When you pictured Kelsier in the Mistborn Series, did you see him as a Christlike figure?
He sees himself that way, I do not.
And the church that follows up after him, is that more like *inaudible*
It is hierarchical like some Christian churches are, but it is not meant to reference any specific church. I do not personally see Kelsier as... he has a more inflated opinion of himself than I think he should have.
Your 2019 writing line up?
Stormlight 4 will take the entire year.
If you had an AI like M-Bot with subroutines that simulate emotions, if it was written well enough, could it attract a spren?
I will RAFO that for now, I have been asked it a bunch. Let's just say, AI in the cosmere are going to be an interesting thing to explore. We will explore that.
Both the languages described in Warbreaker and The Stormlight Archive contain a letter or glyph called the shash. Is that a consequence of both languages originating from a common root language on Yolen or is there something more complicated going on?
Less complicated.
Are the Unmade and the spheres that contain them only on Roshar or are they in other planets in the cosmere?
You need to rephrase that question a little bit. Ask me again, remembering there's a big difference between the Rosharan system and the rest of the cosmere. There's three planets in the Rosharan system.
*Gestures* Particularly in these ones.
It's possible that Unmade influence and existence would extend beyond Roshar.
Can lerasium alloys grant Feruchemy?
It c--RAFO, we'll RAFO that.
Do humans with singer ancestry have vestigial gemhearts?
RAFO. Good question.
Do we know the other talents of Dusk's uncle's Aviar? Because he had three.
I don't think I've revealed those.
Is it possible to form a bond with a Threnodite Shade?
Oh like a Nahel bond, a spren bond? RAFO.
What would be your callsign in the Skyward [universe]?
Oh, my callsign? It would probably be--it's too long. "Mr. Prolific" is what they called me in college. Something like that.
Szeth Son-Son. When did his name change from Son to Son-Son.
When he was made Truthless.
Do we know the time of when he was made Truthless? How long has he been Truthless since the [Prologue]?
I know, but I'm not confident enough, because I rely on Karen so much to fact check my numbers.
Is it like a couple of years or a lot of years. Recent?
I would say recent, but that's also subjective and relative.
Because if he's lived a thousand years, then a hundred years could...
Yes, but he hasn't lived a thousand years.
So, he's lived about thirty years...
Mmhmm.
Was Vo really the First Returned?
RAFO!
Does Taravangian have any darkeyed grandchildren?
RAFO because because *sheepish laugh* I don't know for sure.
An epoch, is that a standardized set of time or relative?
It is not a standardized set of time.
So it could be variable like, when dad gets home from work til when leaves from work.
Well, that's not going to be one, but yeah... The epochs were way better defined in the original Way of Kings. I let them be more squishy.
In the original Way of Kings, like a first edition?
No, in the Prime, that I read from.
God-King versus God-King. Susebron versus Rashek, who comes out on top?
Rashek, probably.
By a lot or a little?
Well, here's the thing. I think Susebron is at the disadvantage in almost every situation.
Okay. How so?
Rashek has been alive longer. Rashek knows what he's doing. Rashek has martial training. Rashek has killed a lot of people, Susebron never has. Fewer scruples. His magic is way more combat-oriented. He can get out of range a lot easier. He has power emotional Allomancy, which Susebron would *inaudible*.
Granted, he's got so much investiture, he may be able to shrug that off. But still, I would put Rashek at the advantage.
What happens if you become an atium savant?
I've RAFO'd that in the past, so I'll RAFO it now
Do any of your characters have afros?
Yes, there are characters with afros.
Will the flying ships in Navani's sketchbook be showing up soon?
RAFO.
Did Dalinar reincarnate Honor at the end of Oathbringer?
RAFO
What's Hoid's real name?
That's a good one; RAFO.
How does Nightblood determine who is evil and who is not?
He is not very good at that, which is the joke. He needs someone else.
In Oathbringer, Taravangian tells Dalinar that there is metal falling from the sky, anything more on that?
The rainfall on Roshar is full of elements; and metal is not maybe not 100% accurate. But crem, that solidifies, comes down with the rain water.
