Coppermind:Welcome

Welcome to the Coppermind, the comprehensive wiki about Brandon Sanderson, his novels, and his cosmere universe. We have 4,861 articles, and would like to have many more, so grab a stub or a redlink and make the wiki even better!

Featured Article: Hemalurgy

Hemalurgy is the third of the three Metallic Arts on Scadrial. At the times of the books, it is the least known Metallic Art.

A koloss, one of the three types of Hemalurgic constructs

Lore & Background

Hemalurgy is the most mysterious of the Metallic Arts, creating some of the most exotic things in the Final Empire. At its core, it involves stealing powers from one person and giving it to another. In order to do this, a metal spike must be stabbed through one person's body and then placed in the second's. The placement of the spike determines what power charges the spike. As such Hemalurgy is the most complex of the Metallic Arts, and the Steel Ministry has experimented for centuries with little success at finding new places to stab Hemalurgic spikes and new spots to lay them in the target. Typically, the correct placement of a spike is a vital organ, so the person who had their power stolen from invariably dies.

After the spike pierces through the initial person and is Hemalurgically charged, the Law of Hemalurgic Decay states that the spike loses some of its potency. The longer a spike is outside a body, the weaker it becomes. Thus, when the Steel Ministry creates an Inquisitor, the spikes are outside of a person for as little as possible.

Hemalurgic Constructs

• Steel Inquisitors are created from nine to eleven spikes, which are charged with various Allomantic or Feruchemical powers.

(more...)

Coppermind News

Book Title Conventions

Let's talk a moment about the titles of books for a moment. For those you who care about content and not categorization (psh, content), this news post is not for you.

Joe has persuaded me that the titling conventions for books have been a little silly. Before, they always had the prefix (book) to them. Now, this works great for Elantris because Elantris can refer to the city or the book itself. It makes less sense for the Way of Kings, however.

So now all titles that are unique, like The Alloy of Law are simply titled The Alloy of Law, rather than The Alloy of Law (book). So Way of Kings, Warbreaker, and all of those are the obvious titles. Any links that go to, say, The Way of Kings (book) should redirect, but hopefully I weeded out anything that linked to the old title.

The Mistborn series is a little more complicated. The first Mistborn novel, for one thing, can be referred to as MB1, Mistborn, The Final Empire, or Mistborn: The Final Empire. It's annoying. In any case, here's the deal on the Mistborn novels. The Well of Ascension and the Hero of Ages articles are simply titled that. There's some confusion, because Brandon liked to refer to those as Mistborn: The Well of Ascension, but those weren't actually the titles written on the book (the hardbacks of those were The Well of Ascension: Book Two of Mistborn, and we're just going to exclude the subheading here). Hence, the Well of Ascension, the Hero of Ages, and the Alloy of Law are all the obvious titles, without the (book) suffix. Note that Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages actually refer to in-world things. For your wiki links, if you want to refer to the books, include the "the."

Mistborn 1 is the most complicated. Amazon is schizophrenic, naming it the nonsensical Mistborn : Final Empire Series (Book #1) (Mistborn, Book 1). Usually, people just refer to it as Mistborn, but for the wiki, that has a lot of meanings. Therefore, I have decided to make Mistborn 1's article be Mistborn: The Final Empire. (I hope that there is never such mass confusion over the title of a book in any other time in Brandon's career.) You can refer to it as The Final Empire and it will redirect to the correct page.

So, hooray, all the unnecessary (book) suffixes are gone. However, for series, we will probably use the convention Mistborn (series), Warbreaker (series), etc. when the series doesn't have a spiffy title like the Stormlight Archive. If you want to link to the Mistborn series, you can always use Mistborn series, which will redirect to the right article. The parentheses are there because that's consistent with wiki formatting.

Clear as mud, right? Feel free to discuss it on the Coppermind forums or a talk page.

-- Chaos2651 21:35, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

A News Post!

What's this? Actual edits to the wiki? I know, I'm surprised too. As you can see, the wiki is now centered on the page. I'm hoping to get this ugly blue out of here soon, too. So at this point, there are small cosmetic changes to the wiki (like the enhanced sidebar).

-- Chaos2651 04:37, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

To Do

There are many tasks left to do on the wiki including:

• Writing wanted pages
• Finding or fixing stubs
• Categorizing Uncategorized pages
• Adding the character infobox template to all character articles