Editing Adamant

|collaborators=[[Ethan Skarstedt]]

'''''Adamant''''', previously titled '''''The Lurker''''', is a planned science-fiction novella by [[Brandon Sanderson]].{{wob ref|9178}} It would the first in a series of six episodic novellas.{{wob ref|891}}

''Adamant'' is the story of Jeffrey Salazar, a war hero whose research in alien psychology was vital to the winning of a war with an alien race colloquially referred to as the "Knockers". He visits the Armada flagship, the ''Adamant'', to interview the enemy general who was taken captive. During this interview, Jeff realizes that everything he thought he knew about the Knockers was wrong, and shortly after this the humans are betrayed by a "friendly" group of aliens who gifted the humans with "sidejack" technology, a kind of neural-communication tool. As part of the betrayal the sidejack is turned off, crippling the Armada's command structure. Jeff, who lacks a sidejack, is able to escape with the ''Adamant'' and the rest of the story is him fighting a war against the "nice" aliens by trying to elicit advice from the captive Knocker general. Meanwhile, the general is trying to escape.{{wob ref|891}}

''The Lurker'' originated as a novel co-written with [[Ethan Skarstedt]], one of Brandon's friends who has served in the military. They had previously worked together on the short story ''[[Heuristic Algorithm and Reasoning Response Engine]]''. Part of Brandon's inspiration for the novella was the idea of [[Wikipedia:The Silence of the Lambs (novel)|''The Silence of the Lambs'']] in space.{{wob ref|891}}

Brandon wrote an outline, and Skarstedt completed a novel-length draft. However, [[Joshua Bilmes]] expressed the feeling that it was not marketable as written, and at the time Brandon did not have the time to work on it. Some time later Brandon was interested in restarting work on the project; however, Skarstedt was going to be unavailable as a result of being deployed overseas. Brandon then purchased the draft Skarstedt had completed as a "work-for-hire" intending to do a re-write.{{url ref|url=http://web.archive.org/web/20160327222405/http://ethanskar.com/wordpress/books/the-lurker/|text=Ethan Skarstedt's blog (archived)|site=Ethanskar.com}}

Brandon re-envisioned the project planned as a sequence of six novellas, four being written by Brandon and the others being written by guest authors. He completed the first novella in 2014, renaming it ''Adamant'', and planned to work on revisions between drafts of ''[[Oathbringer]]''.{{wob ref|9178}} By December 2016, Brandon had not completed additional novellas, but he had a breakthrough on the visuals and worldbuilding. He wanted to wait until he had written each of his novellas before finding co-authors.{{wob ref|9137}} The project then stalled again and there was no new progress to report as of the end of 2020.{{wob ref|14572}}

While Brandon initially wrote the novella in an alternate-Earth setting, he is considering reworking the setting so that it takes place in the [[cosmere]].{{wob ref|891}}