He says that's what they were using to make half-shards.
Oh, you're talking about that! I'll RAFO that for now.
The magic system from Elantris has a lot of drawing things, and the system from Warbreaker has a lot of colors. Would you be able to combine that, if you did a rune with colors?
This is possible, yes. It's an interesting combination, it would work in interesting ways.
Is there anything you can tell me about the Deeper Ones?
About what?
The Deeper Ones?
No, unfortunately. If I write the Threnody novel, they will be involved a great deal, how about that?
I noticed that in the Stormlight Archive the spren act in a quantum physics-y way--
That's intentional!
Is that gonna play a role--
It will indeed play a role. It's relevant.
On Roshar, if a Herald were to die, to not-really-come-back die, would it possible for someone to take up the mantle of that Herald?
You're gonna need to read and find out, because this is the first time that happened was at the end of Oathbringer.
Because he is dead--
He is dead dead.
Did the game developers for the Witcher franchise get back to you?
They never did. I didn't expect them to, though. I was not calling them out. I was specifically just saying that if somebody asked me, I would. It's not like I was...I was trying to bury that. It went way bigger than I wanted to. But I think they already knew. I have made it clear to them I'd enjoy working with them.
Does Stormlight drain faster in a vacuum?
No. Good question, I haven't been asked that before.
In the prologue to Way of Kings, when Szeth kills Gavilar, Gavilar says, "Tell Thaidakar he's too late." What's Thaidakar too late for?
*Evil laugh* RAFO. You'll find out. It's coming, not too far away.
Is the gold blade that Odium has, his equivalent of an Honorblade?
Not quite.
In Mistborn Era 1, they don't...aluminum in real life can only really be refined through the use of electricity.
You can actually get it before that. For instance, Napoleon had a set of aluminum dinnerware that he gave to the really fancy guests. If you weren't fancy enough, you got the gold. So they could get it in elemental form without electrolysis or whatever the process is. You could get it, but you couldn't make it. It was extremely rare till the modern era.
They have started to figure out that process in Mistborn, and it soon is going to become really common.
Once aluminum is dirt cheap like it is--
That changes the world a whole bunch!
Do you play those [Blizzard games]?
Yeah. They tried to get me to write for them. Back before Overwatch became Overwatch, when it was their next MMO game, Titan, they brought me in and were trying to convince me. And they were good books, but I just could not spare the time.
How did Nightblood get from Warbreaker to Oathbringer.
He was carried.
How?
RAFO! He was carried by someone.
What book will you have to read to find out?
You will find out eventually. Nightblood, the sequel to Warbreaker will include some, Stormlight books will also include some.
Me making a book about someone is not a promise they'll live until that book. So the fact that Jasnah gets book ten does not mean necessarily mean Jasnah survives until book ten.
Are there any Sleepless spies on other planets?
Sleepless are not confined to Roshar.
In Secret History, you talked about Kelsier being attuned to Ruin, more to Ruin than to [Preservation]. How come Vin isn't that way.
I have to say this very carefully. She is, for reasons I'm not going to explain at the moment, and she isn't, at the same time.
Does every Shard, of divinity so to speak, have a metal associated to it?
They all have at least one.
What do kandra look like in the Cognitive Realm?
RAFO. But it will be answered eventually.
When a Feruchemist stores their charge in a metal, where is that going? Is that going into molecules, is that going into the Spiritual essence of the metal, is that sort of a Cognitive - what is that?
It is charging it in...in cosmere terms, more on the Spiritual level, but there are connections to the Physical as well. It's not 100% on the Spiritual.
It's not changing the molecular structure?
It is not going to change the molecular structure. If you brought that metal to Earth, somehow, and tested it, you wouldn't be able to tell any difference. Because we just don't have that element.
You can't test for Investiture on Earth
Yeah. In the cosmere, you can.
When Sazed gives Vin a little bit of pewter that doesn't really have a charge in it, and she isn't able to use that power. What would happen if he gave her a full metalmind and she tried to burn it for Allomantic power.
