a contradiction between two of the others. Regarding Splinters: I would suspect that the ones we've seen so far, such as Returned, Seons, and Spren, aren't so strongly constrained or influenced by the Intent of their power- more that their magical abilities are shaped by that Intent. If there are more than 16 intents floating around there, and some of them are Splinter-sized, or somewhere between Splinter- and Shard-sized, I would expect that they also enjoy similar degrees of freedom from their Intent. Hoid's monologue in the chapter Gibbletish would suggest that something has been lost in the shattering of Adonalsium that prevents it from being put back together again. Like cutting food will release some energy, and crush some of the joins, it makes sense that the largest pieces would be discrete, but that a significant amount of adonalsium is out there floating in non-discrete pieces. These pieces might represent power like Stormlight or the Metallic Arts, or arguably those are produced by shards, and there are splinters out there like you hypothesise. Good guess though, I'd say there are good odds you're correct to a high degree.

Probably the best way to think of Spren (and therefore fabrials, and Knights Radiant) is in an analogy. Spren etc... are an intersection of Cultivation's and Honour's power, with the Heralds' magic being Honour's own magic system, so if we were in mistborn, Spren etc... would be equivalent to Feruchemy, with the Heralds being like Allomancy, and possibly the old magic being like Hemalurgy. (Of course, with three shards interacting on Roshar, it's entirely possible that in addition to voidbinding, there are magics that are intersections between Odium and Honour, and between Cultivation and Odium, and at the intersection of all three) edit: wow I missed the extra pages, lol.

Someone needs to ask Brandon if being an epic is what stops the gifting, or whether it's having used your epic powers that stops it to rule out that particular theory. There are definitely unanswered questions about Conflux. (It could be that he's not telling the whole truth about his rending) If David is an epic now, I think figuring out the things he and Conflux have in common would fill in one of the two major holes in what we know about epics, ie "how does an epic avoid their Rending?".(The other is what determines which powers they get, as "thematically appropriate" doesn't really explain much!)

I think the term you're looking for Modus Tollens, which allows you to deny the "then" part of an if-then statement to also deny the "if" part, you're just mixing things up a little by expressing one of the parts positively, and then negating the other half that's expressed negatively. What you want is essentially "If calamity were a natural phenomenon with no ability to hide itself, (X) then its nature could be determined by telescope observation. (Y) Because its nature could not be determined by telescope observation, (not Y) calamity must be a supernatural phenomenon hiding itself from natural observation. (not X) You then need to back up the following two statements to establish not X: that X being true means Y must be true, and that Y isn't true. That allows you to make a deductive conclusion that X can't be true. Keep in mind that theories like this are usually inductive if the answer isn't either obvious or intended to be discovered during the book. (ie. they rely on characters telling the truth, depend on your interpretation of dialogue, and rarely have conclusive direct evidence, and often we don't have reliable characters, or sometimes not even reliable narrators!) So what you're usually doing is making an inductive conclusion that X is likely not true, or that X isn't true if character C was telling the truth when they gave us some information, or if we interpret dialogue a certain way. Most of the theory debate on 17th shard revolves around how to correctly interpret what's going on in the books and whether certain characters are giving reliable information. But yeah, it seems pretty intuitive that something was making it hard to make normal telescope observations about Calamity. The question is whether that was deliberate, or just part of Calamity's nature.

At the moment a lot of the cosmere stuff in the books is between-the-lines. (The Stormlight Archive is actually partly so exciting because the cosmere stuff in there is the LEAST between the lines of any of Brandon's books) It will get more explicit later on when Brandon is closer to being able to publish the books that actually directly deal with it, for now it's optional to your enjoyment of the books. As above, upvoted purely for the term "cosmeronaut".

I'm pretty sure part of the reason that "entering" Shadesmar is so dangerous is that on some level, you are physically going there. (Either that or your body is stored in the spiritual realm, as we know from Words of Radiance that Shallan didn't drown when she entered Shadesmar from her ship) So while your cognitive aspect, the flame, is always present in Shadesmar, when you enter, you are bringing some reflection of your physical aspect with you, and removing it from the physical realm. As for why Shadesmar is so easy to travel... because what might be a large natural obstacle in the physical realm is probably a solitary bead in Shadesmar. As long as you can get out of the oceans, Shadesmar is probably a very convenient place to travel within a world. (Brandon has hinted it has similar convenient properties for worldhopping on the old forums, but hasn't revealed them yet in any books.) edit: Found a relevant quote on it: http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=1097#22

Putting up a bendalloy bubble around yourself while cooking so other people don't have to wait for dinner.

Really? I would think that at least at the very least it would be possible for someone to will breath into a Hemalurgic spike, if not actually drive it through an Awakener to steal their breaths. The nature of Endowment is to give away power. The nature of Ruin is to steal and decay power, setting it against other power. One would think that it would be easier to steal breaths than any other type of non-metallic investiture.

David doesn't "get nothing." He becomes the first and to date only person to be offered powers while in a position to face the rending and to turn it down. It's actually a really great character moment for David that he turns down the powers. Making it through that challenge without killing anyone is David's reward.

Obliteration is definitely not normal, it's just that his issues are more relatable than those of other epics. The rest are caught up in what their powers mean for them, while obliteration has built himself a worldview from the powers of epics that make him a sort of ultraviolent nihilist: He doesn't believe there's anyway to fix the world, he believes that there is a divine plan for the world to end. That's pretty insane from my point of view, even if he does have some anecdotal evidence to back it up, it's as disturbed as anyone else who murders in the name of what they believe.

