One of the most intriguing aspects of Brandon Sanderson’s writing is his Cosmere, the term for his fictional universe in which many of his adult titles are set. And in the Cosmere are the Shards, vast beings of incalculable power, each with a decisive vision and intent. Supposedly the sixteen different pieces of a murdered deity, the Shards hold great power at great cost. In the original Mistborn trilogy, we get to meet and learn about two of them: Ruin and Preservation, and if there’s anything you need to know about them, it’s in their names. Opposing yet equal forces, these two Shards battled for dominance for millennia until finally, at the end of the trilogy, their mantle passes on to a man who can wield both of these powers simultaneously. In accepting these Shards, that man became the only thing Ruin and Preservation could become: Harmony.
But what do we know about Harmony? What can he do? What can he not? And most importantly, just what does he know, truly? There’s not much to go on, but there are some very interesting moments in Shadows of Self where we come to learn a little more about Harmony, and how he operates.
Warning: Spoilers for Shadows of Self and the first Mistborn trilogy.
There’s a lot to love in Brandon Sanderson’s Shadows of Self: action! intrigue! Cosmere! Magic! Kandra? Kandra! Self-doubt! Learning your whole life is a lie! Exciting stuff. But! One of my absolutely favorite moments is when Wax opens himself up to Harmony’s influence, and has a conversation with the man-turned-deity. While discussing the nature of life on the planet, the topic inevitably turns to Harmony, and how he changed the planet after the original trilogy—moving he planet away from the sun, fixing the nightmare ecological system, etc.
But Harmony expresses frustration with Wax and his society, stating that he made it too easy for them. According to Harmony, they should have the radio by now; they should be close to the airplane; in short, they should be progressing as a society more quickly. But they’re not, and Harmony blames himself. Godly doubt is one thing. But having knowledge of technology you’ve never seen before? That’s where I pause.
So how does Harmony know these things? I have a few theories.
Combination of Shards: Shards seeing the future isn’t exactly new. In The Way of Kings, the ghost of the Shard Honor makes mention of his compatriot, Cultivation, having better clairvoyance than even him. So it’s not exactly a power that Shards lack. Just depends on the Shard. So when it comes to Harmony, is he simply looking ahead and extrapolating ideas from future timelines? Or could he be looking into Scadrial’s past, to see technology that may have existed before the events of the first Mistborn trilogy? I don’t think Ruin or Preservation would be able to puncture the time stream on their own, but maybe some melding of the the Shards has gifted Harmony this ability.
Memory Minds: We don’t know how advanced the societies of the past were on Scadrial, or if information of past societies and religions was included in Sazed’s metalminds. Once he becomes Harmony, it’s plausible that he could gain new insights from his metalminds with his now-divine brain. Or of course, the answer could be much more simple…
Someone Else Already Has Them: Look, we don’t know squat about the rest of the planet beyond Elendel. And the easiest explanation for how Harmony knows of these technologies is that someone, somewhere on Scadrial, already has them and is using them. How could the people of the Southern Continent survive after the Catacendre? Is there someone in Elendel who is keeping this technology secret? Don’t know. But! It would be the easiest answer, and if Harmony is indeed in charge of the whole planet, it would be simple to pick out the knowledge.
And this is just knowledge on a purely planetary basis. What does Harmony know of the larger Cosmere? Of Allomancy, Feruchemy, Hemalurgy? Does he know any of the other magic systems? Does he have any knowledge of the other Shards, the different Realms, and that one really, really, really angry ball of Shardic hatred hanging out in the Rosharan System, who happens to really not like Harmony at all?
All food for thought, but it only makes me more curious as to what Harmony knows, and how he knows it. It may be three hundred years since Sazed took up the mantle, but he’s still very much new to the position in the grand scheme of things. Here’s hoping we get to learn with Harmony as he goes along.
Read the first six chapters of the next Mistborn novel, The Bands of Mourning, starting with Chapter One.
Martin Cahill tried eating metal once but it just made him sick. When he’s not slinging words at Tor.com, he’s contributing to Book Riot and Strange Horizons. You can find him on Twitter @McflyCahill90. Tweet him about delicious east coast IPAs, ideas on who Rey’s parents are, and your worries about the DC Movie Universe.
Harmony almost definitely has foresight ability. Preservation had it, after all.
I do think the other continent is more technologically advanced. I know Brandon has talked about how they have integrated the Metallic Arts into technology more readily than did the culture around Elendel. On a related note, I think this other culture will be where the seeds are planted for Allomantically-fueled FTL travel.