I think I cover that in the book somewhere, don't I?
I looked around for it and couldn't find it.
I know for sure I've answered it to fan questions before. So go ask. If I haven't, you can come back and ask me, but I'm pretty sure we have answers on that.
After Stormlight, Wit was far and away my favorite characters. One of my friends came to me and heard I really liked Wit, and he's like, "Oh yeah. His name is Hoid, he's a worldhopper, he's in a ton of cosmere books. So I went and read a bunch of the other cosmere related books. Why's he so different? Like, in Mistborn, he shows up as a beggar/informant for half a page?
So there's a couple reasons for this. One is, there are certain books where he is a character and other books where I'm just writing him as a cameo. Most of the books I'm just doing a cameo for him. Stormlight's where you see the most of him until he gets his own book.
The other reason was, at the beginning, I wasn't sure how much people would be interested in behind-the-scenes stuff, and so I was very sparing with it in the early books. You won't see a lot of him until Warbreaker, and even then he's only in a chapter. Even in Wax and Wayne books, you only see glimpses of him. There will be other books he'll be a bigger part in, but if you like Wit, Stormlight's your jam.
What is the opposite of Stormlight called?
Some would argue voidlight is the opposite.
Now, you have been so very incredibly supportive of our Read for Pixels campaign and of our anti-violence-against-women work as a whole. Could you tell us, why do you support the cause to end violence against women and what do you think authors can do to help with the cultural change needed to eradicate violence against women and girls?
I think that one of the main things we can do is something that I mentioned a little earlier. This is specifically to the other writers out there. Using violence against women, specifically because they are women, as a main plot point in your stories, is not just kind of creating bad stereotypes, it is often times lazy writing. We do it because it is the easiest answer, and because a lot of media takes it as the easy answer, because it elicits immediate visceral responses in an audience. Kind of in the same way that potato chips are bad for you, I think some of these things are bad for us as a society. They are unhealthy, but they are easy.
It is easy to beat up someone's mother, so that the male protagonist has a motivation to go about their life and their story. And this isn't to say we shouldn't ever have people in crisis and characters saving other characters. But what we need to do is we need to look at and say, "Am I taking the easy route? Am I doing this because I've been shown a lot of media, where the way to make a male character motivated is to kill his girlfriend and to give him a revenge plot? Am I doing this just because I've been told this is the way that media is? Or am I doing this because this is actually the story I want to tell?" I don't think any of us are saying that stories should not include women who are in violent situations.
We shouldn't stop writing female characters who get into violent conflicts who are not action stars and things like that. I think what we're all saying is, we should stop the lazy storytelling and we should stop using stories where violence against women because they are women is the way that we further our plots. And so I think as writers, we need to make better stories. We need to not reach for the easy answer, we-- your stories will have more depth, they will be more interesting and they will last longer if you will reach a little further and you will find motivations for your characters that are different. And, I do not uphold myself as the ultimate paragon in this regard. I have a lot of characters who part of their motivations is based off of loss that they have experienced in the past. And you're going to write characters like this too, and it's okay, but examine it, and ask yourself. And, you know, remember that even if you're not writing for your story to be a-- something that is upheld, as the way people should be, you are contributing to the climate of storytelling that people who read those stories will assume is the way that stories are to be told.
Why do I support this cause? Because I am-- I feel very passionately that this is something that we need to step up on, as a community, as entertainers. And that we should stop using sensationalized violence against people, not just women, but children and people who are in weakened social-economic situations as sensationalized ways to make our main characters look awesome. So that's my answer on that, and we can also, like I've said a lot in this particular broadcast, we can listen a little bit better. And I think it'll make us better writers.
Have you ever considered writing more female friendships?