It's pretty clear from the book that you can reverse-engineer Epic powers into a device from the mitochondrial DNA of any epic, and that they do not need to be harmed in any way to do this. So yeah, you could totally make a device for Firefight's powers.

Whether that matters depends on if gifting is impossible to epics in general, or just epics that have gone through the Rending. It's definitely possible that David has powers lying dormant, although I think narratively it works better for the book if he did genuinely turn down the powers, the ability to do so being dependant on conquering your fear of your potential weakness would make a lot of sense with the things we discovered about Epics in Firefight.

Brandon will most likely RAFO anything that isn't obviously wrong from the way he remembers writing the books if Prof's weakness plays any significant part in Calamity. And even if it doesn't, I would imagine he would RAFO questions like that anyway so as not to reveal too much about the nature of the plot. That's a pretty solid guess. It would have a lot of symmetry with Steelheart's weakness- I'm not sure if that's a positive or negative at this stage. It doesn't seem particularly consist with the psychology of Epics for prof to have faced Steelheart in person unless he was confident that Steelheart couldn't use his weakness. If his weakness were lack of control, there could be all sorts of things Steelheart could do in the final encounter to kill him. Also, I feel like if his weakness were lack of control, he would have been far more likely to wipe out reckoner cells that saw him lose control, and that he would show no hint of the control-obsessed traits he obviously displays to the team in Steelheart. I'd caution in guessing Prof's weakness that a character quirk does not necessarily indicate a fear, and that you're looking for something that Prof would have tried to either downplay or outright conceal at least in Firefight, (where he acts exactly like an epic for most of the book) if not also in Steelheart.

It's always possible that while many epics have one weakness that negates their entire powerset, some epics have multiple weaknesses that each negate a subset of their powers, or that some have just the one weakness that negates a portion of their power. If that's the case, Steelheart might have been even more powerful than he appeared, if his weakness only negated his defensive abilities. AS a bully he might have had multiple weaknesses, but perhaps he managed to kill everyone who knew about the one(s) that negated his offensive powers. As for Nightwielder... it's entirely possible that the UV did disrupt his ability to blackout the whole city, but because it's such a large work, it only shrinks around the edges at first, and that the narrative camera didn't track anywhere that was disrupted while he was under UV light.

I think the recent comments about what would happen to a surgebinder burning lerasium suggest that there could have been... consequences to hoid simply burning the element. Using it as a spike (or spikemind) is a definite possibility instead, assuming that functions any differently to a normal spike.

If you want to get really into the physics of it, there isn't such a thing as cold, there's only absense or scarcity of heat, which we colloquially call "cold". In this case there is no "opposing force", but all the same, we have developed a concept of an opposing force because that is how our brains understand continuums. Likewise, there doesn't need to be an opposite of Endowment for us to understand that shard- we can simply contrast what Endowment does to what other shards do. Contrast is all we need, we don't need some idealised opposite of something in order to understand it. (Really, there's a better argument to be made that opposing shards are useful in certain types of narratives than that they provide for better contrast. Preservation and ruin's conflict was interesting and Ruin's victory in it helped lend power to Ruin as an antagonist for Vin. Preservation didn't really add anything to our understanding of Ruin)

I'm going to be an chull and say that the answer could potentially be "both". The stone is, or at least was most likely an ordinary stone that is simply a symbol for his debasement and the fact that he must be owned by foreigners too ignorant to not know the shame of picking up the oathstone. However, I have a suspicion that the way oaths work in the Stormlight Archive mean that Szeth's treatment of the stone may have created some sort of magic bond with it- I doubt the bond coerces Szeth in any way to follow the commands of his "masters"- rather, Szeth's honouring of his social obligations by treating the stone as if it does mean those things may have allowed him access to some powerful magic. As to killing people being dishonourable: It depends what you mean by honour- in the modern use of the word, killing people isn't even arguably honourable. But in terms of fulfilling obligations, keeping promises, performing acts in accordance with social expectations of you, (which is how the word seems to be used in Way of Kings, more along the lines of "honourbound" than in terms of glory or moral conduct) Szeth is acting highly honourably, even if also totally amorally. In a way, this makes his honourable conduct more impressive: he values the seriousness of his word and his obligations above even his own morality. If, as I suspect, these things have large magical import due to their associations with the shard Honour, then that would explain a lot of the things Szeth can do.

There could have simply been a planet of origin before the shattering that named many nearby local solar systems, and those names were inherited by the planets after the shattering of Adonalsium.

That's interesting. I always thought there'd be a similar reason to the number 10 in Stormlight Archive as there would be to the number sixteen in Mistborn. For instance, perhaps 10 is the number of unshattered shards, or there's something fundamental about the number ten on Roshar, but this could be a possibility, especially with the speculation that Ruin and Preservation "added up" to 16. (It could also be that Honour, Cultivation, and Odium "add up" to 10)

It possibly is more than fifty years between Alloy and Way of Kings, but remember the second Mistborn trilogy is a fantasy in a modern setting. It's the third one that involves space travel.

Interesting. We don't see any adverse affects from Spook after he removes his Pewter, spike, so if there are side-effects they aren't ALWAYS disastrous.

The narrative pretty heavily implies that this is too sudden to be second wind AFAIR. (I haven't re-read Alloy of Law yet, so I don't remember it as well as the other books.)