Good question. I think the difficulty is not so much the concepts as the terms. We can already infer that holding a Shard confers superhuman intelligence in addition to Sazed’s already superhuman knowledge (e.g. he can reconstruct a corrected orbit for Scadrial in seconds working only from 2-D star charts). With hundreds of years to use his superhuman intelligence on his superhuman knowledge base, Harmony could well come to conclusions about potential technologies, as well as assumptions based on previous rates of technological growth about when they “should” come to pass. What sense of “should” is, I think, an intentional ambiguity, since the whole book deals so intensely in the degree to which Harmony is capable of/morally justified in ruling Scadrial on a micromanaging level.
However, that would only explain him saying “You should be able to talk to people on the other side of the planet by now”, not “you should have the radio by now”. He needs a source for the term “radio”. So the options are the ones you laid out, or, unfortunately, we have to consider the possibility of “slightly lazy writing/continuity editing”. I hope there’s a better answer than that because I’m inclined to overall consider Shadows of Self to be one of Sanderson’s best novels.
Normally I avoid open criticism of hype-pieces put out in advance of a new book, but this..this wasn’t that good of a piece, at least with regards to the promise of the title.
I mean, “What does Harmony know?” is a good and interesting question, and the tickling detail of the knowledge of radio and flight and when they “should” appear is a good one. But everything else is basically just restating the question, or giving bad info (metalminds only contain what the feruchemist puts in them–Sazed studied and filled his own metalminds with what he learned; there isn’t any hidden info that he can squeeze more out).
It’s a tantalizing question, and one I suspect we’ll get a good hint of (if not solid info) in Bands, but I think this would have been better served as a topic inside a larger “what to look for/hope to see in Bands” piece.
I believe it also mentioned that when someone takes on the power of the shard they gain the memory of the previous uses of the shard. That would give Sazed millennia of information not only from Scadrial’s past, but other worlds as well. And Sazed is not locked in at Scadrial. I’m sure he can travel the Cosmere and see other worlds who may have that sort of technology. Seeing the past as well as other worlds would make it fairly easy to see where his world should be in terms of development. It’s also possible he’s had contact with one or more of the other Shardholders in the universe. We just don’t know enough of what Sazed has been up to for the past 300 years. There are many possible explanations for how he knows what he knows.
The more I think about Harmony’s insistence that Elendel is going too slowly, the more it bugs me. But I think it’s supposed to bug me. The first Mistborn trilogy had a mix of technologies and knowledge, so it can’t quite be placed in a parallel with humanity’s development on Earth, but there’s at least a “ceiling” in that the ash-covered Scadrial didn’t have anything beyond 18th century Earth.
So in that sense Harmony is right in that 300 years of development from that point should have brought about planes, computers, etc. But I think Elendel is exactly where it’s supposed to be, considering that the civilization in the northern hemisphere of the planet is still isolated and hasn’t stretched beyond the basin. Harmony says that he made things too easy, so there’s not been a lot of need to develop new methods of agriculture, manufacturing, research, education, and so on. Too much Preservation, not enough Ruin?
There’s also the question of how long it takes a population to adjust to sudden bounty, as opposed to the scarcity that Scadrial used to live in…
@5, I’d agree with “supposed to bug me”. I’d go further. . .either everything about Scadrial is supposed to bug us, or else it’s again surprisingly lazy worldbuilding. I’m happy to assume the former until I’m proven wrong, because given the care that Sanderson puts into making sure that none of his other planets is a boring medieval-Earth-analogue, it is becoming more and more bizarre that Scadrial is consistently too much of an Earth-analogue, at all points in its history that we’ve seen, for plausibility, in every detail down to fashion. This could be accommodated within-universe if we assume that Scadrial reflects the obsessional small-c conservatism that we would expect of Preservation divorced from most of the other aspects of Adonalsium. But that just moves the problem one level back, because if Preservation is preserving a culture then that makes Yolen a direct Earth-analogue. But it can’t literally be Earth because the WOB places it in a dwarf galaxy.
I think we may have to wait for answers until the publication of whatever-title-Dragonsteel-eventually-has (I have a hard time believing it will actually be published under that title, which sounds a little juvenile and now runs the risk of unfair accusations of GRRM plagiarism). If the answers are in the MFA version of Dragonsteel purportedly available in the BYU main library, then I certainly don’t have time to go digging for them right now.
I think that, being a god, he just has an intuitive knowledge of what’s possible scientifically. Sort of like how the Lord Ruler knew that he could create microbes to break down the ash, etc.