Yeah, you know, that's something that I noticed, right? That's another one of these things we do a bad job of in fiction. Particularly female friendships. Like, you see the bromances happening a lot, particularly in fantasy, but we tend to see-- particularly written by men-- a lot of the "one woman among a large cast of men", and this sort of thing. And certainly that's not to say that there aren't women who have a lot of friends who are male. But it is certainly something I think we get wrong a lot in fantasy. And it's one of those kind of things you don't notice. But I have noticed it about my fiction, that I'm really good at guy friendships, and I have kind of ignored female friendships. I actually took a stab at doing a better job of this in Skyward. So you can tell me if I've done a better job of it or not with this book.
We've got three questions in one. Lots of people are asking, will you be visiting Brazil, or Southeast Asia, or Hungary, or anywhere in the EU in the near future?
Okay. Alright, so the upcoming trips that I have agreed to-- I agreed to Brazil, but we are deciding when the best time for me to visit. They are translating into Portuguese Way of Kings, right now and I think it will be-- I will go out to help when that comes out. I was going to do it this Christmas, but the publisher was like we need to wait till at least until Way of Kings is out. So it's going to get delayed a little bit, but I have said yes, just recently, to Argentina and Columbia, which have book fairs very close to one another in the spring of 2019, that should be my next international trip, is to Columbia and to the Buenos Aires book fair. I don't have the exact dates, but I think they're around April.
Oh, there's my wife, Emily, she has come.
Hi!
She is the one who organizes all of these things and tells me when I'm going where. So, I think we said yes to Argentina and Columbia but we aren't 100% confirmed, correct?
Correct.
We said yes to Israel's ICon Science Fiction Convention, which is probably next year but also not confirmed. There is a good chance I will be living in France for a month next summer, cause my dad is going out to visit and I'll come visit him. And I should be able to hop around and visit some of you in Poland, and in Spain, and in France, and, you know, the UK, which I make fairly regularly.
2020, we have started exploring Scandinavia because I have a lot of invites from Sweden and from that region. So, theoretically I'll get back to Oslo, during that trip and that thing. So that's what I know for certain, internationally, that is at least on the table, that we're working on...
There's an okay chance I'll be at Worldcon next year in Ireland. Not guaranteed, it's gonna depend on when I'm in France and things like that, but yeah.
Brandon, you said we'd know by the end of Oathbringer what Gavilar's black spheres were, but we still don't know what they are. What are they?
People have guessed very correctly about this, so I think I am justified in saying that. Voidlight will become an increasingly important part of the story as things progress. I think there are two main theories on what Gavilar's spheres are, and I think they are both very valid theories supported by the books... I'm not pulling something very sneaky. It is along the lines that you are theorizing.
Stories are one of the most powerful ways of bringing about change. In your opinion, how can authors strike a balance in their storytelling between raising awareness about things like violence against women, while telling an engaging story, without being pedantic or preachy?
Do you think it's important for influential authors such as yourself, who are read all over the world, to make a conscious effort to include characters in your stories that show reinforcements of respecting women as people and as human beings?
Definitely a big "yes" to your last one.
This is a big issue, and I'm glad you asked it, because it's something I've thought about quite a bit. At its core, it comes down to, "How do you write a story that explores difficult questions without preaching." Because, at the end of the day, we're picking up an epic fantasy book because we want to go to a new world, enjoy this new world, and have an interesting adventure. And we're not picking up it up because they want Brandon Sanderson to lecture them. And certainly, there are authors I do read to be lectured. So it's not a blanket statement, "This is how someone should do something."
But for me, there's a couple of core tenets. One is the one I've already mentioned. Which is, if I'm going to put a character in (which I think I should put a wide variety of characters in) approaching questions from different directions, make sure that I am researching that person's viewpoint, people who have that viewpoint in the real world, and make sure I'm doing the job that they would want me to do with their position, their subculture, their belief structure, and things like this.
But that kind of plays into another big... pillar of what I think my duty as a writer to do, which I've expressed it in the books, I've gotten it through things I've heard other authors write. Which is "Raise questions. Don't give answers." I believe that if you are raising questions, and having multiple people who are all sympathetic disagreeing on this question, or struggling with this question in different ways, it innately makes the reader start to say, "Well, what do I think about that? And is it something that I need to think about more?" And not dodging these topics, but also not coming down with long sermons about them, I think, is the way that I want to be able to approach them.
I often share this story, so I apologize if some of you heard it before. But the book that got me into science fiction and fantasy was Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly. And Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly, is criminally under-read in the science fiction/fantasy community. I have read it again as an adult, it holds up, it is a fantastic novel. What made Dragonsbane work for me? I was a fourteen-year-old boy who was handed this novel by his English teacher, and she said, "I think you are reading below your level. I think you would like something a little more challenging. Why don't you try one of these books on my shelf." And that's the one that I ended up picking up. This book should not have worked for a fourteen-year-old boy, if you read the Cliffnotes on how to get a reluctant reader to read books.
Dragonsbane, if you haven't read it, is about a middle-aged woman who is having a crisis as she tries to balance having a family and learning her magic. Her teacher has told her she can be way better at the magic if she would dedicate more time to it, but her family takes a lot of her time. And this is her main character conflict through the story. Now, it also involves going and slaying a dragon, and things like this. And it's a wild adventure with some excellent worldbuilding, and a really interesting premise. The story is about having to kill a dragon, her partner has been asked to slay a dragon, he's the only person who's ever slayed a dragon, but he killed a dragon when he was in his 20's, and now he's middle-aged, and he's like, "I can't do that like I used to anymore." And together, they go down and try to figure out how to kill a dragon when you're an old person. But this story should, on paper, not have worked for me, but it was the most amazing thing I'd ever read in my life.
Meanwhile, my mother graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes. She had been offered, as she graduated, a prestigious scholarship to go become a CPA. And she actually turned that down because of me. She was having me as a child, and she decided that she would put off her education and career for a few years. She is now the head accountant for the city of Idaho Falls power plant, so she did go back to her career, but she put that off for me. Now, as... a middle school kid, if you told me the story, I'd be like, "Of course she did. I'm awesome. I'm me. Of course she would do that. That's the right thing to do." I read this book, and I'm like, "Oh, ditch your kids, woman. You could be a wizard!" I got done with this book, and I realized: I just read a fantasy book about slaying a dragon. High fantasy, all the stuff that should have just been brain popcorn. And yet, I got done with this book, and I understood my mother better. And it hit me like a ton of bricks, that a story could teach me about my mom in some ways better than living with her for fourteen years, because I was a stupid kid who wouldn't listen, and assumed he had the answers. But when I saw through someone else's eyes, who was very different from myself, that changed the way I saw the world.
This is why stories are important. This is why it is important-- if you're writers out there, it's why your stories are important. When you ask, "Well, what can I write that's new?" You can write who you are. And that will be new. And that is valuable in and of itself. Those stories have value because you're telling them. And this is what stories do. And this is how, I think, I want to be approaching telling stories. I want people to read the stories, and I don't want them to feel lectured to. But I want them to see the world through the eyes of someone who sees it in a very different way. Maybe that'll make them, make you, make all of us think a little harder about some of the things in our lives.
Are kandra/mistwraiths naturally immortal? If so, is it magically sustained, or natural, like the immortal jellyfish? If not, what is the natural lifespan of a kandra/mistwraith?
No, they are not immortal, but they are very, very long lived. If you look at the First Generation, you'll see an example of aging happening. They will eventually die of old age. They don't suffer from some of the ailments that, say, humans do, and it takes a bit longer, and there is some magical sustaining of them going on.
Your Shardworlds have a lot of societies of varying social development. So, apropos of this charity, what would be the penalties of hitting your wife in various worlds: Roshar, Scadrial, Nalthis?
Oh, wow. The problem with this question is that no world is a monoculture. There are going to be a lot of different cultures on a lot of different planets, and a lot of different social mores, and a lot of different laws. I'm not sure that that's a question I really want to delve deeply into.
Honor has Stormlight and Odium has Voidlight, is there a Cultivationlight? If so, can an Invested person use it as a third magic on Roshar or is a boon/curse the only magic of Cultivation/Nightwatcher?
There is more! I'll just say that, the rest is Read And Find Out. You are theorizing in an accurate direction.
